Come on, Pepe, I haven't been in here for a while, but I'm not <i>that</i> rusty. If there's one thing your side of the argument likes to point at, it's science's fundamental inability to find lasting truths. Newton's inverse-square law was considered the center of the universe for well over a century, until a German clerk came around and pointed out that there is no such thing as gravity, that it's only the effect of space's distortion by all masses, and sooner or later, that realization will belong to the history of genialic yet slightly wrong explanations for the state of things, only to be replaced by an even smarter, even less expected, even more correct observation. Science does not have the purpose to find truths about the universe, a whole branch of philosophy concerns itself with why it can't, it has to content itself with the observation, analysis, and subsequent extrapolation of events within the universe. Scientific theory can never be proven irrefutably right, it can only be proven irrefutably wrong. The theories that have so far not been faulted are what we consider the current state of knowledge. And if you consider these ramifications, supernatural events quickly drop out of the scope of science, for if something has no natural cause, it can hardly be empirically measured with any certainty. True, you could possibly ascertain that it happened, but why? How? What would you base the estimates of effects on? Supernatural events can just not be factored into scientific theory. If it can't be observed properly, it can not be analyzed, and one can extrapolate from it even less. The big question here is of course what constitutes a supernatural event and what doesn't. Science has so far been quite good at eliminating possible candidates by closely watching them.
I'll let your jab at evolutionism slide, BTW. We both know where discussions on that lead, let's don't go there. Sufficient to say that I will consider the evolutionary theory, which's core tennets have so far not been proven wrong, acceptable despite its relative unlikeliness (which really shouldn't surprise us, the universe is full of unlikely events; it's only much fuller of likely ones) until something more accurate comes along, while the creatonistic theory can be proven wrong by having a long good look at the rock cliffs around where I live.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->If the Universe contains a higher being, then the purpose of Science would naturally lead to a better understanding of that being.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> Except the scientific method has no way of creating an understanding of something like faith or the supernatural. If you can't test it, how can you formulate a theory? This means that science can never "lead to a better understanding of that being"; purely impossible by what we call modern Science.
Actually, that's kinda what Nem0 said....except mine's less eloquent. <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Evolution is one of the most powerful theories (i.e. explanatory frameworks) in all of science, and common descent (the fact that all life on earth is descended from a common ancestor) is a fact so well supported that it could take hundreds of pages just to sketch out all the different lines of indepedant evidence supporting it.
If you have religious beliefs, that's great. But that's not relevant to scientific inquiry. The whole point of science is that, instead of being based on religious beliefs on which we are all unlikely to ever agree upon, it is based on observation, evidence, and open argument. That makes it accessible to all.
Darwin, by the way, was a Christian who became an agnostic deist. I.e., he was not an atheist. The only major thing about his theory that he had any serious doubts about (and rightly so) was his model of heredity, which was blending (i.e. he believed that the traits of offspring were an even mix of the parents). As many people pointed out to him, if this were true, then all populations would tend towards homogeniety. Darwin towards the end of his life thus began to suspect that heredity was perhaps "particulate," i.e. some sort of binary system. This is, in fact, the correct direction (which Mendel discovered), but Darwin never lived to flesh out the idea himself, and few people in the world really made the connection between Darwin and Mendel until the 30s when the so-called "modern synthesis" began in biology. The results of this line of inquiry were utterly astounding. Within just a few decades, we had dealt a deathblow to racism for the first time in human history, discovered the basic building blocks of life (DNA), learned in general the history of life on earth and the planet we live on, and so on. Evolution may have been one of the most revolutionary, society changing discoveries in all human intelletual history, and yet the idea itself is so amazingly simple and obvious that we're hard pressed to understand why no one had ever thought of it until Darwin and Wallace.
<!--QuoteBegin-Pepe+--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Pepe)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->However, if you allow for the possibility of a "higher being" who influences, directs, or even "creates", you can create a picture for the origin of the universe / world / man with a much higher probability and a much better explanation for the way things are. Scientists should be barking up that tree in their search for truth.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If you allow magic, you can explain anything, instantly, without having to leave the comfort of your chair or do any research. That's exactly why scientists aren't much impressed by theories of "God did it." It isn't that they are against the existence or philosophy of God, it's that that answer doesn't really explain anything, it's not testable, and it offers no direction for further research or study. In short, it isn't ground for legitimate scientific inquiry. I mean, it's not like this sort of explanatory laziness can be restricted to God. For instance, you claim that "things as they are" are a "theoretical impossibility." Leave aside the fact that that claim is wrong: even if it were a problem, if science worked by simply making up answers to problems from the comfort of my easy chair, I could think of thousands of "magical" explanations that solve this apparent problem and make it go away. As long as I don't have to supply any evidence for them, claiming God did it is no more or less easy or testable than claiming that all of reality is an illusion and so too are the supposed "impossible odds."
That said, neither evolution nor abiogenesis (the study of the potential origins of life) are "theoretical impossibilities" as you claim.
Nem0 - I don't mean to take little jabs at evolution. I am what you call a "pre-suppositionalist" - meaning that in order for me to come to a set of conclusions, everything I pre-suppose about a situation must be explainable.
When I look at evolution, and what evolution pre-supposes, it is a poposterous theory. A "fact" of evolution - to which all evolutionists must subscribe, is that this thing called "life" came out of a primordial ooze of "non-life" - and that this jump happened spontaneously and accidentaly.
Not only that, but evolution pre-supposes that this new life survived in the most hostile of conditions - yeay it even thrived, managing not only to dodge the lightning bolts and crushing bolders and flames, but steadily growning more "evolved" - first from a bacteria like organism to invertabrate creachers and plant life (at some point there had to be a division between the two) - and ultimatly, over the billions of years, you and I are here.
Don't take this as a Jab at evolution - these are the things that must be believed by every evolutionist out there. My own belief structure also pre-supposes many things - like that my life has a specific purpose and value (outside of a bag of chemicals), that there is a God who gives value to my life, and this same God created this world.
You mention the rock cliffs "proving" creation wrong - From my perspective it is your pre-supposition that creation is wrong, and then you look to the rock cliffs for supporting evidence, which you claim you find. However, if I were to go to those cliffs, I would see evidence for my belief structure, and my pre-suppositions. All they really tell us is that mud and rock gets deposited in layers - beyond that, any sort of time frame, any sort of "age" is anybodies guess.
And I know you will bring up carbon dating - but even then you are dealing with pre-suppositions, like that carbon (or whatever atom your studying) has decayed at exactly the same rate in the past as it does now.
My overall point is this: We both find plenty of evidence to support our positions, and we both differ on our core beliefs - our presuppositions. I reognize Evolution as a "scientific" teaching - I respect the work that people do, I think its great that they dig up all kinds of bones and artifacts. I just think that they are (possibly intentionally) missing a piece of the puzzle that will bring clarity to a lot of the other areas, and the reason they are missing this piece is because they claim it is "unscientific".
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->When I look at evolution, and what evolution pre-supposes, it is a poposterous theory. A "fact" of evolution - to which all evolutionists must subscribe, is that this thing called "life" came out of a primordial ooze of "non-life" - and that this jump happened spontaneously and accidentaly.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That you could say this is a tipoff that you don't know what you are talking about.
Let me say this loud and clear: <i>the Theory of Evolution can not explain, and does not claim to explain, the origin of life</i>. Period. The basic requirements for natural selection to work are thus: 1) heredity of traits 2) variation of traits 3) differential reproductive success based on traits. All of those things pre-suppose "life" (actually, not: life is far too vague a term since there is no set line over which we can distinguish life from non-life: what they pre-suppose are replicators with heredity, whether we choose to call them "alive" or not). Darwin never pretended that his theory explained the origin of life: it takes the existence of simple life as a given and then explains what comes after that. Like all scientific theories, it is specifically limited to a particular explanatory scope. Evolution does not explain why the sun shines. It does not explain why volacanos erupt. And it does not purport to explain the origin of heredity. Everyone got it?
Now, the area of science that deals with the "ooze" bit is called Abiogenesis. And if you'd like to discuss that, I'd be happy to. Suffice to say, I don't find abiogenesis to be implausible at all. What I do find is that people who do find it implausible generally have a very misguided understanding of exactly what abiogenesis hypothesises are aiming at. Because it isn't random chance. It's about finding plausible mechanisms of chemical catalysis based on the conditions of the early earth.
If you are really in a position of knowledge enough to make a judgement about the plausibility of abiogenesis, then answer these basic questions (without googling them! that = teh lose) 1. Why is it important to abiogenesis and carbon-based organic chemistry in general that the atmosphere of the early earth was reductive (and what does that mean, anyway?) 2. What is an error catastrophe? 3. What is Speigelman's monster?
Those are some _really_ basic things one would need to know before they could make any legitimate judgements about how plausible abiogenesis is. Now, be honest: do you know offhand (without cheating with google or some other resource) what any of them are or why they are important to the picture?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->All they really tell us is that mud and rock gets deposited in layers - beyond that, any sort of time frame, any sort of "age" is anybodies guess.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
There are an overwhleming number of indepedant methods that can be used to date natural phenomenon. It isn't even just that these methods are all individually reliable (though they are, and no serious objections have been maintained against them). It's that they all cross-confirm each other: they give the SAME dates. This is one of the most powerful forms of evidence there is, because even if you argue (however impluasibly) that the calculations and assumptions underlying each of these methods is wrong, you are still left with the fact that they all coincidentally gave the SAME wrong answer. But if the methods were truly flawed, then this would be an astounding coincidence. What explains the coordination of these dating methods: the coverging agreement? Only truth: truth coordinates in a way that error cannot.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->And I know you will bring up carbon dating - but even then you are dealing with pre-suppositions, like that carbon (or whatever atom your studying) has decayed at exactly the same rate in the past as it does now. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
But this isn't simply an arbitrary pre-supposition. It's based on tons of research into radioactive decay and hundreds of different sorts of tests of the phenomenon to understand the basic regularities behind it. No one thought up radioactive decay with the explicit intention of attacking creationism. It was developed for entirely different purposes originally, and out of a genuine wish to try and figure out the mysteries of creation.
And, as I said: fine, doubt that carbon dating works at a constant rate (actually, this is another tip-off: carbon dating isn't used for anything other than very very recent things because it has a very short half-life: different isotopes or different atoms are used for longer range dates). Why then does it happen to match up with other sorts of dating phenomenon, like tree rings or seafloor spreading or magnetic polarity reversals? How do you explain how all these methods, which each represent independant lines of figuring out the dates of things, all give the same answers?
There is a much more extensive discussion about how all these things fit together here: <a href='http://forums.tolkienonline.com/viewtopic.php?t=85498&sid=44c9c8410c3b169081091aef7509f0dd' target='_blank'>http://forums.tolkienonline.com/viewtopic....1091aef7509f0dd</a>
But for now, suffice to say that the evidence being used isn't just a bunch of random assumptions: it's all based on very tested and cross-confirmed natural phenomena, all compared and verified. Most of it wasn't snidely made up just to mess with creationist beliefs. In fact, a lot of the major evidences (some developed by scientists who were very religious in their private lives) were argued against very harshly by many scientists (many of whom were non-believers in their private lives) until the evidence ultimately convinced people. It wasn't all a big conspiracy to undermine religion. It really was an honest and spirited debate that increased our knowledge of the world, carried on by people of all sorts of different opinions, most of which concerned just rival ideas and who didn't give a thought to having it in for this or that religious belief. And the basic evidence and argument used to justify these methods is no different than what we're all familiar with with any of the truths in our daily lives. If you want to assert that there is some flaw in the reasoning, it's not fair to simply hint at it and then wave it away dismissively. Out with it! What's your <i>actual</i> objection or testable alternative scenario?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->My overall point is this: We both find plenty of evidence to support our positions, and we both differ on our core beliefs - our presuppositions.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Science does not require presuppositions outside positing the common reality we all share and asking that people play by "well, then show me" rules. That is, if you claim that the evidence says something, then make your argument. And let's consider the evidence and whether it really does fit that argument. If you think they are missing a part of the puzzle, then by all means: MAKE AN ARGUMENT. Otherwise, you are basically just in the business impugning people's motives and judgements, which is plain uncouth. And it is especially abusrd considering that many of the strongest defenders of evolution are religious believers themselves who believe that God created the universe and natural laws. To them, the accusation that they are myopically denying the possibility of God would sound absurd and insulting.
