Sure, truth can be known, but not every way of pursuing truth necessarily leads to a certain conclusion about the creator. If it’s my job to study the behavior of a particular Amazonian tree frog, I don’t want to be shackled into thinking that it has to lead to some conclusion about the Designer.
Then again, I suppose most of us live in the gray area between “Science must lead to the Truth” and “Science cannot lead to the Truth.” I hope most of us live in the space where “Science might lead to the Truth.” I don’t think that’s pessimism. I think it just frees us from insisting on finding evidence for “Design” at every turn.
But I think a long discussion of ID is quite off-topic here. Surely there are lots of places here on the Forum to discuss ID… and if not, maybe you want to start a new topic about it? In my previous response, I tried to get back to the whale evidence, but so far you haven’t seemed interested in pursuing that.
The really big difference between I.D. and the statements presented to you here is that a large number of I.D. supporters are YECs who think it all happened in 6000 years. While Old Earther I.D. folks think that God specially created life on Earth a species at a time … when the geology and physics that God has left for us to evaluate shows that either God intentionally engaged in sequential special creation (to LOOK like the evolution of species) - - or God intentionally used God-Guided-Evolution to fill the earth with life forms.
All of it?! And it has to be science that is saddled with illuminating the whole shebang for us? That’s quite a lot of invested confidence toward science you have there!
Why can’t science just tell us little things … like what is the average mass of these adult tree frogs? Or what provides their main nutrition? And then some questions can work their way up toward more connective concepts … like how is this tree frog different from that tree frog that lives in a different jungle? Are they related? Do they interbreed? Higher questions yet … where do these tree frogs come from? If they evolved, what would their common ancestor look like?
Science modestly builds its way up from the initial observational depths and tries to get higher and more encompassing with its explanations. It sounds like you want it to start with some forced conclusions and then work its way backward to provide post-hoc justification for what you “just know” must be true. Let science do its modest job that it’s fairly good at; don’t try to elevate it into some larger gatekeeper for all truth!
That’s what “Truth with a capital T” is, absolute certainty that something is true.
You can do whatever you want with those claims. Personally, they aren’t something I believe in, but there are obviously many who do believe in those claims. However, I doubt many (any?) would claim that the tenets of Christian belief have been absolutely proven True. From what I have read, heard, and experienced, one believes that these are true through faith.
I’ll just do it on here. First this is the press release. The later paper dated it at 40-46mya which is consistent with other Basilosaurids worldwide. But let’s say it is 49mya, all this would mean is there are likely older Pakecetids. This is a real possibility. There aren’t any Paleocene Indian mammal localities.
Note: I’ve worked on Basilosaurids and love discussing them
The actual paper for those interested: http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.5710/AMGH.02.02.2016.2922?journalCode=ameg&
In summary, considering that 87Sr/86Sr ratios provided for TELM 4 might be biased (because of potential reworking and oscillation of the marine Sr isotope curve during the Eocene), we interpret the age of the horizon that produced MLP 11-II-21-3 (i.e., TELM 4) as early middle Eocene (~46–40 Ma; middle Lutetian to early Bartonian based on ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart 2015; Cohen et al., 2013) and follow the most recent chronostratigraphic interpretation for the La Meseta Formation.
Sorry, I didn’t reply earlier. I got a lot of responses and missed this.
All these are certainly possibilities. However, the fact remains that we don’t have evidence of most of these transitional forms existing before whales do in the light of the latest whale fossil.
And then the rest becomes pure speculation. I could speculate in the opposite direction that whales existed before the oldest known fossils and were fully developed 60mya… Of courses that would be just useless speculation. Just as speculating that the transitional species existed earlier and we just don’t have fossils yet.
Also there is the problem of whale evolution having to become much faster than before…
If I get it right, the authors had three indicators for the date ranging from 54mya to 40mya based on various ways to interpret the date… and they went with 40-46 Mya because it’s more in line with other findings. It’s more of a political/conservative decision rather than anything. The same data they found could be argued for the fossils being 51mya. I think 49 Mya is a fair assumption.
Sure, it could mean there are older pakecetids and whales evolved from them quickly spreading to Antarctica. It does create a problem for the rest of the transitional species described.
It’s one thing to cherry-pick an argument for a one-time topic… but you would have to repeat the same refrain over and over … comparing all the dinosaur period creatures like brontosaurs (and even the giant marine reptiles) who apparently drowned before cows, cattle and giant sloths drowned… because their fossil remains are all below the KT layer … while all the large mammals tread water successfully.
After a while, even theoretically possible explanations seem lame when they show systematic failure to explain.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the dating of a lot of fossils have this issue.
Methods such as stratigraphic estimation of age gives a lot of leeway in dating.
When I have time, I will check out the dating of the rest of the transitional forms …
Or you can do some studying yourself.
Our friend @T_aquaticus is one of the many friends we have at the forum who do not profess to be Christians. You ask a good question–perhaps he will give it some thought.
As to knowing the Truth: as a follower of Christ, I know the Truth because I know Him, not because I can reason my way to Him. Like any gift, reason is useful, but it has limits. We cannot reach capital-T Truth by its means, although we can use it to find useful approximations.
