Jon, is the above accurately descriptive of how evolution works, or claims to work?
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You can’t really call someone a lair when they are not trying to be deceitful they just are not educated. Young earth creationist are usually not intentionally trying to deceive someone by what they are saying. They are usually thinking they are being honest. They just are not educated about the modern synthesis. Now, I would argue it’s a bit willful ignorance. But still not exactly lying.
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Apparently, you haven’t spoken to any biologists. The theory of evolution has been extremely useful for explaining what we observe.
Why do we observe a nested hierarchy?
Why do we see more differences in introns than in exons when comparing genomes across species?
Why do transitions outnumber transversions when we compare genomes?
Why do we see fossils with a mixture of human and ape features?
These questions and many, many more are answered by the theory of evolution. I have yet to see ID or creationism explain any of them. As Todd Wood, a young Earth creationist, put it:
Christian scientists accept the theory of evolution for the same reason that agnostic and atheistic scientists accept the theory of evolution. It explains the data. If you refuse to even talk about or investigate the data, then you are simply whizzing in the rain.
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It is important to understand the difference between your run of the mill creationist in the pew and the professional creationists (with scientific training) that run organizations like Answers in Genesis. The professionals should know better, and I suspect in many cases they do know better. However, the non-scientist creationist sitting in the pew does deserve a wide berth and a lot of understanding. They have put their trust in fellow Christians, and it isn’t their fault that they were taken advantage of.
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Sorry, Richard. GD Created an entire universe, so meticulously perfect that RNA, abiogenesis, and evolution are baked into the design. GD stands outside time - He created time, space, matter, and light all at once, per Genesis 1:1,3. He knows/knew every word I would/am/will utter from before I was born, ditto yourself, ergo ditto back all the way to the first cell that abiogenesis produced. When does G*D choose to intervene? Causing the skies to be black for the final three of Jesus’ hours on the cross and Jesus innumerable miracles.
The universe is theistic creation, and the natural selection kind of evolution is purely naturalistic.
Because there is no point. You do not actually engage with what was posted. Everyone knows you are just waiting to spam YEC articles all over the place like a creationist splatter horror.
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I guess that is a good excuse for science not being able to identify His handywork but less helpful in terns of Evolutionary processes. The Universe is built to run within a tie frame so we can only work within that.
Becomes meaningless because of the “when”
In many ways God is indistinguishable from His creation. Intervention implies a control that certain members here would object to.
Rectifying a God out of time with a Universe constrained by it is almost an impossibility
Richard
This is a distinction without a difference. Knowledge may be sharpened by observation, but cannot be discounted for lacking direct obervation.
Any theory that tries to understand the past will always miss that. Yet another vague assertion treated like fact. Not seeing GoD’s hand hardly amounts to proof that GD in fact did interact. A need to believe that G*D intimately commands every part of the Created universe remains a need. There is no element of force, merely desire that a thing be so.
The sheer mechanical nature of atoms involved in DNA, plus unavoidable changes to DNA made evolution - and smooth evolution - both inevitable and automatic. What is wrong with GD Creating such a universe? It began as it itself indicates - in a moment that birthed time, space, light, and eventually matter, and has proved itself to be so meticulously perfect that RNA and evolutionary competitions resulted in abiogenesis. All these are baked-in features of GD’s great design. Your “bias” depends on a verbatim reading of the opening chapters of Genesis, which are theology not fact. G*D intervened to perform Jesus’ miracles; let that be sufficient.
“It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers … I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” A celebrated author and divine has written to me that “he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.””
–Charles Darwin, “Origin of Species”
I think it has more to do with observed natural processes being adequate to produce what we see. In other words, intervention outside of these natural processes isn’t required. It would seem many here at BioLogos prefer to view God as being part of these natural processes instead of having to constantly fix them. It is the participation with nature that separates Evolutionary Creationism from Deistic Evolution, at least in my evaluation.
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I think some of the “professionals” do know better but I also think a lot of them are sincerely convinced it’s the truth. Like I’ve met someone who legitimately had their masters in biology and was still convinced that design gives the impression of evolution but that satanic cabals are literally hiding the truth and so on. But I do think the overwhelming majority have not been educated on this.