Ok, you said it in your first sentence to me - evolution can not explain, nor will not explain the origin of life - yet that is exactly what it needs to explain!
Why is this theory taught as scientific fact when it can't even handle that basic argument? Lets not forget the considerable gaps in animal history - going from invertabrate to vertabrate to name just one. There are thousands of missing links with no fossil records - yet apparently they all happened!
here is another bit of evidence: <a href='http://www.halos.com/' target='_blank'>Halos.com</a>
and another: <a href='http://www.aboundingjoy.com/molecular-fs.html' target='_blank'>Dealing with the molecular level</a>
and another:<a href='http://www.adam.com.au/bstett/ReligAntiquityofEarth.htm' target='_blank'>A short list of discrepancies</a>
I could go find more, but this should give you enough to deal with for a while.
Oh, but wait - my evidence comes from "Christian" sources - so it can't be reliable - they are already bias! And so the world keeps turning - there is nothing new under the sun. Science strives to preserve its own, while ignoring anything to the contrary.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->first from a bacteria like organism to invertabrate creachers and plant life (at some point there had to be a division between the two) - and ultimatly, over the billions of years, you and I are here.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
More like this:
First to an RNA like precursor, then to an organsim that is mostly RNA like with some proteins, then to an organism that is RNA encased in a lipid bilayer, then to an organism that uses DNA as a storage medium for its RNA code, then to an organism where the DNA has hijacked the cell and enslaved the RNA (poor guys), then....
And so on.
Also, plant and animal cell lines diverged from a common ancestor, not directly from each other.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->And I know you will bring up carbon dating -<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Someone who REALLY knows their stuff will bring up Uranium/Lead dating, which is used to date the oldest rocks known and it doesn't suffer your little 'problem'. This is because these atoms are often surrounded by structures called zirconian cages, that prevent the entry and exit of atoms in the structure. The dates are completely consistent between non-zirconian cage trapped atoms and those in other cages in other parts of the rock.
Obviously, nobody attacks this because it is pretty infallible as a system goes, lacks the problems that carbon dating has and can date rocks to BILLIONS of years, rather than thousands.
Kind makes attacks on carbon dating pointless now doesn't it?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Ok, you said it in your first sentence to me - evolution can not explain, nor will not explain the origin of life - yet that is exactly what it needs to explain!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No, it doesn't, no more than the theory of Gravity needs to explain why dogs like to smell butts. In science, theories are formulated to accomplish <i>specific</i> tasks. In the case of evolution, it is to explain adaptation and design GIVEN life. As I've already told you, it is the field of Abiogenesis that examines the origin of life.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Why is this theory taught as scientific fact when it can't even handle that basic argument?<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I dunno, why is the theory of magnetism taught when it can't even explain why the sky is blue? Same insane sort of question. It doesn't handle that argument because it was never meant to in the first place, and mechanism discovered only applies to already "living" creatures.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Lets not forget the considerable gaps in animal history - going from invertebrate to vertebrate to name just one.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't understand: what gap are you talking about? How is that a gap? In what? The progression from simple notochord to full bony vertebrate is not some great mystery.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->There are thousands of missing links with no fossil records - yet apparently they all happened!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This may come as a shock to you, but there could be 0 fossils ever found, and common descent and evolution would be just as powerful as ever. Darwin never even expected to find as many as we've been lucky to find. Supporting common descent simply does not rely on finding every single fossil species that ever lived, and indeed it is highly unlikely that fossils even formed for every species that ever lived. Fossil formation conditions are extremely rare, and because of the way species branch, you generally are only likely to find those from established dominant populations rather than the new branches. What fossils do tell us are very very important and helpful. But no one expects to find a perfect record of every single last creature that ever lived, nor does the theory require it. Fossils are icing on the cake and welcome gifts to the party (because they help us nail down vauge dates and relations), but what we've found already more than establishes the basic structure of evolution over all of the major phyla throughout the years.
When evolution first finally became widely accepted as true, the major importance of fossils was not that they provided a complete record of anything (and again, they never and still are not expected to: each find is a lucky break, not the norm) but that they showed that the vast majority of species that had ever lived had gone extinct, and that there was a general pattern over the ages tracing through various lines of descent. Specific connections between specific modern animals and others are, of course, aided by fossil evidence, but the current technique of molecular "clocking" modern animals to each other is arguably much more powerful and accurate.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I could go find more, but this should give you enough to deal with for a while.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No. What you did was just google a bunch of articles to throw at me, most of which you probably even barely read over. That's extremely lazy, and I'm not going to waste my time reading someone else's work when you can't even be bothered to debate with me. If you have arguments that have convinced YOU from these articles, then YOU state them. If YOU can refute anything I said, YOU say it. I've seen this game played out over and over: people make a whole bunch of grand statements, then when challenged to support them, or in the face of a mass of evidence they cannot explain away, they feign "Oh, I'm suddenly very tired" or "Oh, I just got very busy" spam a few random articles at you, and run away, never to post again (heck, you even pretty much SAY that you are trying to stall me and keep me busy!)
Sorry, not playing that game. I'm happy to debate any of the claims in those articles, but only if there is a good faith effort on your part to respond to my objections. I could spend forty minutes composing a detailed response to those claims, all to have you respond "bah, it's all just dogmatic faith, evidence doesn't matter, ok, gg, bye bye." Most of the claims made can be answered simply by checking out talk-origins' handy look-up anyway: from a quick glance, it's the usual YEC stuff that's been debunked a million times before (po-ho? I haven't heard anyone try to sell me that one in awhile)
Also, I asked you a few specific questions about some of the basic concepts necessary to understand and evaluate abiogenesis. Did you know the answers or not? If not, then are pretending to know things you don't know.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Oh, but wait - my evidence comes from "Christian" sources - so it can't be reliable - they are already bias!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Again, you are basically insulting the thousands of Christian scientists who believe in and work on evolution. The problem with those articles is not who wrote them, but that they don't make very good arguments, don't provide reliable evidence, and they aren't even from actual scientists who've published these claims within their own field. Robert V. Gentry, for instance, from whom the po-ho stuff is taken from, isn't a geologist: he's a physicist, and as such his work is incredibly sloppy (so sloppy that geologists can't even figure out how he drew his samples). Your last link, laughably, in addition to outright lies about there not being evidence for this or that, contains some claims that even most YECreationists have called for their own movement to stop using because they are so laughably, embarrassingly wrong. For some reason, this stuff never dies. I'm surprised you didn't drag out the old "moon dust" trope.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->And so the world keeps turning - there is nothing new under the sun. Science strives to preserve its own, while ignoring anything to the contrary.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Scientists have dealt with all these sorts claims constantly, over and over. They aren't some renegade knowledge being surpressed by the orthodoxy: they're junk science that has not withstood scientific scrutiny. They haven't been ignored: they've been roundly debunked, often without any further response at all from people who made them up other than to keep repeating the same debunked claims, sell books about them off the internet, and make a fat buck.
And before you launch your defensive claims of bias again, let me just note in conclusion that science is <i>extremely</i> broad in terms of the diversity of beliefs of acredited scientists working and publishing in their fields. There are biologists who are Hindus, who are Muslims, who are Catholics, who are Mormons, who are Protestants, who are non-believers, who are baseball enthusiasts. You speak of bias, and the fact is, it wouldn't work without a vast conspiracy involving thousands of people most of whom in real life often dislike each other, rarely share the same religious beliefs, and would love to prove some grand new theory and become famous and knock down each other's arguments. But as scientists, they also play by the rules of evidence: if some claim doesn't hold up in the face of the evidence, they admit it and move on. Plate tectonics held up. Evolution held up. Polonium halos didn't. The research on magnetism that undergirds the claim about the magnetic field decaying "too fast" didn't hold up: and that was 30 years ago! Are individual scientists biased? Sure. But because of the self-correcting nature of science, because of the fact that it demands common evidence available to all, it is a social endeavor that helps correct any bias.
You can of course deny that. It's in your interest to just casually dismiss it. But then, anyone can make such a argumentless dismissal. There's no power to doing so, other than to make yourself feel better.
First of all, I conceed - I don't know a whole heck of a lot about Abiogenesis - but I am reading - and all things considered, it still doesn't seem very probable. Not only that, but it begs the question "why isn't it happening today?"
Second, you seemed to insinuate that because I googled a few articles means that I know nothing on the subject of evolution, nor did I hand pick those articles which I presented to you. My good sir, that could not be farther from the truth. You show me much dishonor by swipeing them aside "because I probably didn't read them myself" (which I did). - So I get called lazy.
I'll give you another link - if you want on <a href='http://www.trueorigin.org/abio.asp' target='_blank'>Why Abiogenesis is Impossible</a>
but to cut and paste some reasons for you:
Scientists have yet to discover a single molecule that has “learned to make copies of itself” (Simpson, 1999, p. 26). Many scientists seem to be oblivious of this fact because
Articles appearing regularly in scientific journals claim to have generated self-replicating peptides or RNA strands, but they fail to provide a natural source for their compounds or an explanation for what fuels them... this top-down approach... [is like] a caveman coming across a modern car and trying to figure out how to make it. “It would be like taking the engine out of the car, starting it up, and trying to see how that engine works” (Simpson, 1999, p.26).
Many highly complex animals appear very early in the fossil record and many “simple” animals thrive today. The earliest fossils known, which are believed to be those of cyanobacteria, are quite similar structurally and biochemically to bacteria living today. Yet it is claimed they thrived almost as soon as earth formed (Schopf, 1993; Galtier et al., 1999). Estimated at 3.5 billion years old, these earliest known forms of life are incredibly complex. Furthermore, remarkably diverse types of animals existed very early in earth history and no less than eleven different species have been found so far. A concern Corliss raises is “why after such rapid diversification did these microorganisms remain essentially unchanged for the next 3.465 billion years? Such stasis, common in biology, is puzzling” (1993, p. 2). E. coli, as far as we can tell, is the same today as in the fossil record.
and one last problem to end this post with:
Based on a geochemical assessment, Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen (1984 p. 66) concluded that in the atmosphere the “many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical evolution rates would have been negligible” in the various water basins on the primitive earth. They concluded that the “soup” would have been far too diluted for direct polymerization to occur. Even local ponds where some concentrating of soup ingredients may have occurred would have met with the same problem.
Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic soup, even a small organic pond, ever existed on this planet. It is becoming clear that however life began on earth, the usually conceived notion that life emerged from an oceanic soup of organic chemicals is a most implausible hypothesis. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario “the myth of the prebiotic soup” (Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen, 1984, p. 66).
so there you have it - hopefully this will be worth your time and energy reading, and I look forward to your rebuttal.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->First of all, I conceed - I don't know a whole heck of a lot about Abiogenesis - but I am reading - and all things considered, it still doesn't seem very probable. Not only that, but it begs the question "why isn't it happening today?"<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The answer to the first of my questions actually is all about that.
Oxygen, while it may be vital to our lives now, is extremely destructive to simple carbon-based chemistry. Our atmosphere currently has a high level of oxygen: enough to, at normal temperatures, "burn" up carbon compounds. We are more familiar with this "burning" as the decay of organic matter, but it's essentially the same as what happens in a fire: CO2 is released, oxygen is consumed, and the carbon-organic material is broken down. Any simple organic carbon compounds that formed today would oxidize to death because they have no protection from the harsh chemical effects oxygen. Some of the simplest lifeforms around today are still "allergic" to oxygen in this way, but they have at least some degree of protection that even simpler life would lack. So abiogenesis probably could not happen in Earth's current environment. (Of course, there is also the even bigger problem of all the bacteria around today in virtually every place we look: they would almost certainly quickly consume and thus destroy any simpler organic lifeforms that arose).
