The thread is about people who were agnostics and atheists whose studies of science at a university brought them to conclude there must be a Designer. The largest group were biology students who saw evolution as so elegant that it pointed to a Designer.
Dale and I both emphasize providence.
There’s no “different persona” involved.
I’m impressed: except for one sentence, everything you wrote is either false or irrelevant.
I gave you historical information, and you respond by talking about thing that weren’t even in there. I didn’t make any analogies, and I said nothing about Darwin, nor did I mention early church writers.
What I did was inform you that the opening of Genesis has been viewed in a variety of ways down through Christian history, including allegorically, poetically, and others, and that there were Hebrew scholars back before science was really a thing who “purely on the basis of the Hebrew concluded that the universe is old beyond imagination and the Earth old beyond counting”.
These are facts; anyone who studies the Old Testament at even an advanced university level will know them. I’ll give just a few examples: St. Augustine interpreted the opening Creation story allegorically and asserted that God actually created everything in one instant. St. Cyprian said the days were each one thousand years long. Clement of Alexandria held that the days were figurative, not actual. Others held that everything except the earth was created instantaneously. Some called the days thematic. Many noted that until the sun was present the days were however long God wished.
From the article: “The various details in the Biblical story of creation which appear to contradict the scientifically validated portions of the theory of evolution need not be understood literally.”
The title is interesting: Maimonides was one who held that the Hebrew text of Genesis indicated that the universe is old beyond imagination and the Earth old beyond counting – indeed, that it began as smaller than a grain of mustard (i.e. inconceivably small) and expanded incredibly rapidly.
The article also notes that Judaism has no trouble re-interpreting the age of the world as counted from the Old Testament to make it fit the scientific calculation. It points out that there is no way to assign a length of time to the first day, and that a major school of Jewish thought says that the account in Genesis does not necessarily give the actual order of events, and that it is commonly understood that “the verses in Genesis are not to be interpreted literally”. It observes that the Big Bang theory is perfectly compatible with Jewish thought.
Good article – it demonstrates that young-earth creationism is a poor fit with Judaism.
I should start taking notes!
I read an article a while back that reported an argument by one cosmologist that what the JWST is showing us about the early universe suggests we don’t understand gravity well at all.
Of course it does not. The weather has not changed its working in 6 million years. I have no idea what you think the word evolution means but it has nothing to do with the weather.
The principles of the weather would have been established from the outset. There is nothing to evolve. You are not using a correct analogy because you fail to see the principles involved
A storm evolves, but that is not what you are saying
Richard
Aw com’on, Richard. Look words up in the dictionary before you say silly things about what words mean or don’t mean.
A common way of understanding the word is simply ‘change over time’. Just this evening I was watching a series of thunderstorms on a weather radar app as they evolved while approaching where we live. That is perfectly legitimate use of the word. It is not exclusive to biology as you appear to think it is.
Weather follows the rules God instituted for it as storms evolve.
Biology follows the rules God instituted for it as organisms evolve, and boy, are they wonderful and complex (not that meteorology is not complex, but it has nowhere near the number of subspecialties that biology has, each complex in themselves).
I should have included statistics in both of those, and how randomness affects each.
The lot is cast into the lap…
Proverbs 16:33
And the results will obey the laws of statistics when studied scientifically and the perspective is VFB… just like meteorology and biology (and what is integral to it, namely biological evolution).
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.
Proverbs 16:33
But God is in sovereign control of the outcomes of casting lots and of the storms on Galilee and in kidneys. The VFA.
It is true that the conclusions made by scientists are sometimes told in media as something that is the truth even when they are just the best available explanation. Ambitious scientists may also sometimes market their pet hypothesis almost like facts even when the hypothesis is just a hypothesis. This is unfortunate because most(?) people do not have the basic training to understand how scientific reasoning operates. I do not doubt that most people could understand if they received basic education about the topic, it is just a lack of basic teaching mixed with wild non-scientific speculations and the will of media people to prepare simple and selling stories.
Biological evolution is about heritable changes in populations, driven by natural and sexual selection and sometimes more or less neutral drift. The change becomes visible in the change of the phenotypes of organisms, what they look like. The history of evolution can also be inspected indirectly, for example by comparing similarities and differences in the DNA of organisms (heritable changes).
The theory of evolution is an umbrella theory, a general framework, because it predicts the general development of the diversity of life, while questions like how venomous snakes got their fangs and toxins are just small details where we can apply the general framework. Scientists may form hypotheses about these small details and the hypotheses are just hypotheses until they get convincing support.
The theory of evolution is called theory, not hypothesis, because it has got so much support from observations within various lines of research; the majority of scientists have concluded that the theory of evolution is a working framework, it can explain the observations we make. It is not the absolute truth but it is the best available framework that can explain the observations.
Any facts that are against the general predictions of the theory challenges the theory. Depending on the extent of the conflicting evidence, there is either a need to modify the general framework or replace the theory with another general framework that can explain all observations and facts better than the theory of evolution. So far, there has sometimes been a need to modify the general framework, for example when the mechanisms of heritability were revealed. There has not been any competing theory that could have explained the scientific observations and facts better than the theory of evolution. That is why the theory of evolution is still the general framework used.