But it goes to many things. Not just creationism in Christianity. People believe in Bigfoot for real who are educated enough that they should know better.
But also look at how many, probably even in here, who understands science fairly decently concerning evolution and still truly believe that there is evidence for fine tuning only explainable through intelligent design of some sort.
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That’s one area where my opinions move back and forth. I absolutely understand how irrational human psychology can be at times, but I just can’t get past the idea that a trained and/or professional should adhere to a basic level of responsibility when it comes to talking about science. For example, I can’t see how someone could honestly claim that there are no transitional fossils when they would reject any fossil as being transitional, no matter what features it has. Hiding dogmatic denial behind a science degree isn’t defensible in my book, especially when they know that the creationist in the pew will interpret their dogmatic denial as having a scientific foundation.
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You have to admit that would be quite a feat of design and creation. It might explain why there are advancements but it still needs more than reactionary selection to work effectively.
Natural selection can only operate on what is already there. ToE would seem to suggest that the changes are somehow generated by environmental and ecological pressures, but that would need both diagnosis and the ability to create on demand, neither of which are a part of ToE (or at least the original version)
Richard
Dear Mervin,
thank you for your relevant question, I will try to answer it as best I can.
The only mechanism available to enable evolution to perform its miraculous creation of all the species of life on Earth requires inordinate expanses of time, and chance mutations in the genetic information that codes to build the next generation of each specie of life on Earth that evolution claims are formed through Natural Selection that explains (by survival of the fittest), the ascension of life from the first self reproducing cell to you and me.
The problem with that belief is that the information selected for by Natural Selection can ONLY EVER be selected from EXISTING information already in the genome.
Also the odds or if you prefer the chance of those random mutations conferring a benefit to the organism are somewhere in the order of about 1,000,000 deleterious or near neutral mutations to every 1 slightly beneficial.
The analogy made by Sir Fred Hoyle illustrates this that by his reckoning is small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.”
When a person indoctrinates themselves with an evolution deep time worldview, then everything they see and do, they interpret in a manner that is consistent with their worldview.
They are not being dishonest, or operating within any conspiracy, they are being wholly consistent with their beliefs about how the world operates, how they see the world.
Thus when they see rock strata as exposed by the Grand Canyon in Colorado, USA, or here in Australia at say the Sydney Basin where Hawkesbury sandstone is exposed in deep highway cuttings, they honestly see billions of years of slow and gradual deposition, and they interpret fossils found in those strata within the same paradigm of evolution,
whereas,
when I see all those same strata, from top to bottom without any evidence of soil horizons or bioturbation, all I can see is rapid catastrophic burial at a scale that is absolutely consistent with the Bibles historical account of a Flood that destroyed all life on Earth.
I trust God and consequently I completely trust the Bible; I see absolutely no need to take on board all the mental gymnastics required to discredit the accuracy of the Holy Bibles clear historical account of creation and the Flood of Noah, to then enable the introduction of evolution that is an alien belief to the Holy Scriptures.
God bless,
jon
Two classic experiments from the 1940’s and 50’s demonstrated that new genetic variation in the form of mutations are not produced by environmental and ecological pressures. Instead, the processes that produce mutations are blind to what the organism needs in a given environment.
Mutations aren’t created on demand. Instead, they are occurring at a somewhat constant rate and are random with respect to fitness.
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Mutations produces new information, and are occurring all of the time.
The human mutation rate is about 50 mutations per person per generation. In a population of just 1 million people that is 50 million new mutations in a single generation. With a generation time of 25 years, that would be 200,000 generations since our lineage broke off from the chimp lineage. 200,000 generations with 50 million new mutations for each generation would be 10 trillion over those 5 million years. We are separated from chimps by just 40 million mutations, only about half of which would need to occur in the human lineage, so about 20 million (minus standing variation in the common ancestral population). This means only a tiny percentage of the mutations that did occur in our lineage had to make it into the modern population. With a diploid genome of only 6 billion bases this also means the same mutation at the same base in the genome happened hundreds of times over those 5 million years.