Finally, I want to encourage you to investigate the oldest whales very carefully. You seem to assume they were basically identical to modern whales, but this is not at all the case. They were much closer to their “intermediate” cousins than to modern whales.
And there it is again… suggesting that the evidence has some sort of systematic leeway. And yet the systematic bias is not just “a little give here and there”… the evidence SHOUTS the following:
If you support a global flood, all dinosaurs above a certain size drowned long before any large mammal did… and that includes the special problems represented by gigantic dinosaurs like brontosaurs and giant marine reptiles (not officially labeled as dinosaurs).
the array of marsupials in Australia requires that once released from the ark… all of these marsupials virtually raced to Australia’s coastline… well ahead of even faster placental predators… in time for Australia to drift into the middle of the ocean where no placental mammals could follow. That is NOT leeway; it is just a slice of ridiculousness.
Again, if one supports a global flood, it is more than a little leeway that large mammals like giraffes, rhinos, elephants (or to be more specific, the precursor populations that came before the Earth’s current animal populations) and so on are NEVER found “drowned” in the same layers as the dinosaur-period animals.
In fact, the drowning of precursor animal populations waits until the smaller versions of these animals drown first… which only drown after even smaller versions drown… and so on… but with the bizarre realization that even the earliest of these mammal drownings (above the size of, say, a badger) had to wait until ALL the big and small dinos had to drown first!
Hi Chris,
I will look at the oldest whales more carefully as you suggested.
As to knowing the truth. I was an agnostic in high school/pre college. It was my biology classes that played a big role in my becoming a theist (not Christian, that happened years later). I learned about evolution in class, and my first reaction was a thorough skepticism. And once I thought things over, and realised evolution was the best explanation science had, I realised there had to be a God. And the God I assumed from looking at organisms, was quite similar to the God of the Bible, though I had never read the bible at that point. So in my experience, a person can arrive at the truth through logic. I did. (I am sure the holy spirit
also helped my logic)
As a Christian , I understand that evolution can be compatible with some ways of interpreting the Bible. However, as a logical person, the more I look at it, the more it looks like a bunch of fairy tails built on a philosophy of materialism.
Perhaps I have not looked hard enough…
But as it stands, I agree more with David Berlinsky on this issue. In my viewpoint some vague claim of common ancestry based on similarity is not enough… Because similarity (even at the minute molecular level) does not always indicate ancestry.
Of course it is not enough. But in cases of non-convergence, when God gives us very tight correspondences genetically, to support the claim of common ancestry, we find that evidence for this is all over the world, and in all time periods, and for all kinds of animal and plant life.
That’s pretty non-vague!
If God was using special creation to create all species (even the ones that came and went long before any human could even see them), and if God didn’t want us to “believe the evidence” … all he would have had to do was make sure each species had genetic markers that made it impossible to conclude a genetic/reproductive relationship with common ancestral populations!
The problem is… how do we identify “non-convergence”…
They might as well call it convenience… when it can be fit into a tree… it’s non-convergence…
When we can’t manage to do that… call it convergence.
There is no real differentiator between similarities that can tell which is common descent and which is convergence… other than convenience.
So when can you enage in some remedial genetics reading?
Non-Convergence is easy to determine … when the genetics shows a close relationship, and a detective-like stance on the flagged factors - - is there continuity between one group or another?
If the court system used your rules of evidence, you would never find a man guilty … because you would refuse to believe the “trails of breadcrumbs” that culprits leave behind them…
You would simply repeat your mantra: “that could mean anything”. When in fact, centuries of jurisprudence tells us, “circumstantial evidence” is not really useless. In fact, law schools teach their students that the best cases are usually based on “circumstantial evidence” - - because it’s evidence that can exclude all other possibilities.
The opposite of “Circumstantial Evidence” is not “good evidence”… it’s eye-witness testimony. But witnesses can have memories in error, or they can lie.
“Circumstantial Evidence” doesn’t lie. And if you have ENOUGH circumstantial evidence, the bad guy will be found guilty.
Example:
the defendant has motives.
the defendant has means (he sells rat poison).
the defendant has opportunity - - he was the only person alone with the murder victim during the last 4 hours of his life. There is a video of the entrance, and nobody else came or went into the building. The accused cooked a pasta meal for the victim. And the accused has “pasta stains with rat poison in the sauce” on his apron. And the accused said he ate the same meal as the victim.
These are all circumstantial… because they are not based on testimony.
As you can see, “circumstantial evidence” and the proper deductions from it are all that is needed to make a solid conclusion.
Circumstancial evidence is useful as long as the entire framework is not circumstantial.
And legal cases are not the best examples. They have the principle of “the element of doubt”. If any of the facts is questionable… such as we can’t say for sure whether the accused actually cooked the meal that killed the victim (i.e he might not be a direct ancestor).
If the accused lived next door with gates adjacent to the house of the victim and the evidence is not clear as to which house he entered… and finally another guy turns up with an apron with similarly poisoned pasta …
No judge will convict. I think evolution is worse than this example.