Maybe you are not familiar with neutral drift and the neutral theory of evolution?
YEC almost ruined my faith.
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My perspective is the opposite. I first shifted from a special creation viewpoint when I dissected a mouse in biology lab. No one was talking about evolution in the least. I could not help being struck that while looking at exterior appearances that animals looked very different, from the viewpoint of anatomy and mechanics they actually looked much the same. The critter had the same tibula and fibula as from first aid class, and all the same major organs. Most of the change to get from one species to another is a matter of scaling and incidental or adaptive changes. I do not think the differences are the barrier you present them to be.
I would not speak in terms of proof, but the fossil record and genetic evidence of level of general commonality, chromosome 2 fusion, ERVs, and the loss of vitamin C synthesis are consistent and coherent with primate common ancestry. Alternative explanations make no sense at all, so I would consider the case for common ancestry to be incontrovertible.
This is a category error. Evolutionary theories, from Darwin to the modern synthesis, are descriptions of biological processes and are no more religious or godless than weather forecasts, theories of gravitation or mathematical theorems. Belief and trust in God is the object of Christian faith.
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âThe scientific communityâ == people who actually spend time in the lab, out in the field, performing experiments, doing the maths, running computer simulations, and coming up with practical applications for what they are discovering.
Does that describe you, Richard? Because if it doesnât, what makes you think that youâre qualified to dismiss the verdict of people who it does describe as âconjecture and majority conclusionâ? And if it does describe you, what evidence do you have that all your colleagues are wrong and you are right?
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Why not?
False. A nested hierarchy is an objective measurement.
Added in edit:
It is also worth mentioning that the nested hierarchy was first discovered by Carl Linnaeus who was a creationist who lived 100 years before Darwin. The nested hierarchy was already an established fact before the theory of evolution came along.
You can have the same building blocks but not have a nested hierarchy. That is why a nested hierarchy is evidence for common ancestry.
I am not the one denying the existence of an objective nested hierarchy, or the possibility of DNA comparisons evidencing common ancestry.
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The number of mutations separating the human and chimp genomes is well within the range achievable by observed mutation rates.
That assumes you are reasonable.
It is also said that the Earth is flat. People can say anything. Providing evidence for what they claim is another matter.
Evolution is no more godless than all of the other scientific explanations you already accept.
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Plenty, if you allow illustrations in physical publications to some extent.
There are a number of mollusk species in basal Pleistocene deposits (Busycon cf. carica, or Neoterebra cf. dislocata e.g.), which I have personally collected, that are distinctly transitional between species from mid-Pliocene deposits (B. maximum, and N. indenta to continue those examples), which my grandfather has collected and illustrated, and recent species (standard B. carica and N. dislocata), which one can find plenty of images of in many volumes on recent east coast mollusks.
If one looks at one of Ed Petuchâs publications documenting a series of âspeciesâ (what everyone else calls âvarietiesâ) over time, then one can see another example. His volume describing Pyruella comes to mind. Some of Emily Vokesâ Tulane Studies papers on muricids also give good examples.
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MatthewâŚwelcome to the discussion. I found something below relating to the dino-with-red-blood-cell matter. Got it from history.comâŚand I am sure that others here have found more intriguing references to float about.
You DID ask people about Genesis 1:5 and what that means. This is the verse that says: âAnd God named the light day, but the darkness he named night. And it was evening and it was morning, one day.â Westermann, in his commentary on Genesis 1-11, refers to this verse as âthe namingâ in which âthe creation of lightâ and its separation from darkness is named. Wenham, in his commentary on Genesis, notes that he agrees with Westermann on this â and notes that the word âdayâ is used here in âits basic sense of a 24-hour period.â This is cited in Word Biblical Commentary and other commentators I have seen. But even then, Wenham in his commentary notes that a âsix dayâ pattern for creative acts was commonly used in other Mesopotamian and Ugaritic literature âŚmeaning that this was the pattern by which certain accounts of that culture were told. Or at least that seems to be how they told it (my opinion). He (like some other commentators these days) sees the early chapters of Genesis as targetting the creation philosophies of the era of the original writer(s) of Genesis, not ours â and thus not a scientific treatise of the sort we usually expect. And I suggest you read him for more on that.
