I will need to search this site (and other places) to give details of claims that the ToE has resulted in direct application, and without it these would not have occurred. The example I used here of the design of drugs shows that ToE is not mentioned, let alone applied with great success.
Yeah, I don’t see that ToE is used in the designing and formulation of drugs per se (that is the realm of biochemisty and and physiology). But, I would word things to say that ToE provides the theoretical framework for why new drugs are needed, i.e., viruses and bacteria are constantly evolving to become resistant to the current drugs. Hence, understanding that this evolution is going on with microorganisms provides the rationale for why new forms of drugs continually need to be developed.
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I was meaning the Exodus and the Incarnation – those are where miracles really pop up, while at other times they’re scarcer.
The Hebrew text doesn’t tell of a global flood, it tells of a flood that covered the known world – the land. That’s the common meaning of the Hebrew word ‘eretz’ throughout Genesis: when it says that a famine spread across the eretz it doesn’t mean the globe, it means the land that Jacob and his family knew of (and maybe not even all of that).
We also know that “all” doesn’t literally mean all when used by the Genesis writer: we read that “all the world” bought grain from Joseph in Egypt, when plainly the Babylonians and Indians and Etruscans and many others obviously didn’t. Even if we render eretz as “Land” instead of “world” this doesn’t work, for the same reason. In Genesis 2 the writer tells us of a couple of rivers that flowed “all around” specific lands; if we take that literally we have the strange phenomenon of rivers flowing in circles.
In Genesis 13 these two words also occur together; Abraham says to Lot “Is not the whole (all) land before you?” They aren’t looking at the globe, they’re talking about a specific stretch of land.
The account is significantly mythologized as shown by the symbolic numbers and the nested structure.
Right there you demonstrate the flaw in YEC: you’re imposing an alien worldview on the scriptures! The scriptures don’t care about science and have no intent to teach it; not a single writer of any part of scripture had the least notion of science. They had their own cosmology, and communicated in the terms of their cosmologies.
This is the same flaw: none of the Genesis writers even had the concept of “evidence” in terms of science or even in terms of history.
Applies directly to every effort through the centuries to force the scriptures to fit the reader’s worldview instead of the writer’s worldview.
And in the case of YEC it’s especially bad because the source of the idea that in order to be true writings have to be 100% scientifically (and historically) accurate doesn’t come from scripture and doesn’t even come from theology, it comes from the very human philosophy of scientific materialism – which is an inherently atheistic system of thought!
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Of course it’s confusing – he’s not using the term “providence” in its usual theological meaning, which is:
“Divine providence is the governance of God by which He, with wisdom and love, cares for and directs all things in the universe. The doctrine of divine providence asserts that God is in complete control of all things. He is sovereign over the universe as a whole (Psalm 103:19), the physical world (Matthew 5:45), the affairs of nations (Psalm 66:7), human destiny (Galatians), human successes and failures (Luke 1:52), and the protection of His people (Psalm 4:8). This doctrine stands in direct opposition to the idea that the universe is governed by chance or fate.”
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The residents of La Rinconada in Peru, at about three miles above sea level, have their own genetic modification. Those with it can play soccer at that altitude!
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And that is NOT what this thread is about. The people who were this thread’s inspiration would have – and did – laugh people arguing that version of ‘intelligent design’ out of the room.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
I presume you’re using “the natural” in the sense Paul does, i.e. what fallen man can figure out on his own.
By what authroity do ou claim this superior definition?
That is not what the Bible shows. The OTis chronicling the history of God’s retionship with Israel and the patriarchs of Israel. SHow me God;s care for the
- Egyptians
- Caananites
- Philistines
Not to mention the victims pf the lood, and Sodom and Ghomorrah.(regardless of any view of Guilt)
Says you.
The New Testament says that the devil has been given temprorary reign.
Predestination? Who are you kidding!
You have gone too far this time.
Richard
Vaccine development, including but not limited to SARS-2-CoV and influenza, preferentially targets viral regions which are more highly conserved and therefore more likely to be difficult for the virus to mutate without detrimental effect and purifying selection. Put another way, if the specificity was not essential, we would expect more variation in the wild or circulating strains. That is a direct working application of ToE.
