Yes … I was right there, on the spot … but I don’t remember what I saw. Sorry.
So God started each little tree? What a suggestion!
Richard
Reminds me of Dobzhansky’s essay, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” (1973), in which he claims human embryos have “gills”, which are evolutionary remnants of our fish ancestors.
Embarrassingly for that much-revered Darwinist, it turned out that the “gills” were just folds of skin.
Yes, I realise that it’s outrageous for a Christian to even suggest such a thing …
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Embarrassingly, They are not just folds of skin, but structures that develop into other structures such as middle ear bones and jaw bones. They are never gills, as you state, but are similar to the same features that develop into gills in fish.(Learning about evolutionary history - Understanding Evolution)
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You’re funny and just making things up – why? Maybe you’re desperate to retain your false belief. What makes you think I’m in the least bit desperate to believe it or that I even wanted to believe it?
Two things, no, three things combined to change my mind. I was an OEC for about three decades (and a YEC but not a noisy one for decades before that).
- ID is not scientific
- “…the most common mutations, transitions, are not really ‘copying errors,’ because the keto-enol transition of the base is driving them and the polymerase is working correctly. So if you’d like, that can be seen as providence more than chance.” John Mercer, molecular biologist
- The obvious sovereignty of God’s providence in the timing and placing of mutations in DNA before my nephrectomy.
Add a fourth:
- Five short of fourscore years of experience of my Father’s providences in my life, a small multitude of instances – I keep a log to enumerate them. Some of them fun, some are hard, some startling, but all are wonderful and all are good, even the hard ones.
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It’s very cool that some who understand evolution have become Christians because of it, per @St.Roymond, and it’s not the pseudoscience, YEC-like, that @RichardG and @Buzzard make it in their incomplete understanding.
No, Buzzard, it can’t be, no matter how much some atheists would like it to be.
I’m going to bring back the original theme of this thread by quoting the original post in its entirety:
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True – biological evolution is better understood: physicists still don’t know what gravity is, and they’re not altogether sure they know completely how it behaves.
The “orchard” scenario wasn’t totally ludicrous thirty years ago when I took my last university biology course, but it gets harder and harder to argue, and that’s with people out there actively looking hard for some evidence that there wasn’t just a single common ancestor.
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And at the same time, I never saw a single person become a Christian because of YEC – in fact some in spite of it.
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Is that a valid excuse to deny the existence of God?
Believers are aware of exactly the same evils, injustices and horrors in life that atheists are aware of, yet they still believe.
Mayfly scientists might face ridicule from other mayfly’s for believing this. After all, has any mayfly actually seen a grub fly, or an egg turn into a frog?
No, that is not what I mean. What I mean is that phenotypic change over time is a fact. Long-term evolutionary theory is a theory based on facts.
Can every gravitational interaction between every set of objects be observed? Also, that’s a Nirvana Fallacy: insisting that we must have perfect data.
No, but the argument that “Evolution cannot be factual because it cannot be replicated in a laboratory.” requires that solar fusion, whale lifestyle, sequence stratigraphy, climatology, etc., etc. also aren’t factual.
Just like you can’t see every gravitational interaction that has ever happened. Until an improvement appears, I will go with the best explanation for all the relevant data that does exist.
How many years have we had for running such experiments? 100 at the absolute maximum? There is no actual proof of anything is science, thus that critique is irrelevant.
How so? They can’t be replicated in a lab either, and that was my point. “Can’t be replicated” does not mean “Can’t be described scientifically.”
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It reveals a whole bunch of trees, with gaps between them where we lack data, but given that all the data we have aligns quite well with descent with modifications, I see no reason for it to arbitrarily stop working when we cease to have data.
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How mammals (allegedly) evolved from fish (for example) is better understood than gravity?
Well, of course. It ludicrous to science that numerous novel phyla suddenly appear in the Cambria explosion with no evolutionary history.
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Theory can have different meanings. Music theory is a fact. The theory of evolution is not a fact … and never will be.
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True. Lamarckism is a theory. Darwinism is a theory. Neo-Darwinism is a theory, as is the Modern Synthesis. These progressively present a unified causal explanation for the fact of evolution.
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I take your point. Thank you for correcting this bumbling amateur.
I accept the fossil evidence that shows life-forms becoming more complex and diverse over time. That, to me, is the fact of evolution.
Your “fact of evolution” may be different.