. Augustine, in his Literal Meaning of Genesis (early 5th century A.D.), wondered how there could actually BE light if the sun was not created till the third day â a question asked by others in his day and since. Augustine then decided that it was not possible to be certain what is meant by that word in this chapter.
And the reality is that the ordering of the events in the Genesis account plus other things lead people of our era âincluding Christian people of evangelical faith â to look for other explanations beyond that of the six 24-hour day a few thousand years ago.
OKâŚfrom history.com
Finally, the new findings raise a tantalizing possibility: If collagen and red blood cells can survive for 75 million years, couldnât dinosaur DNAâeven in fragmentsâalso have survived? Could scientists use that genetic code to resurrect the dinosaurs, âJurassic Worldâ-style? Bertazzo admits that finding genetic information in ancient specimens is a possibility, but is cautious about its likelihood. âThe problem with DNA is that even if you find it, it wonât be intact. Itâs possible you could find fragments, but to find more than that? Who knows?â
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People have found a few bits of âwe can tell these are DNA breakdown productsâ. And the red blood cells did not survive unchanged that long. There are impressions of red blood cells which contain hemoglobin breakdown products, not intact red blood cells.
Thanks for the response, Timothy. I did just view some of the blogs cited by others aboveâŚRs Sewellâs insertion as well as the two biologos blogs that LM77 includedâŚvery interesting! I need to read the blog by Francis Collins, I suppose. Thanks for pointing this out!!
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There are a couple of other reasons why accurate and honest weights and measures need to apply to the historical sciences as well as to everything else.
First. it is an issue of trust. If someone thinks that the Bibleâs demands for accurate and honest weights and measures do not apply to the historical sciences, what else do they think they do not apply to? And what other forms of dishonesty do they think are acceptable and in what contexts? Additionally, it raises the question, even if they acknowledge the need for accurate and honest weights and measures in trade and finance, are they practicing what they preach? If someone isnât prepared to even acknowledge the need for accuracy and honesty about everything, how can they expect anyone to consider them accurate and honest about anything? For instance, how can they expect anyone to consider them to be telling the truth about what the original Hebrew text of the Bible means?
Second, accurate and honest weights and measures are determined on the basis of universal rules. These are rules that apply to every area of science, both âoperationalâ and âhistoricalâ; to every area of engineering; to finance and commerce; and even to some areas of politics such as how elections are conducted. If someoneâs arguments about âhistorical scienceâ flout the rules, they will be sowing confusion in peopleâs minds about what accurate and honest weights and measures even look like in the first place. They will end up applying fallacies that they see in YEC arguments to other areas of science and engineering, to finance and commerce, and to all sorts of other areas. They will believe that they do indeed have accurate and honest weights and measures when in reality they do not. This will have all sorts of bad consequences, from undermining their ability to do their jobs properly, to opening them up to prosecution for fraud, to even in some cases killing people. In fact weâve seen that happening a lot over the past two years or so with covid. Many of the falsehoods in arguments against vaccination or masks have made exactly the same logical fallacies that I see time and time again in YEC arguments.
So sorry, @Matthew_Cserhati, when discussing creation and evolution, you must still report and interpret both the evidence and the methods used to analyse it accurately and honestly. This is completely non-negotiable. If YECs can come up with an approach that does so, then it will be worthy of consideration, but if they can not, no-one, Christian or otherwise, has any right whatsoever to describe any creation model that fails to do so as Biblical.
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I misread that at first as "how electrons are conducted. XD You were just talking about engineering, after all. 
And the rules still apply! A good meter from Fluke helps enforce them. 
Is no different from accepting what is written in Scripture.
Richard
In what exact manner do you mean?
Published photographs of specimens that can be accessed by others seem pretty well verified.