In the conditions of the early earth, however, free oxygen was a rarity. That's why the fact that the early earth had a chemically reductive environment around the time when life first appeared is so important: this is precisely the sort of chemical environment such a process would require!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Second, you seemed to insinuate that because I googled a few articles means that I know nothing on the subject of evolution, nor did I hand pick those articles which I presented to you. My good sir, that could not be farther from the truth. You show me much dishonor by swipeing them aside "because I probably didn't read them myself" (which I did). - So I get called lazy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Actually, the lazy part was in basically trying to have the articles do your work for you, which is akin to blowing me off. If I wanted to read articles, I could go read them: I don't need you to point this stuff out to me. I've read it a zillion times before, and I know where to find all of it. And almost every last claim is already pre-refuted on talk-origins and other such debunking database websites. The purpose of messageboards is to actually discuss the concepts in our own words.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Scientists have yet to discover a single molecule that has “learned to make copies of itself” (Simpson, 1999, p. 26). Many scientists seem to be oblivious of this fact because<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This article seems deeply confused. It's title is "abiogenesis is impossible" yet all it talks about is how scientists have yet to hit upon the exact mechanisms. Well, of course they haven't. But what does that have to do with proving it _impossible_, or even implausible?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The earliest fossils known, which are believed to be those of cyanobacteria, are quite similar structurally and biochemically to bacteria living today. Yet it is claimed they thrived almost as soon as earth formed (Schopf, 1993; Galtier et al., 1999). Estimated at 3.5 billion years old, these earliest known forms of life are incredibly complex.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Again, this is highly confused. We don't really know what the bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago were "structurally" like other than they they were single celled. Indeed, at 3.5 billion years, all we have are highly speculative <i>hints</i> that life may have already been on the planet. Single cells really don't fossilize. This article is falsely claiming that we somehow can know what early bacteria were like, and that they are virtually the same to modern bacteria. But we don't know that, and everything we DO know about the diversity of single-celled prokaryotes found today suggests that they have changed quite a LOT in several billion years, diversifying immensely.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Furthermore, remarkably diverse types of animals existed very early in earth history and no less than eleven different species have been found so far. A concern Corliss raises is “why after such rapid diversification did these microorganisms remain essentially unchanged for the next 3.465 billion years? Such stasis, common in biology, is puzzling”<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't understand the issue here at all. It's common... and therefore... puzzling? What? I highly suspect the author of this piece of quote mining, as he is definately guilty of later in the essay. For instance, he quotes Dawkins and Denton (both strong proponents of the idea that abiogenesis is not only plausible, but even inevitable) out of context, leaving out entirely the parts where they go on to discuss why these events are to as improbable as they seem because of specific mechanisms and conditions that would catalyze the event. This sort of tactic is very common in creationist literature, and highly dishonest.
The most famous example are people who quote Darwin saying "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus for different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." They then end the quote and claim that even Darwin had to "admit" that his theory could not explain things as wonderous as the eye. Why is this so dishonest? Because in that passage, Darwin was making a "Perils of Pauline" concession: trying to empathize with people's incredulity that his mechanism of natural selection could explain the eye. It was a rhetorical device that, quoted out of context, makes it sound like Darwin is admitting defeat. But what IS the context? Well, after making that concession, Darwin then goes on to explain why that common wisdom and natural incredulity is, in fact, mistaken, because he can in fact describe in detail how such a seemingly complex structure could have arisen through minor variation, and he then proceeds to do so.
Anyway, as to why bacteria remain unchanged: when organisms are very well suited to their environments, and when environments are very similar they don't tend to diversify as much. This is no strange thing. Bacteria are indeed extremely well suited for their particular lifestyle: so well suited, in fact, that they remain the dominant lifeform on this planet to this day! (in biomass and number of individuals and coverage, and so on) While lots of other lifeforms have adapted their way into new lifestyles, the basic niche occupied by bacteria is a fertile one.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->E. coli, as far as we can tell, is the same today as in the fossil record.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Again, this is extremely misleading, bordering on lying. What we have in the "fossil record" on early bacterial-type life is nowhere near enough to compare to modern bacteria. The best we have are imprints of what MIGHT be basic cell structures: not anything clear enough to compare to modern life and declare them identical, or even declare them to be E. coli! But the way the authors place this in the article it sounds like E. Coli wouldn't have changed for 3.5 billlion years. And this misleading claim is made even more bizarre by the fact that the authors later say in the SAME ARTICLE that there is no real fossil record to go on before 600mya. Which is true, but then how can they get off with implying that "we" know that modern bacteria is "exactly" like ancient bacteria?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Based on a geochemical assessment, Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen (1984 p. 66) concluded that in the atmosphere the “many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical evolution rates would have been negligible” in the various water basins on the primitive earth.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Again, this is another very common tactic. This particular study is part of what's common in science: debate. In this case, Thaxton et al concluded one thing about the early earth at one point... but then were proven wrong in many respects. And indeed that was a long time ago. But this outdated and swamped-out research is cherry-picked out of the distant past because it says what the authors of the article want it to say. No mention is made of the hundreds of other papers coming to different conclusions, or of the modifications that Thaxton et al. made to their own conclusions. Creationists often pull the same trick with the moon dust argument I referenced earlier: picking and dicussing only a single set of measurements from almost 30 years ago as to dust accumulation on the moon, they conclude that there is not enough of it for the moon to have existed as long as it supposedly has. But this single measurement was shown over and over again in later and much more sophisticated measurements to be in error. Why is that never mentioned?
It also gives the false sense that all the different abiogenesis hypothesises being proposed are spurred on by the failure of one after the other. But in fact, the main problem in abiogenesis right now is not that all the main ideas have been ruled out, but that there are too MANY different possibilities, and we aren't sure which one is the most promising to pursue.
The paper is flawed in the most basic sense because it discusses DNA. But no one thinks that abiogenesis produced DNA right off the bat: they suspect instead that it produced a much simpler form of RNA, which in addition to being far simpler also has the special property of being able to weakly mimic some functions of proteins (which is important for theories abou self-catalysis).
Note also how they carefully couch their discussion of the smallest known forms of life as "the smallest known <i>nonparasitic</i> life." As I noted earlier, "life" is a pretty flimsy term, because it's not really what we're interested in. We might or might not consider viruses to be "alive" (viruses are basically just RNA (which is itself just a chain of amino acids) with a chemical raincoat) but that is irrelevant to whether they can self-replicate, which is all we really care about.
Now, as they state, viruses that we know today are generally found in a "parasitic" lifestyle, in some cases living in bacteria and exploiting them in order to reproduce. But that doesn't mean that's the only way they CAN function, and indeed, plenty of experiments (most famously "Speigelman's monster" which I referenced) have shown that the raw RNA from a bacteriophage and its single enzyme can function just fine outside the environment of a bacteria's body as long as the basic components of organic chemistry are around (which is what the "soup" is all about). In fact, just the enzyme itself without any of the RNA is enough to re-create the RNA of Speigelman's monster. While this isn't in itself a demonstration of abiogenesis at work, the point is that the simplest replicators and evolvers we know of (so far!) are FAR FAR less complicated than giant things like E. coli.
And notice how the authors of this paper essentially TRICKED the reader into overlooking that whole line of inquiry with the "non-parasitic" hedge word and briefly dismissing (wrongly) the ability of virus-like replicators to function without a bacterial host. They also claim "millions" of atomic parts... but these are for the bacteria, not the viruses. Speigelman's self-replicating "monster" has less than a thousand letters in its sequence, and the enzyme that can generate it has even less than that, and there are no real "atomic parts" to speak of at all: just the RNA replicating and the enzyme. So are these authors really trying to inform, or are they trying to spin the truth? I think this example says everything one might need to hear on that score.
That's all I have time to run through at the moment. But I want to renew my appeal that we not just trade articles, or you just keep pumping out article after article for me to have to refute at length. If you have doubts, express them in your own words. Explain why YOU don't understand how evolution can do what it claims to do (and let's work on evolution before getting back to abiogenesis, since it's more directly on topic).
I think its a lie. Created by religious people trying to make out one of the greatest minds ever was a fraud. Its a last desperate by Christian zealots, trying to convince the masses once again there is a god. I think its disgusting that they should use this great man as a religious tool. Trying to harm the man who has caused there religion so much damage.
Yes I am an atheist and can argue in a rather amusing sarcastic way. So don’t get me started on any afterlife god hogwash.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->There are thousands of missing links with no fossil records - yet apparently they all happened!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Ok a little gem of knowledge here. The chances of an animal becoming a fossil in the first place is remote. Depending on the climate it may not happen at all. Its by pure chance that fossils are formed. Its by even rare luck that we find fossils. So the chances of finding a particular species to suit the ravenous creationist critics can be hard! Second fact we have only been digging for fossils over the last 170 odd years, not everything has been found yet. I agree there are thousand of "transitional species" that haven’t been found yet. But believe me we haven’t yet found 1% of all extinct species yet! In time those species will be found. Already we have found hundreds of transitional species. We have already shown through transitional species how scales evolved into feathers. Monkeys into humans. The list goes on. I suggest you do research before saying "you haven’t found everything yet, therefore your incorrect". Which is basically what your saying and to be honest that sounds stupid!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I agree there are thousand of "transitional species" that haven’t been found yet. But believe me we haven’t yet found 1% of all extinct species yet!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's important to note that this clamor for "transitional" species is itself a gross misunderstanding of evolution. In reality, there are no "transitional" species. Or, alternatively, EVERY species is transitional. That's because every creature back downwards on the tree of life is its own particular success story, not a depot on the way to somewhere else. These particular creatures are only "transitional" in hindsight. In reality, evolution has no foresight: a lizard with feathers is not "on its way" to becoming a bird. It is simply a lizard with feathers. It's offspring may or may not eventually evolve into birds, but if they do that is because the environment suits such a path, not because it was an inevtiable or intended direction.
All modern living life is simply a single sample in time, not the endpoint of evolution. It too is as much "transitional" as any living thing that lived prior.
I just thought I'd add: I did some research into who this "Jerry Bergman, Ph.D." person is. His "PhD" degree (in "human biology"(<!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/confused-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->)), the only one directly relevant to this subject matter, comes from a long-distance learning school that has since been shut down: <a href='http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/News/cpu.html' target='_blank'>http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/News/cpu.html</a>
He has never pulished anything in any mainstream peer reviewed journal relevant to biology or molecular biology. In short, treating him and his work as if it were the peer-checked insight of an expert in the field he's talking about would be a bad idea. While not directly relevant to the need to address his arguments, his credentials are highly dubious, as is his knowledge of the relevant fields.
I also wanted to post this graphic from talk.origins: <a href='http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/views.gif' target='_blank'>http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/views.gif</a>
It basically sums up the apparent disconnect between the sort of things that molecular biologists and chemists discuss and the things that creationists envision. If you don't know what a hypercycle or a protobiont is, then that's exactly the point: most creationist literature that tries to deal with the subject of abiogenesis is either woefully uninformed about the field it is attacking, or at best skims through some of the relevant scientific literature and pulls out a bunch of random cites that dicuss the problems that scientists are always discussing with each other... without including the context that these very same scientists are in fact working right then and there on figuring those problems out (that's what science DOES after all!)
<!--QuoteBegin-The Fluffy Duck+Jan 25 2005, 05:09 AM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (The Fluffy Duck @ Jan 25 2005, 05:09 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> <!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->There are thousands of missing links with no fossil records - yet apparently they all happened!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Ok a little gem of knowledge here. The chances of an animal becoming a fossil in the first place is remote. Depending on the climate it may not happen at all. Its by pure chance that fossils are formed. Its by even rare luck that we find fossils. So the chances of finding a particular species to suit the ravenous creationist critics can be hard! Second fact we have only been digging for fossils over the last 170 odd years, not everything has been found yet. I agree there are thousand of "transitional species" that haven’t been found yet. But believe me we haven’t yet found 1% of all extinct species yet! In time those species will be found. Already we have found hundreds of transitional species. We have already shown through transitional species how scales evolved into feathers. Monkeys into humans. The list goes on. I suggest you do research before saying "you haven’t found everything yet, therefore your incorrect". Which is basically what your saying and to be honest that sounds stupid! <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd--> To get a little perspective on how "difficult" it is to form a fossil, if all the people in the United States were to die right now, statistically speaking one person's skeleton would be preserved as a fossil. Then, of course, there's the chance that that one fossil is destroyed by the elements, rocks moving, etc. <u>Then</u>, of course, someone would have to come along at the right time to see it poking up out of the ground. Given all this, it's not surprising we have found so few fossils relatively speaking. <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->
here is a short fascinating article on fossils, which begs the question "if fossils are so hard to create, why do we have these?":
Now, I understand, burying someone (or thing) 6 feet under is not condusive to fossil creation - neither is dying and having your body exposed to the elements. How then could these be formed? Perhaps a giant catastrophy? Perhaps a catastrophy large enough to form all the various layers these fossils are present in? Hmm, makes one think...