How often? What resources went into the modeling? You need to qualify this statement and support with specific references.
You would do well to give due consideration to replies from @glipsnort, as his infectious desease expertise involves exactly the concerns you have raised.
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No one important – just the church Fathers, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther . . .
I think we can get sidetracked by appealing to expertise - however, to settle your concerns, I have been active in application of quantum molecular computer modelling for decades, including chemical reactions and catalysis, and these are complicated systems that require considerable theoretical understanding and also the ability to apply to real systems. Predictive capabilities and direct verification, and including any needed assumptions and simplifications, are spelled out in detail in such studies.
I have pointed out claims made regarding ToE and so far, one response seems to acknowledge the validity of my remarks. You and others should not be so defensive, as my main concern is with statements such as, for example, God works through Darwinian evolution, or ToE is fact, and other exaggerations.
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I think there is a difference in what we consider ToE - I see that as encompassing the natural/biological world, including ecology, whereas (if I understand you correctly) you regard this as separate to evolution.
What part of scripture did any of the people you quoted write?
There is no definitive interpretation of scripture. And you certainly do not speak it.
Richard
Ps and I am sure that you have the personal permission to speak on the behalf of these people, and to claim an authority that they themselves would not claim
None of which has any bearing on Darwinian evolutionary theory.
I agree. Your original claim was that the failure of Darwinian evolutionary theory to have practical applications show that it is mathematically unsound. The premise is not correct, since Darwinian evolutionary theory does have practical applications (e.g. see this paper, one of many in which signals of positive selection are used to identify genetic changes important to public health). But even if the premise were correct, the argument is patently invalid since mathematical soundness is not a sufficient (or even necessary) condition for a theory to have practical applications.
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Good to hear …
I think the claim that known biological mechanisms alone produced the history of life on earth is nonsense. All we know is, species adapt to their environment within the bounds of their genetic variations, or they die - they don’t change.
Sounds good to me …
This is not strictly accurate - I pointed out that there are instances where evolution was the basis for activities that were predicted to provide beneficial outcomes, and the opposite resulted. If these were mathematically sound exercises, the results should reflect this. I also mentioned some claims that I considered outrageous.
The paper you site appears to me to show method and statistical treatment. From the abstract:
… “Looking for a good proxy for local malaria incidence, we found that the best predictor was the proportion of polygenomic infections (those with multiple genetically distinct parasites), although that relationship broke down in very low incidence settings (r = 0.77 overall). The proportion of closely related parasites in a site was more weakly correlated (r = -0.44) with incidence while the local genetic diversity was uninformative”.
I can only repeat my original post, in that such work is for biologists and others who specialize in such fields - however ToE does not show me how God works in it, through it, or any such nonsense.
Thank you for making a clear statement. My point is that your argument, which you have just restated, is fallacious. Mathematical soundness of a theory has nothing to do with how accurate that theory can be in making predictions about future phenomena. You made a different but related error when you wrote, ‘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,’ which suggests that predictive capabilities are a good metric of the extent to which a theory has been researched and scrutinized. If a particular set of phenomena are inherently difficult to predict, you can scrutinize the theory that describes them till the cows come home – they’ll still be difficult to predict.
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I think only God understands the relationship between the physical/natural world and the supernatural world. Puny science can only scratch the surface of reality; it can’t determine how the supernatural interacts with whatever we humans perceive with our five senses.
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I connected the dots and it said, “eternal mystery”
Yes, its possible we are defining things differently. I’m not sure how you think of “ecology”? The dictionary defines ecology as “the relationships between living things and their physical environment”. So I view the local ecology as the set of conditions that individuals adapt to (via natural selection/ evolution).
Of course, the things that comprise the ecology of an area are not usually static but dynamic. And if one species in the community changes (via evolution), it may have ripple effects on the selective pressures that other species in the community now face because of the relationships between organisms there. That may lead to evolutionary changes in those other species as well, which in turn, may come back to affect the original species that changed etc. etc. So, in such a web of relationships, there is continual feedback, and continual evolution going on. Back-and-forth evolution as species relate to each other through competition, predation, cooperation and various types of mutualisms.
cheers,
K.
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