Why? Are you trying to make him compete with sitcoms like Seinfeld? I wouldn’t see any greater import if you changed “H-index” to “intelligence,” since AIs can beat out human intelligence by mindlessly following a set of instructions.
This passage is about righteousness and doing the work of God not the pursuit of understanding nature.
I would say that it is highly likely my intelligence beats out this fisherman despite him being Jewish which have always had a rather high average IQ compared to Caucasians. Peter was hardly known for his great feats of intellectual accomplishment. But like I noted above, we are learning that intelligence isn’t so special after all. Now if we were talking about the apostle Paul, I think the probability is in his favor rather than mine.
“Advanced?” In what way? We stand on the shoulders of scholars who have gone before us. It is in this way that all of our scholarly efforts advance.
All of which is irrelevant to whether we seek to follow the teachings of the Bible.
Perhaps the spirit terminates at bodily death, for those not bound for eternal life?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
153
Hmmm. So your Heaven is dependent on knowing that there are an infinity of people in Hell from eternity. I know where I’ll be.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
154
My colossal ego wants the God Person to exist. Wants to be significant. Doesn’t want to cease to exist, go back to where I came from. I don’t want to rebel against decency, social justice, kindness, gentleness, patience. So why do I have no rational reason to believe in God? Why does God make it so difficult?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
155
I’m new here but wanted to share my thoughts as I was wondering about theistic evolution versus ID as well.
A) Old earth / old universe
Sure this proven by now (based on speed of light, moleculair clock, etc.).
B) Common descent human from a proto-chimp
Sure this is proven by now, retroviruses (ERVs) in humans and chimps are for about 99,8% in the same location.
C) Random mutations lead to rise of new organs or new bodyplans
Nah, science proved that this isn’t possible because of:
Combinatorial inflation (making a random search for functional sequences a needle-in-a-haystack proposition)
Mutational load in the genome
Entropy
Explosions of plant- and animal life in the fossil record
D) Natural selection or neutral selection or something else
This fully hinges on C (random mutations). You can’t select something that doesn’t exist.
So yeah I think God took a proto-chimp and build the first human out of it. Seems logical (God built Eve out of Adam too) and I would do the same (starting all over again is totally inefficient?).
One of my conclusions is that it’s important to make a distinction between common descent and improvements in body plans based on random mutations.
Common descent makes scientifically sense while random mutations leading to new structures does not.
So I guess I believe in common descent but the process cannot be random so ID seems most reasonable to me.
Please let me know if my reasoning is evident or if it makes no sense at all
Thanks
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
158
So what happens to the overwhelming majority? 97% in the UK
This is a frequently promoted claim with relatively little to back it up, however, I am not an expert on genetics. I believe that @glipsnort and @paleomalacologist have done far more on that subject, and can give much better-informed responses.
No, science hasn’t proved that about combinatorial inflation. The number of possible combinations (of whatever – amino acids, proteins, body parts) is very, very large. That means the number of nonfunctional and functional arrangements is very large, which by itself tells you nothing about how hard it is for random searches to find new functional states. What matters are the density and connectedness of such states. At least in protein space, all the evidence we have says that function is pretty common and that it’s easy to reach a new functional state from an existing one.
I’ve seen various arguments along these lines but I don’t consider any of them scientifically sound. Perhaps you could explain more what you mean. In any case, these are all arguments against common descent (and indeed, against old life at all) rather than arguments against the formation of new organs.
This is simply incorrect: no step in evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. (Unless you’re talking about ‘genetic entropy’, which isn’t really a thing and which is wrong for different reasons.)
How has science shown that such explosions as have occurred are impossible without miraculous intervention? Also, lots of organs have arisen outside of explosions.
In somewhere between 5 and 10 million years (reasonable consensus) , of the 3.5 BILLION years of life, and of the 2.4 billion years we have had O2, and of the 900 million years of multi-cellular life represents something between .56% and 1% of our time available. That is what I call “the blink of an eye”.
But more importantly, the 36 phyla of animal life we see today all appeared at that time, and not a single new one since. For me that is a compelling observation.
And science has no way to explain how the raw material from which life emerged came to be. If science has nothing to say about how something came from nothing, except it is not possible, maybe some day we will realize science fails to address our deepest questions and our deepest needs.
Hi Steve, I really appreciate your feedback!
My wording could be a bit wrong since I stated that science proved those points
I’m a simple mind (not a scientist) trying to wrap my head around this since I’m in some discussion with a friend who left the Faith since he couldn’t reconcile evolution with God.
I did bring up convergent evolution and the possibility to be a Theistic Evolutionist by the way.
You brought up some good arguments, I will look more into them when I have time.
Below are a few quick points that I have readily availble.
On the mutational load in the genome, I think the accumulation of bad or deleterious mutations would vastly outnumber the positive mutations and as such render any positive outcome for random mutations quite futile?
To quote:
What would be the consequence if 90% of our genome were really functional and had undergone
mutations?
I’m also interested in what you mentioned about genetic entropy. How would this be wrong?
Hi Jelte. Like your name. Thanks for visiting. Don’t be a stranger. You’ve accomplished the hardest part by hooking up, so kick back, have fun and stay a long while, k?