FOSSIL GRAVEYARDS Perhaps the most challenging fossil phenomena for Darwinian apologists to explain are the vast graveyards of animal remains that are found throughout the world. Ongoing excavations in the Gobi Desert tell of one such sight that has become an embarrassment to evolutionists. Twenty-five therapod dinosaurs have been discovered along with 200 skulls of mammals. There is no evidence of the several million year evolutionary gap or of the iridium boundary that is thought to delineate when the dinosaurs became extinct. "The Gobi Desert of Central Asia is one of the earth’s desolate places. Yet the Gobi is a paradise for paleontologists. ...Our expeditions, jointly sponsored by the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and the American Museum of Natural History, have excavated dinosaurs, lizards and small mammals in an unprecedented state of preservation. Freshly exposed skeletons sometimes look more like the recent remains of a carcass than like an 80-million-year-old fossil. In yet another ironic twist, the rocks of the Gobi appear to be missing precisely those strata that currently hold the greatest public interest: no sections found thus far include the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary, when the dinosaurs became extinct. Whatever cataclysm wiped out the dinosaurs (and many other species then on the earth), its mark on Central Asia seems to have been erased." (Novacek, Michael J., Mark Norell, Malcolm C. McKenna, and James Clark, "Fossils of the Flaming Cliffs," Scientific American, vol. 271, 1994, pp. 60-69, as cited in Morris, 1997.)
Nor is the Gobi unique. Joe Taylor is perhaps the world’s premiere creator of fossil casts for museums and universities. In his fascinating book, Fossils, Facts, and Fantasies, he analyzes several of these sites around the world. In the United States one finds a profusion of skeletons in a hillside dinosaur graveyard in New Mexico, in the famous Bone Cabin Quarry of Wyoming, and at other sites. In Alberta, Canada there is a huge graveyard that stretches for many miles and holds innumerable dinosaurs bones. In Agate Springs, Nebraska a fossil graveyard of around 9,000 animals was found buried in alluvial deposits. The remains of hundreds of rhinos, three-toed horses, camels, giant wild boars, birds, plants, trees, sea shells and fish are mixed and intermingled in great confusion. In Tanzania, Belgium and Mongolia similar massive catastrophes captured vast populations and trapped them in a fossil graveyard of sediments and debris.
One of the most fascinating fossil graveyard of all is located in the southern United States. The Ashley Beds is an enormous phosphate graveyard that contains mixed remains of man with land and sea animals, notably dinosaurs, pleisosaurs, whales, sharks, rhinos, horses, mastodons, mammoths, porpoises, elephants, deer, pigs, dogs, and sheep. This catalogue of fossils from the phosphate beds was given in the records of Major Edward Willis who displayed them at multiple expositions (Willis, "Fossils and Phosphate Specimens," 1881.) Professor F.S. Holmes (paleontologist and curator of the College of Charleston’s Natural History Museum) described the fossil graveyard in a report to the Academy of Natural Sciences: "Remains of the hog, the horse and other animals of recent date, together with human bones mingled with the bones of the mastodon and extinct gigantic lizards." There can be little doubt what extinct gigantic lizard he referenced for he pictured a hadrosaurus on the front of his 1870 book The Phosphate Rocks of South Carolina and captioned it: "Skeleton of a Fossil Lizard eighteen feet in Length." Moreover, on page 31 he wrote, "It was in this Post-Pleiocene age, the period when the American Elephant, or Mammoth, the Mastodon, Rhinoceros, Megathereum, Hadrosaurus, and other gigantic quadrupeds roamed the Carolina forests, and repaired periodically to these Salt-lakes"... (p. 31.) The mixing of these remains was pell-mell throughout the roughly 40 square mile area of this deposit around Charleston, South Carolina. By one estimate, bones made up 65% of the extraordinary phosphate deposits in the region of the Ashley River basin before it was largely mined out. (Keener, J.C., The Garden of Eden and the Flood, 1901, p. 244.) Evolutionists have cast about trying to propose a credible mechanism for mixing creatures from Cretaceous to Holocene in this stratum, but none has been satisfactory and the matter has been expunged from current references to this site. (Watson, John Allen, Man, Dinosaurs, and Mammals Together, 2001, p. 7.)
I ask you again: if you are serious about this, please make actual arguments instead of just posting creationist articles. I'm not going to continue arguing with your ability to copy and paste. I spent roughly and hour writing out my last post, and as a response you said precisely nothing: nothing at all to ANY of the arguments I've presented in this thread. Instead, you just hit me up with another article and ANOTHER new subject to discuss. I've already indulged you enough already. This is the last time. Either address some of the past arguments in your own words, or I'm not wasting any more time on this.
Fossil formation is indeed very rare, though there are indeed some known places where sudden catastrophic events (like volcano ash, the way it worked in Pompei) can lay down many fossils in a single area. Again, mentioning one or two of these few locatins we are aware of IN THE ENTIRE WORLD is not good cause to lean back and say "ha, it seems fossil formation isn't so rare after all!" But unfortunately, these catastrophic events don't have any of the evidence of a worldwide flood, as you are implying.
But this was a tipoff as to where your latest copy/paste comes from: it seems to have been taken from the website of Genesis Park, which appears to be a Kent Hovind/Henry Morris (of the ICR)-type project. <a href='http://www.genesispark.org/genpark/home.htm' target='_blank'>http://www.genesispark.org/genpark/home.htm</a> Hovind, Morris and the ICR are considered to be joke, even amongst creationists. They quote-mine ridiculously (completely out of context quotes), try to pass off ancient and long-ago refuted work as a authoritative, and even just outright lie. Morris believes that all the fossils and major sediment layers come from a worldwide flood: an idea so preposterous, so belied by geological evidence, that it simply defies words. All three of the paragraphs here basically try to support versions of that claim.
All three also seem to be missing out on some basic information about geology, such as the fact that finding a complete geologic column is rare (though there are 25 locations in the world) because sediment layers are not laid down everywhere all the time on the planet. It's not surprising that a site like the Gobi might be missing the K/T boundary: sediment might well have been eroding away at that time in that particular place rather than being added. Again, the article tries to make this sound outrageous and telling, but it's just not. The reason the quote says it's "ironic" is simply because for such a trove of exciting dinosaur era fossils, it's unfortunate that it doesn't include the layer during their extinction, which was in hot demand at the time. "Freshly exposed skeletons sometimes look more like the recent remains of a carcass than like an 80-million-year-old fossil." doesn't mean that the fossils are litterally decaying fleshy bodies, just a hyperbolus way of saying that the quality (fidelity) and the completeness of the fossils is very high.
The second paragraph is the same thing: trying to write about fairly prosiac information as if they posed some surprising or deep threat to modern geology or evolution.
In the latter paragraph, I've never even heard of some of these things, but considering that the primary sources cited came from things that were published in the 19th century (!!!), it looks pretty obvious that they were stretching to find SOMETHING to support their claims. Yet they can't find any sources post-1901 (before modern geology was even invented!) to back up their claims about fossils in a disjointed geological strata. In this case, I'm guessing that "none has been satisfactory" means "scientists figured out the apparent discrepancy like, 70 years ago, but we're not going to mention that, and just claim that they haven't."
In short, flood geology is just batty. To explain a worldwide flood, creationists would have to overcome the fact that the "flood" somehow sorted the fossils into discrete layers in which only certain kinds of animals are found in each layer, and not by weight/density as they would have been if the layers were all put down in a flood. And, of course, there is the problem that the layers simply CANNOT have been laid down all at once anyway. Even if you refuse to acknowledge the reality of radioactive dating, there are tons of other methods that can verify this. I present two of them in my longer essays that I linked to in my first few posts.
Now: do you plan on ever getting around to address the basic arguments I made? Can you explain to me in your own words why you find evolution to be so implausible, common descent not true, the age of the earth not true? Either we get into an actual discussion here, or I'm going to stop jumping through these pointless hoops.
I dub Apos the Marine01 of geological/biological arguments. <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Now: do you plan on ever getting around to address the basic arguments I made? Can you explain to me in your own words why you find evolution to be so implausible, common descent not true, the age of the earth not true? Either we get into an actual discussion here, or I'm going to stop jumping through these pointless hoops. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
first of all, I find it implausable because of the absolute miniscuile chances involved.
It violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics - at its core, evolution must always violate this law. It is the "origin of life" equivalant to falling up hill.
Genetic mutation has never been observed to improve, modify or make an organism more complex.
here is a small cut/paste from nature: Turtles have been turtles for two hundred and fifty million years. Turtles have an incredible skeleton. They live inside boxes and their limb girdles are inside the rib cage. That should mean millions of years of evolving. We should find millions of quarter turtles then half turtles and so on... We don't! The very first turtles were perfect turtles. There is not one fossil of any transitional or pre-turtle.
There are various mountains around the world, Matterhorn and Mythen Peak to name 2, where the fossil records are upside down. In fact, these sort of mountains appear on all the major continents. Explain upside down when there are millions of years involved. - the best evolutionists can come up with is that these mountains traversed cross country - mysteriously. Matterhorn apparently traveled for 30-60 miles.
Tree trunks that pass through multipal strata - evidence of either 100million year old trees, or some sort of catastrophy.
A relatively shallow mississippi river delta dates that river ~5-10 thousand years old.
Instances where using radioactive dating to discover that the higher strata are older than the lower strata.
decay of the earths magnetic field belies an earth billions of years old. Evolutionary theories to compensate for this are cubersome at best.
comet desintegration - if the galaxy was billions of years old, all the comets would be gone.
Saturns rings are unstable - they should have stableized in about 1 million years - yet they still haven't, suggesting a younger galaxy.
The fact that our galaxy hasn't rotated in on itself yet - the inner parts of a galaxy rotate faster, causing the outer portions to "fall inward" - yet we are still far enough out to be on one of the very first rotations of our own galaxy (if not the first)
So, there you have it - multiple reasons for a young earth, nay a young solar system and a young galaxy - and all in my own words!!
<!--QuoteBegin-Pepe Muffassa+Jan 25 2005, 07:23 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Pepe Muffassa @ Jan 25 2005, 07:23 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> first of all, I find it implausable because of the absolute miniscuile chances involved. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> You do realize how large a timescale we're talking here? Like <u>nothing</u> that can be reproduced in a lab. Miniscule chances have a tendency of working out over long periods of time.
Also, consider how unlikely this universe as we know it is. How in the world do we exist here? How do we overcome these enormous odds? Answer: infinite universes, which if you read up on your physics is an increasingly likely possibility. Eventually the odds evened out, and we exist in the one universe where all these physical laws as we know them panned out.
Same thing for evolution: eventually, given enough time and enough planets, life as we know it spawned on one of them. It'd be a statistical impossiblity if life <u>didn't</u> form this way.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->It violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics - at its core, evolution must always violate this law. It is the "origin of life" equivalant to falling up hill.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> There are always exceptions to laws, especially when you try to apply laws relating to chemical interactions to the infinitely more complex entity that is life. Newton's Laws of Gravitation have been proven to only apply in a limited spectra of speeds and sizes; why can't the Law of Thermodynamics have exceptions as well?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Genetic mutation has never been observed to improve, modify or make an organism more complex.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> You're kidding right? Bacteria mutating randomly, forming genes that produce resistance to standard pennicilin, you've never heard of that?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->here is a small cut/paste from nature: Turtles have been turtles for two hundred and fifty million years. Turtles have an incredible skeleton. They live inside boxes and their limb girdles are inside the rib cage. That should mean millions of years of evolving. We should find millions of quarter turtles then half turtles and so on... We don't! The very first turtles were perfect turtles. There is not one fossil of any transitional or pre-turtle. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> Did you just ignore the whole, "The fossil record is incomplete" thing we just talked about?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->There are various mountains around the world, Matterhorn and Mythen Peak to name 2, where the fossil records are upside down. In fact, these sort of mountains appear on all the major continents. Explain upside down when there are millions of years involved. - the best evolutionists can come up with is that these mountains traversed cross country - mysteriously. Matterhorn apparently traveled for 30-60 miles.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> Well, when you look at how unstable the Earth and its tectonic plates are, it's not surprising that mountains "traveled"; actually, it was the plates underneath them that were moving. Heck, the mountains are created at the faults between two tectonic plates, is this motion and turbulence in the fossil record really that surprising?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Tree trunks that pass through multipal strata - evidence of either 100million year old trees, or some sort of catastrophy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> What, the only catastrophes in history was Noah's Flood? Of course there are random disturbances in the general pattern; Earth changes too quickly for everything to be uniform.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->A relatively shallow mississippi river delta dates that river ~5-10 thousand years old.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> What's your point? That entire region of the Americas was an inland sea at one point, it only dried out in recent history (geologically speaking). It's not surprising that the Mississippi is a "new" river. If you expect ALL rivers to date back to the dawn of time, you seriously need to brush up on your geology.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Instances where using radioactive dating to discover that the higher strata are older than the lower strata.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> Once again, <u>instances</u>! We're looking at the overwhelming majority of the time! Nothing is constant on this planet, especially the planet itself. Rocks are moved, mountains are formed, hills are leveled, seas are drained, etc etc etc. But the fact that, through all this turmoil, certain things prove true the vast majority of the time leads to the inevitable conclusion that those things represent the truth.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->decay of the earths magnetic field belies an earth billions of years old. Evolutionary theories to compensate for this are cubersome at best.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> 1) Evolutionary theories I've studied actually rely on the Earth being billions of years old; it's calculations that the earth is only a few million years old that throws off the evolution theory. 2)The earth's magnetic field has been reversing polarity ever since the earth was formed, and there is geological evidence to support this. If the earth's magnetic field is truly "decaying", then humanity is about to suffer the misfortune of one of these changing periods.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->comet desintegration - if the galaxy was billions of years old, all the comets would be gone.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> H'what? You think the comets would all be clumped together and attatched to planets because of gravity? If gravity were that strong, the moon be about to crash into the Earth. If I'm not mistaken, the moon is actually getting farther away from Earth....