The theory of evolution is not the absolute truth but it can explain the observations made. We do not have any competing theory that could explain the observations and facts better. YEC claim they can but that claim is far from the truth. It is ok to doubt the theory of evolution but a constructive way forward would be to tell what other theory or hypothesis can explain the observations and facts as well or better.
Most of the material covered in high school and the first two years of undergraduate science has been firmly established for decades, and that volume of material is plenty enough. Only after that do you have enough background to cover anything still uncertain.
It seems to me that those hypotheses are not always tested … for example, the hypothesis that one fossil represents the evolutionary/biological descendent of another fossil cannot be tested.
“The intervals of time that separate the fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.”
“To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story—amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific.”
(In Search of Deep Time—Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life* , by Henry Gee)
“Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else.”
(Dr. Colin Patterson)
Another example, the hypothesis that mammals evolved from fish via known neo-Darwinism mechanisms is not a hypothesis that can be tested.
Firstly, please be advised that I accept that evolution has occurred. My position is that I don’t accept that anyone can know how evolution occurred (you seem to have overlooked the “how” in my previous post …
“They invent stories about how things might have evolved and call those stories hypotheses”).
Secondly, I can’t detect any evidence of evolution in the series of shell images you kindly provided … they all look pretty much the same. (???)
To answer your question, I recommend reading the articles published at evolutionnews.org … the folks there specialise in exposing the holes in ToE.
Why would an evolutionary process that 99.9999% of scientists accept is understood and explained by natural mechanisms lead anyone to believe in a supernatural Designer?
You appear to be barking up the wrong tree here. The quote in question (from Dr. Colin Patterson … see above) doesn’t pertain to whether evolution has occurred or not (Patterson accepted evolution as a fact) … it pertains to explanations of how evolution occurred.
Finding predicted (alleged) transitional forms tells us nothing about how evolution proceeded.
I understand that, but I don’t understand how the hypothesis that mammals evolved from fish (for example) via known biological mechanisms can possibly be tested … in which case, ToE itself is untestable.
The author of the quote doesn’t seem to think ToE can be tested either.
Glancing at a handy intro biology textbook to formulate a better summary, it is essentially:
That is at least a basic summary.
One consilient test of the direct mechanism of evolution is that phylogenic trees based on genetics will correspond to trees based on morphology, including genetic markers which are not essential to morphology. In general, this has held up pretty well, with many studies especially at the level of various families. I would focus on primates, because there is a lot of data, and even if that does not extend back to fish, the human status goes to the heart of the argument anyways.
Actually, it can. Using mathematics. Given that all humans in Europe are estimated to have shared a set of common ancestors roughly 3000-4000 years ago, we can use 150-200 generations as a starting estimate. For these animals, they go through 1 generation per year, and a few hundred thousand years is plenty of time for a set of descendants to spread across an ocean basin.
Definite, no; as likely as most hypotheses are, yes. I have complete blurs in form in at least 3 taxa offhand between 3.8 to 3.2 and 2.4 to 2.2, 2.4 to 2.2 and 2.0 to 1.8, and 2.0 to 1.8 and 0 MYA. How that is not a complete line with short intervals is beyond me.
I have tested hypotheses to that effect. How are they not scientific?
This is true to a certain extent, but it is an unsupported claim, and does not help with the statistical probability of their being ancestors.
How about holes from a source that has a better track record on doing purely scientific arguments and on honesty?
How it proceeded is differential inheritance of mutations, which can be quite readily observed in modern populations.
Finding transitional fossils tells us a great deal about the path which was taken, but the exact mechanism requires other sources of information to elucidate.
Brother, if you are talking about God, as the Designer you are talking theology or the Trinity, just as if you are talking about evolution, you are talking about science.
You have accepted the limitations of ID. To be responsible you must deal with them. God is Love.
If your thinking has nothing to do with the Trinity, it has nothing to do with God.
Generally, this summary is what I have gleaned from reading various papers, reviews, and discussions, and as is:
“Biological evolution is a process of descent with modification. Lineages of organisms change through generations; diversity arises because the lineages that descend from common ancestors diverge through time”.
I have also read some accounts that sought to apply biological evolution in some settings - I discussed these some time ago and will not go over this here, but it was beyond dispute that the predictions made by biologists were inaccurate (some of these introduced species to bring beneficial outcome, but results were disastrous, others sought to encourage populations of selected species but failed); you can probably find examples in the literature.
So, my impression is that biologists have a descriptive notion based on using data from past events, but lack the predictive capabilities found in well researched and scrutinized scientific theories. I would be interested in your comments.
Ecological webs are likely chaotic, in that causality is present but predictive specificity is not. The same can be said of long term solar orbits, so that does not compromise the understanding of evolutionary principles.
One general prediction of introduced species, especially inadvertently invasive, is that ecological settings which are naive to the alien species would not be adapted to them, and therefore threatened with disruption. Another general prediction would be that this disruption would be a selective pressure, and possibly favor a measurable shift in expressed traits of indigenous species.
My point is that evolutionists have made predictions, and these were shown to be wrong.
On causality and implications, I would enter into a discussion at a later time.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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