So where is the problem?
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Dear T_Aquaticus,
well if you interpret any changes to the genetic information as "new information’, then yes that is correct.
However, it is the change itself that is important here.
It is true that on extremely rare occasions, mutations can confer a heritable benefit to an individual, but that is usually if not always at a cost of causing damage to other information, in the parallel linear and three dimensional codes that are also altered by that single mutation that conferred the benefit. Sickle cell anaemia is as good an example as any for people with that mutation who live in Malaria infested countries, however if they live where there is no Malaria, that mutation is NOT good to have and makes them less healthy than people without that mutation to the information that codes for the manufacture of their haemoglobin.
The point that you and others here on this site appear unable to grasp is that the TYPE of information required is so utterly complex and so brilliantly written that the unwavering faith put into Natural Selection to filter out the gibberish and keep the beneficial to the extent that ALL species on Earth came into their very existence that way is nonsense.
Also, the other salient point that you are conveniently missing or just plain avoiding, is that in your mathematical myth above you completely avoid the matter of the huge length of time for a single mutation to become ‘fixed’ in a population.
Please consider the enormous length of time it takes even one of the extremely rare,
(1,000,000 : 1), so called beneficial mutations to become ‘fixed’ in a population.
The sheer quantity of "New Information’ required to explain the existence of the biodiversity on Earth right now from the first single cell upwards to the present, is so massive that the entire assumed age of the universe since the postulated ‘Big Bang’ is so inadequate as to be miniscule…
14 billion years is not even sufficient for a single protein to self assemble (as if that was even a remote possibility), and become fixed in a species population.
Additionally, most mutations are near neutral, and are not visible to Natural Selection at the level of reproductive fitness, so they remain in the genome and accumulate, passed on to successive generations with no mechanism available to remove them, and this happens at the entire population level, not just in individuals.So rather than evolution being real, we indeed have the very REAL situation of devolution, the amazingly brilliant creation by God ex nihilo the life on Earth is unraveling under the weight of the curse put on the creation by God as the consequence of sin as we are reliably told in the Holy Scriptures.
I know you will inevitably disagree and claim this and that and that I am lying, but I assure you I am not. the science is sound, the facts are clear.
God bless,
jon
Then show me a comparison of the chimp and human genomes, and show me how the differences between the two could not have been produced by the observed and known processes of mutagenesis.
Let’s see the math.
I already showed this is false. The genomes of modern humans contain a tiny, tiny fraction of all the mutations that happened in our lineage.
Why would evolution require the self assembly of proteins? I don’t think you know how evolution or genetics works. Proteins come from the transcription of DNA into RNA and the translation of RNA into proteins. No self assembly required.
Why would neutral mutations lead to devolution?
You haven’t presented any science.
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Dear Ron,
please just take a long hard look at yourself.
Have you answered the questions I put to you on the topic forum at:
https://discourse.biologos.org/t/two-questions-about-how-central-the-question-of-origins-is-to-your-core-beliefs/39708/550
An emphatic NO is the correct answer, so I suggest you answer those questions first before you point the finger at others.
God bless,
jon
Dear Ron,
please just take a long hard look at your own history in relation to answering questions I have raised with you.
Have you answered the questions I put to you?
in the post at:
https://discourse.biologos.org/t/two-questions-about-how-central-the-question-of-origins-is-to-your-core-beliefs/39708/550
The answer is NO, thus I suggest you practice what you preach before pointing the finger at others.
God bless,
jon
Thus ultimately Ron, how do you reconcile the absolutely clear as crystal words of God Himself in the Holy Scriptures with a LOCAL FLOOD?
One, you and yours are not God Himself. The genre of scripture matters. I am not a literalist, so I do not have the need to come up with a concordist explanation.
Two, Christians have some different beliefs. Some sprinkle, some dunk. Some are Calvinist, some are Arminian. Some believe in a flat earth, some believe in a global flood.
I really do not care if you believe in a global flood. Believe what you want. I am not bothered that there are people who hold to different dogmas.
What I do care about is your peddling nonsense, slandering science and fabricating an alternate reality in the name of the gospel.
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