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Saturns rings are unstable - they should have stableized in about 1 million years - yet they still haven't, suggesting a younger galaxy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> "Should have"? According to who? What basis of comparison do you have for this? Also, what does the formation of Saturn's rings have to do with Earth's formation? They weren't necessarily at the same time.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The fact that our galaxy hasn't rotated in on itself yet - the inner parts of a galaxy rotate faster, causing the outer portions to "fall inward" - yet we are still far enough out to be on one of the very first rotations of our own galaxy (if not the first)<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> Tell ya what, if you can explain the exact mechanics behind the monster of a black hole at the center of our galaxy, and what its effect is on how this galaxy spins, then someone might have a chance at answering that. As it stands, we don't have a good enough knowledge of astrophysics to concretely explain this. But then again, you don't have any proof that we should be spiraling inwards anyway. For all you know, I could claim, "Due to the strange effects of black holes and dark matter, our solar system should be dancing across the galaxy like a super ball," and you couldn't really disprove me. That's how little you know.
Now, professional astrophysicists could debunk my claim. But they also could debunk yours. End result: a nullified argument.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->So, there you have it - multiple reasons for a young earth, nay a young solar system and a young galaxy - and all in my own words!!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> These are simplistic explanations that an unresearched high school student came up with off the top of his head. I'm sure there are even more clever ways of shooting your arguments down, but the fact that <i>I</i> can take a good crack at it is telling indeed.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->first of all, I find it implausable because of the absolute miniscuile chances involved. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't understand. How do you calculate the "chances" when you don't even understand the process? That's like saying that you can judge the chances of rolling a "64" with 6 dice without even knowing what pips the dice have on them, or how many sides they have.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->It violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics - at its core, evolution must always violate this law. It is the "origin of life" equivalant to falling up hill.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No, it doesn't (and indeed, this is another of the creationist arguments that even most creationists have given up using since it's so embarrasingly wrong). The 2nd law does not preclude or prevent chemical reactions!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Genetic mutation has never been observed to improve, modify or make an organism more complex.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Wrong, though misleading as well (since it is selection among variations that technically does the improving/modifying/complexifying, not single mutations directly)
As I explain in this post: <a href='http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showpost.php?p=1199441&postcount=66' target='_blank'>http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showpost.p...41&postcount=66</a> our experience with dogs demonstrates in a direct way that mutation HAS to have increased variation within populations, or else there would have been no differences for our breefing (artificial selection) to work on. But that's evne silly to bring up, because the point has been demonstrated bajillions of times by running things like fruit flies or mice through evolutionary filters. They adapt, they change, and these changes are the result of mutations because they are the result of variations. We've observed speciation in both the lab and in the wild.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Turtles have been turtles for two hundred and fifty million years. Turtles have an incredible skeleton. They live inside boxes and their limb girdles are inside the rib cage. That should mean millions of years of evolving. We should find millions of quarter turtles then half turtles and so on... We don't! The very first turtles were perfect turtles. There is not one fossil of any transitional or pre-turtle. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If that is a cite, where is the citation? Regardless, this is nonsense. I won't go over the problem with the idea that any one species is "transitional" between anything else ("half-turtle!??!" what is this person smoking?!), but this link notes the many many different sorts of turtle species we find in the fossil record, with som clear patterns in their development over time. <a href='http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1b.html#rept2' target='_blank'>http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transi...rt1b.html#rept2</a>
As to why turtles haven't changed much (they HAVE changed: the fossil species simply aren't "exactly" the same as modern turtles), this is because evolution works via adaptation. If an animal is extremely well-suited to its environment already, then it is unlikely that the old form will be "given up upon." However, that doesn't preclude some species or groups within a species ALSO evolving further along other lines, it's just that we wouldn't recognize them as turtles any more, after a point. And the original line of turtles would still be there as well (evolution _doesn't_ predict that old species are eradicated by new ones: hence why there are still apes even though we AND modern apes both evolved from a common ancestor that was also technically an ape)
And that's a deeper point. Our very language that we use to describe living things is misleading. It divides animals into very gross categories that supposedly have hard, bright lines dividing one from another. That's a very Platonic way of thinking, and yet when it comes to the natural world, it's very unhelpful because nature is full of gradual transition rather than bright lines. So in a sense, creationists are setting people up when they claim that "turtles" never evolved from anything or to anything. That's because if they did, they wouldn't be called "turtles" anymore! But the fat is, evolution works by gradual steps. There is no generation where on thing becomes another: no point at which one species gives birth to a new species. Instead general names like "turtle" are assigned in HINDSIGHT, with the bias of only considering those animals alive today and then naming them. Animals of the past, however, are unlikely to fit, and do not fit, the categories we created in this era.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->There are various mountains around the world, Matterhorn and Mythen Peak to name 2, where the fossil records are upside down. In fact, these sort of mountains appear on all the major continents. Explain upside down when there are millions of years involved. - the best evolutionists can come up with is that these mountains traversed cross country - mysteriously. Matterhorn apparently traveled for 30-60 miles.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is almost embarrasing. "the best evolutionists can come up with" is called "basic geology" where I come from. Mountains rise and fall. Geologic strata twist and fold over on themselves, and so on. Our planet's surface is a dynamic one: as the recent horrible earthquake inspired tsunami aptly demonstrated.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Tree trunks that pass through multipal strata - evidence of either 100million year old trees, or some sort of catastrophy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
talk.origins has a page on this that's better than what I could write: <a href='http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/trees.html' target='_blank'>http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/trees.html</a>
In short though: even <i>creationist</i> geologists from <b>100 years ago</b> understood the phenomena that created polystrate tree fossils. Knowledge of even basic geology (that layers can be laid down at radically different speeds) rebuts this silly claim. I mean good grief: this isn't even a MODERN creationist claim. Duane Gish was making this argument back when he was popular 20 years ago, for goodness sakes!
Don't you think that, if polystrate trees REALLY proved that modern geology had it all wrong, that geologists would take it seriously? I mean, if it really means what you claim it does, it would be VERY obvious proof that geology has things totally wrong about the composition of layers and call for a total revolution within the field. Countless geologists would stand to make themselves famous and very rich by researching this breakthrough. But the reality is, polystrate trees fit in jsut fine with modern geology, and they have for more than a HUNDRED YEARS (before modern geological methods even existed).
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->A relatively shallow mississippi river delta dates that river ~5-10 thousand years old. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Never heard of this one: going to have to get a cite for it.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Instances where using radioactive dating to discover that the higher strata are older than the lower strata.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's not entirely clear what this means. See the bit about geology above if what you mean is that higher (physically in one location) strata are found to be older than lower (physically in one location) those below it. Strata are often folded over on themselves. If what you mean is that actual higher (as in, younger in the geological column) strata are dated older then lower (geologicaly) strata, then I'm going to have to see a cite for that claim to figure out what the specific situation is that you're refferring to. But then, I thought you didn't believe in radioactive dating anyway?!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->decay of the earths magnetic field belies an earth billions of years old. Evolutionary theories to compensate for this are cubersome at best.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What sort of refutation is that: YOU say that they are cumbersome? Do you even know what they are? It sounds like you are just quoting someone on this without knowing what they are talking about. In fact, I'm pretty sure you ARE just quoting it, because someone pulled this exact same one out on me recently.
Our magnetic field is not constant. In fact, NO magnetic field based on what's in our planet (the rotating core) is constant. Our field measurably waxes and wanes (it doesn't just "decay"), and even periodically (anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 years) reverses polarity (North becomes South). This isn't just a "theory": this is recorded right in igneous rocks where iron filiments are "pointed" towards magnetic north when the rock is cooling, and get frozen that way when its fully cool. This direction completely switches periodically, following the pole reversal. You can call it "cumbersome" if you want, but it's also the truth.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->comet desintegration - if the galaxy was billions of years old, all the comets would be gone.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Except not. The Oort Cloud and the Kupier belt (the part of the cloud that passes through the plane of our solar system) are where comet-like bodies reside near our solar system. This is where comets come from: periodically spit by gravity out of their distant orbits to spin around the largest mass in the area: the sun.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Saturns rings are unstable - they should have stableized in about 1 million years - yet they still haven't, suggesting a younger galaxy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
First of all, no: try 100 million years. Regardless, Saturn didn't always have its rings (they are basically gravitationally captured space debris), and its moon's gravitationally "shepard" the rings. When the rings formed around Saturn doesn't have anything to do with the age of anything anyway. Are you claiming that Saturn supposedly always had rings: even before the solar system formed?!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The fact that our galaxy hasn't rotated in on itself yet - the inner parts of a galaxy rotate faster, causing the outer portions to "fall inward" - yet we are still far enough out to be on one of the very first rotations of our own galaxy (if not the first)<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is particularly silly in that anyone with a computer can simulate galaxies and show that it's not true. This subject is really too complicated to get into at length (lots and lots of physics), but suffice to say that if it were so obvious, then you'd be able to cite even one acredited scientist who studies these sorts of things who thinks its true. The idea that the thousands of people that study and model these sorts of things are ALL part of some giant conspiracy to hold back information like this is just absurd.
I should also note that most of these arguments, if not all of them, and perhaps while written out by you, are virtually verbatim from Kent Hovind. Contrats on being decieved by one of the most dishonest of all creationists, Dr. Dino himself! (and many of these arguments are on Answers in Genesis' page of "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use") <a href='http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dont_use.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dont_use.asp</a>
You can, of course, keep throwing these claims at me if you want. But you could also stop and think "well, why do all these arguments I've heard turn out to be so bogus, so laughably silly in light of all the modern sciences, even those done by highly religious people who would have no reason to engage in any conspiracy to cover up the truth. Maybe while I'm not yet convinced of evolution or the age of the solar system or anything like that, I should also be a little more suspicious of the people who came up with all these bogus arguments too."
Let me reiterate: answer his post, not mine. Mine is the sad attempt of a self-declared unknowledgeable student of this topic. His is researched and backed. Which should you trust?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->So, there you have it - multiple reasons for a young earth, nay a young solar system and a young galaxy - and all in my own words!!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is why I hate religion it breads stupidity!