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But you donât have to accept those pictures. You can go and dig up your own fossils. That is precise where all those photos came from â when people went out and dug up fossils for themselves completely independent of each other. So now there are thousands of early hominid fossils found by people all over the world.
How is that the same as believing the content of one book of one religion among thousands?
I can tell you why I believe in that religion/book rather than any of the others, but I donât see any basis for a reasonable expectation that other should believe the same. So, I donât see even a remote similarity to science which is based on procedures anyone can follow to get the same result no matter what they want or believe.
To be sure, personal experience is the most convincing reason for believing anything, but only for the person who has that experience. They provide no reasonable expectation that others should believe likewise. After all those personal experiences include all manner of things such as UFOs, psychics, healing with crystals, and ghosts. The majority donât have any such experiences and so they have little reason to believe such things. But with science the claims are demonstrable and you can do it yourself to get same result. That makes it only reasonable to accept those results.
On the other hand, what about when the two conflict? Based on personal experience and testimony, people were able sell water containing radium as a medicine until someone died of radiation poisoning. It is an example of why science should take precedence over personal experience, let alone the testimonies of other people about their personal experiences.
Now the song and dance of many atheists is that they will only believe the results of science. Some will insist that they will not believe what they experience for themselves. But that frankly looks even more willful to me than a refusal to accept the results of science. And besides I think the claim that they only believe what the scientific evidence tells them is delusional, because that simply isnât enough for the living of human life. They have to make choices of what to believe just the same as everybody else.
No one is doubting the existence of fossils. What is in doubt is the theories that accompany them. And that is what you get from your books.
The trouble with personal experiences is that they are completely unprovable to anyone who wasnât there. Why should you believe me? (because I have such an honest face and demeanor!)
But, this applies to my acceptance of TOE. I do not have to accept the proposals without question because much of it cannot be actually proven. No matter how much the theories fit what we see, they are still unprovable. And, like in many things, once you have found something that fits (or seems to) you do not look for anything else and the natural response is to defend it with everything you have.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I was taught Evolution nearly 50 years ago. I have not really kept up with everything since then. Most of my modern knowledge has come via forums like this one with all the prejudices and self-righteousness intact. I have checked out some of the stuff on the Internet but you and I know that the Internet will show anything that is posted, it does not certify accuracy or truth. So I plough on with my own beliefs, and I make no bones about what they are. I accept the existence of God and I accept the existence of the Evolutionary process. My beliefs accommodate those two apparently disparate, notions.
Richard
Same is true of every theory. They are still useful descriptors of reality. By definition.
Ones where the only references to it are âthis form seems to be transitional between x and yâ?
Finding pictures of the species I mentioned is not difficult, as finding pictures of mollusks goes.
No, they become dogma. Reality s not defined by theory nor is it quantified by such.
Richard
If no theory is a useful descriptor of reality, then weâve lost all ability to describe reality. Whatâs the point in even trying? (By the way, dogma isnât necessarily always a bad thing.)
I think this is the fundamental difference between YECs and pretty much everyone else: YECs tend to say that if their literal interpretation of the Bible (specifically Genesis) is incorrect, then the entire Bible is loses its authority. Everyone else says that if you reject the clear, consistent, empirical data that people have gathered over millennia, then all of reality is suspect. The latter view does not preclude the authority of scripture, only the YEC interpretation. The former rejects the entire concept of knowable, absolute truths.
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I am reminded of the words of a Pythagrean Fundamentalist I knew in 2002-2004, who said: âTo say that the evidence is against the universeâs making sense is an absurd statement. If the universe actually does not make sense, then we should just fold our tents and get drunk or something instead of wasting our time trying to explain the universe. The actual situation is that evidence must be interpreted and it is always interpreted either on the basis of some theory or else on the basis of some set of inchoate presumptions. If one starts out with false fundamental notions, then one will also read falsity that is not in the evidence itself into the interpretation of that evidence. If the evidence seems not to make sense, that is your clue that an examination of the assumptions used in interpreting that evidence is in order.â
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