It does matter what it is if we are to communicate intelligibly about faith and science.
Evolution is science, and science is incapable of saying anything about God. So am I ‘arguing TOE’, am I arguing about the science? Yes, if I am ‘anrguing’ about nested hierarchies in phylogenetic trees. Am I saying God does not use evolution? Absolutely not, because I am talking about the science reflected in phylogenetic trees. I am ’arguing’ about theology, notscience, if I say God does use evolution (and cosmology, and meteorology, and…).
So you are incorrect if you cannot distinguish between science and theology. I can talk about evolution scientifically and I can talk about evolution theologically. The former does not not deny that God uses evolution because it has no tools or methods to say anything about what God does or doesn’t do. Likewise, I can talk about meteorology scientifically and I can talk about it theologically.
Backatcha, bro’.
No, you do not know what you are arguing when you fail to separate the ‘lateral’ view, the science, from the ‘vertical’ view, the theology.
Are we arguing about the science of evolution or are we talking about the theology of whether or not God can use evolution? There is a difference, and I can do both (along with most everyone else).
The point is this.
It does not matter what you think you say. What matters is what people hear and understand.
When you argue scientific TOE you are telling the world that you do not include God in evolution. And therefore God is not needed.
That is your mistaken perception. When I regale someone with accounts of God’s providence, they think it’s cool. If I then tell them that likewise God’s hand is in evolution, they get it and know that I am not denying the science of evolution. They never once think ‘God is not needed.’
It really is like talking to a brick wall orbanging my head against one.
When you promote TOE you are denying God.
It doesn’t matter what you argue when talking about God. When you argue that TOE works you are denying God. The only way to show God is needed in evolution is to show that TOE cannot work without Him.
Speaking of nonsense, it’s nothing like a newborn baby. A baby arises from living parents - as opposed to the resurrection, which is human life arising in an instant from inanimate matter.
How long did it take Jesus to raise Lazarus from the dead (John 11:38-44)? … or to put it another way, how long did it take Jesus to create a living human being from inanimate matter?
(Hint: It wasn’t billions of years.)
I not aware of any of the “Big Five” extinction events being followed by the appearance of any new phyla, let alone sixteen new phyla within 10 million years, as in the Cambrian explosion.
Dr. Donald Prothero, author of the book “Evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters” posted a critique of Stephen Meyer’s(an ID proponent) interpretation the “Cambrian Explosion”, explaining that the sudden appearance of phyla is an exaggerated construct of Meyer’s flawed and biased methodology. You can read the entire post if you google “Stephen Meyer’s Fumbling Bumbling Camrian Amateur Follies”. Below, I posted an excerpt here for reader’s information:
"But does Meyer reflect this modern understanding of the subject? No! His figures (e.g., Figs. 2.5, 2.6, 3.8) portray the “explosion” as if it happened all at once, showing that he has paid no attention to the past 70 years of discoveries. He dismisses the Ediacara fauna as not clearly related to living phyla (a point that is still debated among paleontologists), but its very existence is fatal to the creationist falsehood that multicellular animals appeared all at once in the fossil record with no predecessors. Even more damning, Meyer completely ignores the existence of the first two stages of the Cambrian (nowhere are they even mentioned in the book, or the index) and talks about the Atdabanian stage as if it were the entire Cambrian all by itself. His misleading figures (e.g., Fig. 2.5, 2.6, 3.8) imply that there were no modern phyla in existence until the trilobites diversified in the Atdabanian. Sorry, but that’s a flat out lie. Even a casual glance at any modern diagram of life’s diversification (Figure 1) demonstrates that probable arthropods, cnidarians, and echinoderms are present in the Ediacara fauna, mollusks and sponges are well documented from the Nemakit-Daldynian Stage, and brachiopods and archaeocyathids appear in the Tommotian Stage–all millions of years before Meyer’s incorrectly defined “Cambrian explosion” in the Atdabanian. The phyla that he lists in Fig. 2.6 as “explosively” appearing in the Atdabanian stages all actually appeared much earlier–or they are soft-bodied phyla from the Chinese Chengjiang fauna, whose first appearance artificially inflates the count. Meyer deliberately and dishonestly distorts the story by implying that these soft-bodied animals appeared all at once, when he knows that this is an artifact of preservation. It’s just an accident that there are no extraordinary soft-bodied faunas preserved before Chengjiang, so we simply have no fossils demonstrating their true first appearance, which occurred much earlier based on molecular evidence. Meyer’s distorted and false view of conflating the entire Early Cambrian (545-520 m.y. ago) as consisting of only the third