"Give a man a fish he will fead for a day. Give a man religion and he will starve to death while praying for a fish"
/me rolls up sleeve.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->It violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics - at its core, evolution must always violate this law. It is the "origin of life" equivalent to falling up hill.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
2nd law dictates the direction heat must travel and the quantity of energy that gets transferred. Evolution and this 2nd law collide? Hmm I guess if the man has been out in the hot sun all day and the wife sitting in a bathtub full of ice we may be able to calculate the thermal equilibrium of the two. Dude sprouting random physical laws without evidence makes you look stupid Mkay.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Genetic mutation has never been observed to improve, modify or make an organism more complex.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Wrong again. IT has been observed in the common house fly which can go through many generation in the space of a month. Much easier to observe than a mouse or human who’s life span are years not days. Now the experiment consisted of exposing the flies to certain physical and chemical harm. over a period of weeks those flies who’s genes gave them an advantage survived and those flies who couldn’t cope died. Therefore "natural selection" at work. Therefore random genetic mutation proved to give these flies an advantage. I will try and find the paper, I have it lying around the house somewhere.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Turtles have been turtles for two hundred and fifty million years. Turtles have an incredible skeleton. They live inside boxes and their limb girdles are inside the rib cage. That should mean millions of years of evolving. We should find millions of quarter turtles then half turtles and so on... We don't! The very first turtles were perfect turtles. There is not one fossil of any transitional or pre-turtle. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Wrong again. Your going well today aren’t you!! There has been one species that has been found to bridge the gap called Ecuatorianas . However unfortunately we haven’t found many more. So because one species hasn’t had "millions of fossils" found means everything is incorrect?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->here are various mountains around the world, Matterhorn and Mythen Peak to name 2, where the fossil records are upside down. In fact, these sort of mountains appear on all the major continents. Explain upside down when there are millions of years involved. - the best evolutionists can come up with is that these mountains traversed cross country - mysteriously. Matterhorn apparently traveled for 30-60 miles.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Let me introduce you to something called tectonic drift. Such a process along plate areas causes mountains. Because such process has that much pressure and every .Rock strata can be rotated a full 180 degrees. For more information on tectonic drift <a href='http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/vwlessons/plate_tectonics/introduction.html' target='_blank'>http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/vwless...troduction.html</a>
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Tree trunks that pass through multipal strata - evidence of either 100million year old trees, or some sort of catastrophy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
OK have you ever seen a cliff? a small incline hill. This is not uncommon to see a tree stretching over 2-3 sediment layers. After a landslide or some such event a tree may fall over. given that its on an angle when the sediment builds up again we can see the tree stretching over such a "long period" of time. Its something that geologist get taught every early on. Another explanation is where strata has become twisted and uplifted due to plate movement and continent compression. Its no miracle. Nothing fancy.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->A relatively shallow mississippi river delta dates that river ~5-10 thousand years old.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
To be honest I don’t know anything about the Mississippi delta. However if its like any other delta of river 5-10,000 years old seems about right. Being shallow is the sediment build up due to its age. Now your point being ? ITs shallow therefore the worlds as old as the Mississippi?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Instances where using radioactive dating to discover that the higher strata are older than the lower strata.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Hmm, See above when it comes to tectonic movement. Or another explanation is depending on the rock surrounding it is quite possible to have a more radioactive layer than the one bellow. this can throw off testing techniques. Even though your testing for a particular isotope its quite possible for it to become contraindicated by the surrounding rock.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->decay of the earths magnetic field belies an earth billions of years old. Evolutionary theories to compensate for this are cumbersome at best.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The church is an expert on astronomy now as well? the magnetic field is fading but it also regenerates itself from time to time. its just like a glacier. sometimes its in advance sometimes its retreating. It goes through these stages. go to the nasa website Im sure you will find heaps of information about it.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->comet desintegration - if the galaxy was billions of years old, all the comets would be gone.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
ROLF !!! New stars new planets new everything is being created as we speak. YES including comets! Comets can be trapped in a field of debris called the kuiper belt and also the Oort cloud. They are where all the rubble from our solar system exists. Many icy and rocky bodies exist out there. they collide from time to time and a new dormient icy Rockey body flies towards the centre of our solar system as it gets closer to the sun it begins to heat up and POW!!!! a new comet is born. Once again its by chance that two bodies collide out there. Or when a neighbouring star passes by , the shear gravity of that neighbouring solar system slingshots many huge meteorites and comets our way. Once again you prove didely squat !
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Saturns rings are unstable - they should have stableized in about 1 million years - yet they still haven't, suggesting a younger galaxy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Of course its rings are unstable!! dude you know how they were formed? They were formed by 2 or more moons colliding and disintegrating. IT wasn’t meant to have any rings but it does. All the dust is in a decaying orbit as it wasn’t launched by a man made fully calculated mission. . IT isn’t meant to re-stabilize. There isn’t some force going "those rings are meant to be there" . They just happened and its going to disperse. I have no idea why that suggest a young galaxy as that is happening inside a solar system, inside a planetary system! IT suggest FA to a young universe!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The fact that our galaxy hasn't rotated in on itself yet - the inner parts of a galaxy rotate faster, causing the outer portions to "fall inward" - yet we are still far enough out to be on one of the very first rotations of our own galaxy (if not the first)<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
OK this galaxy is a spiral galaxy agreed? well To begin with it didn’t have its lovely spiral shape. Our galaxy has become the size it is by cannibalizing other galaxies. infact we are predicted to swallow the small/large ( cant remember which) Mangellic clouds in the next 100 million odd years. This galaxy started off small and grew. Now we don’t fall "inward" as we are in an "orbit" that’s why we are on the outer arm. we are constantly falling over the horizon of the galaxy. It spins faster in the middle because of more mass. It is theorized that a black hole is at the centre of our galaxy because of the way it spins and how fast it is spinning. To say we are on our first rotation is bull dust . We are on the outer reaches for no particular reason. Space out here is less dense than in the middle that’s why we lag behind in the spinning savy?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->This is why I hate religion it breads stupidity! <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
How can that be true when many of the greatest scientists who ever lived were religious? Even Darwin was a Christian (though to be fair he became more of an agnostic later in life).
hmm, seems like I'm the vilage idiot around these parts - I mean, you must be a plate tectonics expert, and a microbiologist to figure all that out.
First of all, the treas I refered to as being multi-strata are well known. They came from certain coal mines. They are petrified. The remains don't have a root system, and for all intentes and purposes, they look as though they are plunged through millions of years of evolutionary history.
This raises doubt for me - the fact that these trees can even exist says that labeling strata with an age is not a good idea - especially when scientists go around the world and say "this is terassic, and this is - insert age - ", but in other parts of the world the layers are reversed.
Concerning the Oort Cloud - last time I checked, it too is still just a theory.
Concerning your fruit flies, you are talking about survivial of the fiittest, micro-evolutoinary stuff. Hey, thats all fine and dandy - But the net result was, those fruit flies are still fruit flies. In order for evolution to work, that fruit fly needs to Grow, or Evolve in such a way that it is no longer a fruit fly, and it needs to do it randomly without getting itself killed, and without the new trait being harmful to it. Macro-evolution - big picture - there is a distinct difference, and the second of those two can't happen. -feel free to show me a case where it has.
Second law of theromodynamics - yes it deals directly with energy and the transfer of heat - but it explains more than that. It explains why your cloths get worn, why things break, why people / animals / everything has to eat, why the sun burns out. To put it in its most basic terms, things go from a state of order to a state of disorder - naturally. Now apply that to evolution, if you will. Evolution insists that creatures get MORE complex over time - going from a state of disorder to order! Now, this is not a natural thing - which is why I compaired it to falling uphill.
In order to circumvent that rather large problem, evolutionists say "but in small instances - like on earth - that can change! We get our energy from the sun!" Great, thats all fine and dandy. That still doesn't mean that there is any driving factor to imbue this sunlight into making things more complex. So I bake a planet for a few eons - can I expect life? By that reasoning mercury should be overflowing with organics!
You atempted a refute of the earths magentic field decay, citing a "cyclical" nature of renewal. I suppose that you are referring to the polarity reversal that happens every so often. Now, I havent brought up the flood until now - at least not directly, but here is another great spot where it fits the evidence. Dont you think that massive crust upheaval could cause a polarity reversal? - infact several of them (think earth quake aftershock) - as sediments are being laid down world wide?
See, evolutionists <b>assume</b> renewal comes with the polarity reversal - because if it doesn't renew, then it doesn't fit their timeline. All we know is it changes direction - renewal is just another theory.
Just one more little question I have. How come recorded history is only ~ 10,000 years old? All of our records of "man" (bones, what have you) seem to indicate that ancient man was at least as smart as modern man. Don't you think that perhaps ancient man would look at the skin of the animal he just killed and think to write on it? - to at least paint a picture? I mean, these ancient guys have been around millions of years! - Some of them have to have stores to tell. - surely we would find more of them - heck they had millions of years to reproduce! On the contrary. I suggest that a shorter, much more recent stone age would fit the evidence we find. It would do well to explain the small numbers and the lack of stuff left behind.
Now I know at least one of you is a "Christian disliker" at best - but perhaps if you put some of that bias away, you might see were not all stupid fishless prayers.
<!--QuoteBegin-Pepe Muffassa+Jan 25 2005, 11:30 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Pepe Muffassa @ Jan 25 2005, 11:30 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> hmm, seems like I'm the vilage idiot around these parts - I mean, you must be a plate tectonics expert, and a microbiologist to figure all that out.
First of all, the treas I refered to as being multi-strata are well known. They came from certain coal mines. They are petrified. The remains don't have a root system, and for all intentes and purposes, they look as though they are plunged through millions of years of evolutionary history.
This raises doubt for me - the fact that these trees can even exist says that labeling strata with an age is not a good idea - especially when scientists go around the world and say "this is terassic, and this is - insert age - ", but in other parts of the world the layers are reversed.
Concerning the Oort Cloud - last time I checked, it too is still just a theory.
Concerning your fruit flies, you are talking about survivial of the fiittest, micro-evolutoinary stuff. Hey, thats all fine and dandy - But the net result was, those fruit flies are still fruit flies. In order for evolution to work, that fruit fly needs to Grow, or Evolve in such a way that it is no longer a fruit fly, and it needs to do it randomly without getting itself killed, and without the new trait being harmful to it. Macro-evolution - big picture - there is a distinct difference, and the second of those two can't happen. -feel free to show me a case where it has.
Second law of theromodynamics - yes it deals directly with energy and the transfer of heat - but it explains more than that. It explains why your cloths get worn, why things break, why people / animals / everything has to eat, why the sun burns out. To put it in its most basic terms, things go from a state of order to a state of disorder - naturally. Now apply that to evolution, if you will. Evolution insists that creatures get MORE complex over time - going from a state of disorder to order! Now, this is not a natural thing - which is why I compaired it to falling uphill.
In order to circumvent that rather large problem, evolutionists say "but in small instances - like on earth - that can change! We get our energy from the sun!" Great, thats all fine and dandy. That still doesn't mean that there is any driving factor to imbue this sunlight into making things more complex. So I bake a planet for a few eons - can I expect life? By that reasoning mercury should be overflowing with organics!
You atempted a refute of the earths magentic field decay, citing a "cyclical" nature of renewal. I suppose that you are referring to the polarity reversal that happens every so often. Now, I havent brought up the flood until now - at least not directly, but here is another great spot where it fits the evidence. Dont you think that massive crust upheaval could cause a polarity reversal? - infact several of them (think earth quake aftershock) - as sediments are being laid down world wide?
See, evolutionists <b>assume</b> renewal comes with the polarity reversal - because if it doesn't renew, then it doesn't fit their timeline. All we know is it changes direction - renewal is just another theory.
Just one more little question I have. How come recorded history is only ~ 10,000 years old? All of our records of "man" (bones, what have you) seem to indicate that ancient man was at least as smart as modern man. Don't you think that perhaps ancient man would look at the skin of the animal he just killed and think to write on it? - to at least paint a picture? I mean, these ancient guys have been around millions of years! - Some of them have to have stores to tell. - surely we would find more of them - heck they had millions of years to reproduce! On the contrary. I suggest that a shorter, much more recent stone age would fit the evidence we find. It would do well to explain the small numbers and the lack of stuff left behind.
Now I know at least one of you is a "Christian disliker" at best - but perhaps if you put some of that bias away, you might see were not all stupid fishless prayers. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd--> <!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->First of all, the treas I refered to as being multi-strata are well known. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yes, they are well known. Well known examples of creationist nonsense which they can't find a single serious, published geologist out of thousands to endorse their 100 year-old nosnense. It's truly, unbelievably ridiculous. Christian creationists of a <b>100 years ago</b> were the ones that explained how polystrate trees work. That's because they were familiar with hte basic concepts of geology, of which you seem laughably ignorant. Tell me again about how geologists all over the world, from every nation and religion, every gender and ideology, in all sorts of competing schools and debates... tell me again how they are ALL somehow in on this plot to hide the evidence of a Young Earth by simply inventing crazy ideas like the geological column? I mean, you REALLY believe this tinfoil hat stuff?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Concerning the Oort Cloud - last time I checked, it too is still just a theory. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
When was the "last time you checked" exactly? Because the Oort cloud has been a commonly accepted fact in astronomy since the 50s.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Concerning your fruit flies, you are talking about survivial of the fiittest, micro-evolutoinary stuff. Hey, thats all fine and dandy - But the net result was, those fruit flies are still fruit flies. In order for evolution to work, that fruit fly needs to Grow, or Evolve in such a way that it is no longer a fruit fly, and it needs to do it randomly without getting itself killed, and without the new trait being harmful to it.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Last time I checked, that's not what you asked. You asked for increase in complexity even evidence of adaptation, and that's exactly what you got evidence of. Now that it's staring you in the face, you are spinning around and demanding something else instead. And th fact is, what we have at the end of the process is NOT the same sort of creature we began with. You can still call it a fruit fly if you want, but that's smoke and mirrors: they reality is that the evolved populations have traits that the past populations did not. If you want evidence of speciation, you should have asked for than in the first place. Let's get to that now then...
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Macro-evolution - big picture - there is a distinct difference, and the second of those two can't happen. -feel free to show me a case where it has.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
There is no barrier between "micro" and "macro" evolution. They are the exact same process, just happening over a longer period of time. Please: explain to me what would prevent small changes from building up to large ones over successive generations. What "stops" this from happening? The answer is: nothing. There is nothing that "prevents" small changes from accumulating. They can, and they do.
Speciation has been observed over and over and over again in nature. Longer-term developments, which take longer than all recorded human history, are reflected in the fossil record, but more importantly in the genetic record, where the divergence of genes from a common source is obvious.
For examples of observed speciation, try this article, one of my favorites: Kluger, Jeffrey. Go fish. (rapid fish speciation in African lakes). Discover. V13. P18(1) March, 1992.
I could have posted any of a hundred published each YEAR on instances of speciation that took place within the history of human biological observation.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->To put it in its most basic terms, things go from a state of order to a state of disorder - naturally. Now apply that to evolution, if you will. Evolution insists that creatures get MORE complex over time - going from a state of disorder to order! Now, this is not a natural thing - which is why I compaired it to falling uphill.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Did you even read the Answers in Genesis website? Those people are hardcore Young Earth Creationists, and even they admit that this whole line of argument is utter bullplop.
The 2nd law does NOT state that things go from order to disorder in any general sense: the "order" refferred to is entropic order (i.e. energy content). It states instead that energy spontaneously disperses from being localized to becoming spread out: i.e. that systems cannot be perfectly efficient and work without a loss of energy (this is why perpetual motion machines are impossible). It has nothing to do with order in a general sense. If the 2nd law actually said what you claim it does, then things like snow flakes would be impossible.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->In order to circumvent that rather large problem, evolutionists say "but in small instances - like on earth - that can change! We get our energy from the sun!" Great, thats all fine and dandy. That still doesn't mean that there is any driving factor to imbue this sunlight into making things more complex. So I bake a planet for a few eons - can I expect life? By that reasoning mercury should be overflowing with organics!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Except that "reasoning" is insane. The point of the sun is not that it creates order or magically makes babies appear out of the dirt. The point is that it imparts energy: enough to make up for what's lost via entropy. That's all that matters as far as the 2nd law.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->You atempted a refute of the earths magentic field decay, citing a "cyclical" nature of renewal. I suppose that you are referring to the polarity reversal that happens every so often. Now, I havent brought up the flood until now - at least not directly, but here is another great spot where it fits the evidence. Dont you think that massive crust upheaval could cause a polarity reversal?<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Er, no. In case you didn't already know this, the earth's crust is an EXTREMELY thin layer on the outside of the Earth. The Earth's magnetic field, however, is generated by its rotating core via the dynamo effect. The entire surface of the Earth could blow up and it wouldn't affect the magnetic field one bit. Regardless, a worldwide flood (of which there is no evidence for in the geological record anyway) wouldn't cause the polarity to reverse every couple of 10,000 - 100,000 years (and these reversals date back, WAY back, in a staggered pattern that can be found in igneous rock amongst the strata).
You jump from one subject to the next like you have ADD. Before you were claiming that the field decays and thus the earth can't be very old. Now you are claiming that a worldwide flood somehow coaxed the field to reverse over and over. Can you make up your mind as to what crazy, nonsensical thing it's doing?
The only thing you seem to be able to shout is "well that's just a theory you made up to discredit the Bible." For all you seem to know, scientists just sit around in rooms all day making stuff up just because it will hurt creationists' feelings. The actual reality is very very different: thousands of competing scientists all studying the same evidence and doing actual RESEARCH to prove this or that, again and again. They don't generally give a damn about creationism vs. evolution debates: they are just trying to discover groundbreaking new stuff so they can get papers published and contribute to world knowledge. The pole reversals aren't just some dream an evolutionist had one night. They are solidly documented and TESTED ideas that have stood the test of time: ideas that, in fact, were developed by Christians!!!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->How come recorded history is only ~ 10,000 years old? All of our records of "man" (bones, what have you) seem to indicate that ancient man was at least as smart as modern man.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yeah, all those cellphones they made! The reason recorded history is so recent to the point when we're around to comment on it is because... we're only now around to talk and think about it. If mankind had developed language and all the complex mechanisms of civilization earlier, then we'd live back thousands or millions of years ago, we'd have recorded history that went even FARTHER back and you'd still be here throwing out the same goofball argument about how our even earlier ancestors must have been smart enough to write Shakespeare. What a depressing thought. Anyway, the reason we don't have recorded history going back past 10,000 years or so is that that's about the time when mankind began (very crudely) to actually record history.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Some of them have to have stores to tell. - surely we would find more of them - heck they had millions of years to reproduce!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
There are, of course, cave paintings that go back farther than 10,000 years. But, give early man a break. He had barely even developed a rudimentary language, much less learned to create complex oil paints.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Now I know at least one of you is a "Christian disliker" at best - but perhaps if you put some of that bias away, you might see were not all stupid fishless prayers.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Unfortunately for you, evolutionary biologists count tons of Christians amonst their number. The creationist side, however only seems to have nutcases like Hovind (who you are simply parrotting at me). It isn't your Christianity that makes you stupid: not at all. If you are being stupid, it's your own darn fault.
At this point, I'm going to bow out of the argument. I feel as though I have been hit below the belt enough to satisfy anyones ego. Let me leave you with an explanation of why I believe the way I do. I fully expect you to disagree and tear it to shreds, but before you do, I hope some of it rings true.
Man has always wanted things on his own terms. As of late the trend is for an Atheistic egocentric world view. In order to maintain this world view - along with a sence of "right" - man has to take God out of the picture - after all, it is God's laws that man breaks, and man doesn't want to feel guilty anymore.
In order to successfully pull God out of the picture, this world, this universe must be "caused" by natural processes - be it origin of life, evolution, speciation - everything must happen "naturally" and easily.
Unfortunatly, these "natural" things are very rare and require very precise situations to happend. The evolutionist responds by throwing a few billion years at it.
So you see - it is a "massive conspiracy" - but it is one that people participate because they don't have a choice. If you want to live your life (I'm not talking you Apos specific) denying God and his work, then evolution is your only option. It flows directly from that sort of philosophy. Of course, this is a very easy and popular road to follow because "you can't prove God" - not to mention the "moral freedoms" and self pleasing lifestyle that it supports. Which leads us all the way back to square one.
It comes as no surprise to me that there are many more evolutionists than creationists. Through this discussion, I hope you have at least come to realize that there is more than one model - more than one timeline that "fits" the evidence. I also hope you realize that both models require "faith" - weather it be in God or a very lucky little planet hurling its way through space-time. Which requires more faith is entirely subjective.
This leaves one other class of people - Theistic evolutionists (Gods creation through evolution). Ultimatly, these people want it both ways. They want to be moral, and recognize God as the ultimate source of morality, but they don't want to be subject to him in the biblical sence. It starts with making the Bible a "good book" - then spreads to making it the "ten suggestions" - ultimately making it a smorgasboard of good ideas and "guidelines" - of course evolution fits well - after all, God has to fit Human Scientific Discovery, not the other way around. I'm not sure why they want to rob God of the ability to create the world in a weak - perhaps they are trying to please those in the "scientific" community, at the expense of Gods nature.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> At this point, I'm going to bow out of the argument. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Of course: you've followed the "standard creationist handbook" to the letter so far, why not complete it by running away, with a few nasty parting shots? And run away you should. You've now left a permanent record on this webserver as to the fact that you are a person willing to criticize things that they then demonstrate, for all to see, that they don't understand in the slightest. That should be pretty embarrasing at this point. You've done little more than simply parrot some of the more laughable creationist arguments: arguments that I've repeatedly shown that even most fundamentalist Christian creationists, who AGREE with you about te Young Earth and the Bible being science, think are dishonest, wrong, and shouldn't be used. And yet, instead of admitting that you were in error, you self-righteously sulk away with some nasty words for everyone that doesn't think you have any ground to stand on. And really, who COULD respect such behavior?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Man has always wanted things on his own terms. As of late the trend is for an Atheistic egocentric world view. In order to maintain this world view - along with a sence of "right" - man has to take God out of the picture - after all, it is God's laws that man breaks, and man doesn't want to feel guilty anymore.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You speak of below the belt, but this is simply one of the most nasty arguments one could make. Centuries of honest, sincere exploration of the cosmos to discover its mysteries: much of it done by CHRISTIANS who believed themselves to be exploring the wonders of God's creation, and you sum it all up as a petty attempt for people to justify stealing cookies out of the cookie jar.
How petty. When you are shown that all your arguments turn out to be lies that you got suckered into believing, instead of questioning the people who told them to you, you decide to impugn the motives of millions of incredible hardworking and honest people, most of them with such a diversity of opinions that there is simply no way to claim that they are all conspiring for any single purpose other than the one on which they all agree: that we should follow where the evidence leads us, and measure truth only against what we can all establish by proven argument and research.
What is ego-centric? Ego centric is thinking that mankind is the center of the universe: the sole purpose of all that exists. Ego-centric is in thinking that instead of subjecting your ideas to peer review: instead of testing them against the evidence, they are simply true because you believe them. Nothing could be more egotistical than that.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Through this discussion, I hope you have at least come to realize that there is more than one model - more than one timeline that "fits" the evidence.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You haven't even begun to demonstrate that this is the case. Though you have not actually presented ANY alternative timeline (just lamely suggested a worldwide flood) that accounts for the evidence we have, I very much doubt that if you did it would be different from the ones I've heard from creationists over and over. And far from fitting the evidence, their timeline is contradicted in so many different ways by the evidence, taken down by so many different arguments from disciplines of knowledge as remote as chemistry is from semiotics, that it may be one of the most decisively DISproven hypotheses of all time. Generate virtually any testable prediction from creationist theory, check that prediction against unknown evidence, and it turns out to be dead wrong.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I also hope you realize that both models require "faith" - weather it be in God or a very lucky little planet hurling its way through space-time. Which requires more faith is entirely subjective.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No.
And here you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what's at stake. You are claiming that both science and creationism require faith: but in fact they don't work anything like each other. You begin with a conclusion, believed on faith, that the Bible is a literal account of reality. This is by far a minority extremist position even with Christianity, but it is your faith, and you are welcome to it. Next, you... well actually there is no next. You're already done. That's the end of your story because you have decided tout suite what the truth is without having to do any sort of work whatsoever in going out and looking for it.
Science is an entirely different process. It begins not with a conclusion, but with a set of observed facts: facts on which all can agree. Next, hundreds if not thousands of different people, each perhaps with their own agendas and biases, try to formulate hypotheses that would explain those facts. Next, they publically subject those ideas to the test: tests of evidence, designed by both themselves AND a host of skeptics. Tests that can be repeated by anyone who cares to try. And the results of those tests help rule out bogus hypotheses, suggest new lines of inquiry, discover new facts, and so on. And this process then continues apace, slowly adding to our knowledge by winnowing away the possible alternative explanations. Over time, major theories can be produced that explain all the relevant facts in one area and survive all testing. These then provide the framework for more incisive explorations of the specifics. And still, by their use in dredging up new evidence and facts, they are continually tested: for science has only two real rules: no one is a final authority, and no one gets to say "game over."
To claim that both methods are just "faith" is absurd. Not only is your method the only one that puts faith at it's center, your method is just, and there is really no better word for it: lazy. It requires nothing. No one actually has to go out and DO anything. No one even ever has to deign to look for facts. Now, sure, they CAN look for facts and try to squeeze them into their belief, but this is secondary: their beliefs didn't come from facts in the first place, weren't informed by them to begin with.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I'm not sure why they want to rob God of the ability to create the world in a weak - perhaps they are trying to please those in the "scientific" community, at the expense of Gods nature.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Of course: if they disagree with your beliefs, the answer MUST be that they have some base motive, rather than that they are honest explorers into what they see as God's creation.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->heck they had millions of years to reproduce!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Hate to rain on your parade but modern humans have only been around for WAY WAY less than that. Infact modern homo sapiens or "humans" as creationists call them have only been around for less than 100,000 years.