stage of the Early Cambrian (Atdabanian, 530-525 m.y. ago) creates a fundamental lie that falsifies everything else he says in the ensuing chapters. He even attacks me (p. 73) by claiming that during our 2009 debate, it was I who was improperly redefining the Cambrian! Even a cursory glance at any recent paleontology book on the topic, or even the Wikipedia site for “Cambrian explosion”, shows that it is Meyer who has cherry-picked and distorted the record, completely ignoring the 15 million years of the first two stages of the Cambrian because their existence shoots down his entire false interpretation of the fossil record. Sorry, Steve, but you don’t get to contradict every paleontologist in the world, ignore the evidence from the first two stages of the Cambrian, and redefine the Early Cambrian as the just the Atdabanian Stage just to fit your fairy tale! Even if we grant the premise that a lot of phyla appear in the Atdabanian (solely because there are no soft-bodied faunas older than Chengjiang in the earliest Cambrian), Meyer claims the 5-6 million years of the Atdabanian are too fast for evolution to produce all the phyla of animals. Wrong again! Lieberman (2003) showed that rates of evolution during the “Cambrian explosion” are typical of any adaptive radiation in life’s history, whether you look at the Paleocene diversification of the mammals after the non-avian dinosaurs vanished, or even the diversification of humans from their common ancestor with apes 6 m.y. ago.
“When you promote meteorology you are denying God.” Sure, that makes sense. Science is science and theology is theology, and never the twain shall meet ever will Richard persist in conflating them, but especially with evolution.
You really cannot see your self-contradictions in separating evolution from the other sciences. After all this history I should stop being amazed and also stop being hopeful that somehow a good argument will rectify that and help you recognize your logical gaffes and non sequiturs.
This comment would seem to require a thorough knowledge of the evolutionary biology literature. Do you have that kind of knowledge or are you relying on stories told by professional creationists.
Have you considered reading something on the subject not written by creationists?
This make little sense as a criticism of common descent. All taxonomic grades above species are arbitrary human inventions and they are only assigned retrospectively. Presumably, this mean that you wouldn’t expect new body plans to appear suddenly rather than gradually – but this is just a restatement of the previous argument.
The identification of regulatory elements by their similarity across species is a particular application of a general pattern in comparative genetics. That specific case could be explained (sort of) by the functional similarity of the species in question the broader pattern – and other similar patterns – cannot be. For example, fourfold degenerate sites, which code for the same amino acid regardless of the base present, typically have no effect on the functioning of fitness of an organism. And yet such sites are more similar between closely related species than between distantly related one. Why? Core housekeeping genes, which perform exactly the same function in all animals, say, should not differ with morphology or physiology, but they are also more similar between closely related species. Why? Pseudogenes, which are non-functioning genes or copies of genes, mostly have no functional role in the organisms that carry them, and yet their placement closely follows a phylogenetic tree. Why? Endogenous retrovirus insertions into the genome occur (to a good approximation) at random and are again largely nonfunctional, and yet those insertions also closely follow the same phylogenetic tree. Why? Insertions that are more widely shared across species show more mutational divergence. Why? When we look at genetic differences between species in detail, we find that they look exactly like the result of accumulated mutation. Why?
When scientists have a theory that successfully predicts numerous independent patterns in data, with any where from hundreds to millions of data points supporting each pattern, and when no alternative explanation at all is on hand, we do not write them off as ‘happy accidents’.
Whereas Richard insists that the TOE does make claims about what God would or would not do, or could and could not do. No doubt he’s heard too many atheists trying to do theology in the guise of science. But again, that’s certainly not limited to evolution!
You insist that God can use evolution. So do I. I also insist that God can use meteorology.
How could that be more clear that I do not leave God out of evolution. In his inability to distinguish between science and theology, he imagines somehow that you can include God in the science of evolution and if you don’t, you deny God. He wants to teach the science with God in it, because he objects to evolution “as taught”, a total non sequitur. You can talk about God and science, theology, but you cannot talk about God in science.
(Have I misconstrued your position, @RichardG? I also wish you could give a well-reasoned explanation of how you can legitimately extract the science of biology from the other sciences except by an argument of incredulity.)