For about 85,000 years of this man was in small tribes of about 20-40 individuals. They were hunter gathers and used a Hierarchal social pattern much like the one we use today. Like most social mammals this "pyramid" hierarchy leaves us constantly feeling of something more “greater and higher than ourselves” like a more important social member. Is it any wonder that when humans became smart enough to understand the world around us and start to ask questions that this primordial social Patten gave way to "higher beings" when there were no more higher social cavemen .
Recorded history as we know it started with the Greek's . However it goes back 5-10,000 years before when humans started to domesticate animals and live in larger groups. There were thousands of tiny societies each with there own record system its only when they started to merge is when common languages formed . Today we still have a hierarchal system in place, but our minds have not yet come to grasps with groups larger than 20-40 people. How many people are you in close and constant contact with? Im not talking about your work mate who works at the photocopier and you say “hi” as you pass him to your desk. Im talking about real friends and real family? On average no more than 40. See a remembrance to our ancestral friends? Its because even though we don’t like to admit it humans are still controlled by instincts. Religion is an instinct to the overwhelming felling of something else which rose from the murky depths of the primal mammal dominants, or sexual selection!
Your child has a much higher chance to survive if it’s the offspring of somebody that is high on the social ladder. Plus that person at the top of the social ladder usually will have better genes. It’s a simple premise that we are all still bound by.
This urge to have a better child with somebody at the top, has lead , in one way or another to religion as we know it today. The something greater than ourselves.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->till now I haven’t mentioned the flood<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Smart boy. But then you had to go mention it . IT DIDNT HAPPEN , but hey lets amuse our friend here. If it did happen and the water is lapping at the top of Mt Everest. The world would have 3 times more water in it than it does now. If you were take a breath of air you would drown from the extra humidity. The bible is a moral guideline not a history/science book!!
This forum seems to have a more even mix of atheists and creationists. Over in the AusNS forums I was the only atheist in a similar debate. Unfortunately I was dealing with about six creationists two of which were admins. As you can guess when they started to lose they locked the topic The debate got interesting when a certain person disagreed against the carbon copy posts of the "bible bashers"
If anybody is interested by this discussion have a look at this one as its quite amusing: <a href='http://www.ausns.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9785' target='_blank'>Ausns Religion debate</a>
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> At this point, I'm going to bow out of the argument. I feel as though I have been hit below the belt enough to satisfy anyones ego.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It is amazing how when you completely out debate a creationist, they just claim this 'victim' complex and then bow out of the debate without attempting to prove why they are right or why the evolutionists are 'incorrect'.
Essentially, all you have done is declared your defeat to superior arguments.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->So you see - it is a "massive conspiracy" - but it is one that people participate because they don't have a choice. If you want to live your life (I'm not talking you Apos specific) denying God and his work, then evolution is your only option<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Best of all, you end it with one of the most ignorant straw mans around.
Of course, anyone who has been in these debates or has been doing this for a while, is more than aware of what kinds of strawmans and tactics that creationists use. I unfortunately couldn't have joined in this when pepe was beginning to come out with the truely hillarious arguments I have come to love rebutting, but I was busy with another similar argument on a different forum.
Ironically, the creationists in that thread did the exact same tactics and refused to meet my arguments, just as Pepe did. Funny how this all seems to consistently work out to a similar conclusion. I admire you Apos for being so patient, and for a change I could read the rebuttals instead of writing them for once!
EpidemicDark Force GorgeJoin Date: 2003-06-29Member: 17781Members
edited January 2005
<!--QuoteBegin-Pepe Muffassa+Jan 26 2005, 04:46 AM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Pepe Muffassa @ Jan 26 2005, 04:46 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> At this point, I'm going to bow out of the argument. I feel as though I have been hit below the belt enough to satisfy anyones ego. Let me leave you with an explanation of why I believe the way I do. I fully expect you to disagree and tear it to shreds, but before you do, I hope some of it rings true.
Man has always wanted things on his own terms. As of late the trend is for an Atheistic egocentric world view. In order to maintain this world view - along with a sence of "right" - man has to take God out of the picture - after all, it is God's laws that man breaks, and man doesn't want to feel guilty anymore.
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> Atheists DONT believe in a god, GEDDIT? Egocentrical? Am I not a pinko commie no more?
Comments
Newton's inverse-square law was considered the center of the universe for well over a century, until a German clerk came around and pointed out that there is no such thing as gravity, that it's only the effect of space's distortion by all masses, and sooner or later, that realization will belong to the history of genialic yet slightly wrong explanations for the state of things, only to be replaced by an even smarter, even less expected, even more correct observation. Science does not have the purpose to find truths about the universe, a whole branch of philosophy concerns itself with why it can't, it has to content itself with the observation, analysis, and subsequent extrapolation of events within the universe. Scientific theory can never be proven irrefutably right, it can only be proven irrefutably wrong. The theories that have so far not been faulted are what we consider the current state of knowledge.
And if you consider these ramifications, supernatural events quickly drop out of the scope of science, for if something has no natural cause, it can hardly be empirically measured with any certainty. True, you could possibly ascertain that it happened, but why? How? What would you base the estimates of effects on? Supernatural events can just not be factored into scientific theory. If it can't be observed properly, it can not be analyzed, and one can extrapolate from it even less. The big question here is of course what constitutes a supernatural event and what doesn't. Science has so far been quite good at eliminating possible candidates by closely watching them.
I'll let your jab at evolutionism slide, BTW. We both know where discussions on that lead, let's don't go there. Sufficient to say that I will consider the evolutionary theory, which's core tennets have so far not been proven wrong, acceptable despite its relative unlikeliness (which really shouldn't surprise us, the universe is full of unlikely events; it's only much fuller of likely ones) until something more accurate comes along, while the creatonistic theory can be proven wrong by having a long good look at the rock cliffs around where I live.
Except the scientific method has no way of creating an understanding of something like faith or the supernatural. If you can't test it, how can you formulate a theory? This means that science can never "lead to a better understanding of that being"; purely impossible by what we call modern Science.
Actually, that's kinda what Nem0 said....except mine's less eloquent. <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->
If you have religious beliefs, that's great. But that's not relevant to scientific inquiry. The whole point of science is that, instead of being based on religious beliefs on which we are all unlikely to ever agree upon, it is based on observation, evidence, and open argument. That makes it accessible to all.
Darwin, by the way, was a Christian who became an agnostic deist. I.e., he was not an atheist. The only major thing about his theory that he had any serious doubts about (and rightly so) was his model of heredity, which was blending (i.e. he believed that the traits of offspring were an even mix of the parents). As many people pointed out to him, if this were true, then all populations would tend towards homogeniety. Darwin towards the end of his life thus began to suspect that heredity was perhaps "particulate," i.e. some sort of binary system. This is, in fact, the correct direction (which Mendel discovered), but Darwin never lived to flesh out the idea himself, and few people in the world really made the connection between Darwin and Mendel until the 30s when the so-called "modern synthesis" began in biology. The results of this line of inquiry were utterly astounding. Within just a few decades, we had dealt a deathblow to racism for the first time in human history, discovered the basic building blocks of life (DNA), learned in general the history of life on earth and the planet we live on, and so on. Evolution may have been one of the most revolutionary, society changing discoveries in all human intelletual history, and yet the idea itself is so amazingly simple and obvious that we're hard pressed to understand why no one had ever thought of it until Darwin and Wallace.
<!--QuoteBegin-Pepe+--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Pepe)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->However, if you allow for the possibility of a "higher being" who influences, directs, or even "creates", you can create a picture for the origin of the universe / world / man with a much higher probability and a much better explanation for the way things are. Scientists should be barking up that tree in their search for truth.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If you allow magic, you can explain anything, instantly, without having to leave the comfort of your chair or do any research. That's exactly why scientists aren't much impressed by theories of "God did it." It isn't that they are against the existence or philosophy of God, it's that that answer doesn't really explain anything, it's not testable, and it offers no direction for further research or study. In short, it isn't ground for legitimate scientific inquiry. I mean, it's not like this sort of explanatory laziness can be restricted to God. For instance, you claim that "things as they are" are a "theoretical impossibility." Leave aside the fact that that claim is wrong: even if it were a problem, if science worked by simply making up answers to problems from the comfort of my easy chair, I could think of thousands of "magical" explanations that solve this apparent problem and make it go away. As long as I don't have to supply any evidence for them, claiming God did it is no more or less easy or testable than claiming that all of reality is an illusion and so too are the supposed "impossible odds."
That said, neither evolution nor abiogenesis (the study of the potential origins of life) are "theoretical impossibilities" as you claim.
When I look at evolution, and what evolution pre-supposes, it is a poposterous theory. A "fact" of evolution - to which all evolutionists must subscribe, is that this thing called "life" came out of a primordial ooze of "non-life" - and that this jump happened spontaneously and accidentaly.
Not only that, but evolution pre-supposes that this new life survived in the most hostile of conditions - yeay it even thrived, managing not only to dodge the lightning bolts and crushing bolders and flames, but steadily growning more "evolved" - first from a bacteria like organism to invertabrate creachers and plant life (at some point there had to be a division between the two) - and ultimatly, over the billions of years, you and I are here.
Don't take this as a Jab at evolution - these are the things that must be believed by every evolutionist out there. My own belief structure also pre-supposes many things - like that my life has a specific purpose and value (outside of a bag of chemicals), that there is a God who gives value to my life, and this same God created this world.
You mention the rock cliffs "proving" creation wrong - From my perspective it is your pre-supposition that creation is wrong, and then you look to the rock cliffs for supporting evidence, which you claim you find. However, if I were to go to those cliffs, I would see evidence for my belief structure, and my pre-suppositions. All they really tell us is that mud and rock gets deposited in layers - beyond that, any sort of time frame, any sort of "age" is anybodies guess.
And I know you will bring up carbon dating - but even then you are dealing with pre-suppositions, like that carbon (or whatever atom your studying) has decayed at exactly the same rate in the past as it does now.
My overall point is this: We both find plenty of evidence to support our positions, and we both differ on our core beliefs - our presuppositions. I reognize Evolution as a "scientific" teaching - I respect the work that people do, I think its great that they dig up all kinds of bones and artifacts. I just think that they are (possibly intentionally) missing a piece of the puzzle that will bring clarity to a lot of the other areas, and the reason they are missing this piece is because they claim it is "unscientific".
That you could say this is a tipoff that you don't know what you are talking about.
Let me say this loud and clear: <i>the Theory of Evolution can not explain, and does not claim to explain, the origin of life</i>. Period. The basic requirements for natural selection to work are thus: 1) heredity of traits 2) variation of traits 3) differential reproductive success based on traits. All of those things pre-suppose "life" (actually, not: life is far too vague a term since there is no set line over which we can distinguish life from non-life: what they pre-suppose are replicators with heredity, whether we choose to call them "alive" or not). Darwin never pretended that his theory explained the origin of life: it takes the existence of simple life as a given and then explains what comes after that. Like all scientific theories, it is specifically limited to a particular explanatory scope. Evolution does not explain why the sun shines. It does not explain why volacanos erupt. And it does not purport to explain the origin of heredity. Everyone got it?
Now, the area of science that deals with the "ooze" bit is called Abiogenesis. And if you'd like to discuss that, I'd be happy to. Suffice to say, I don't find abiogenesis to be implausible at all. What I do find is that people who do find it implausible generally have a very misguided understanding of exactly what abiogenesis hypothesises are aiming at. Because it isn't random chance. It's about finding plausible mechanisms of chemical catalysis based on the conditions of the early earth.
If you are really in a position of knowledge enough to make a judgement about the plausibility of abiogenesis, then answer these basic questions (without googling them! that = teh lose)
1. Why is it important to abiogenesis and carbon-based organic chemistry in general that the atmosphere of the early earth was reductive (and what does that mean, anyway?)
2. What is an error catastrophe?
3. What is Speigelman's monster?
Those are some _really_ basic things one would need to know before they could make any legitimate judgements about how plausible abiogenesis is. Now, be honest: do you know offhand (without cheating with google or some other resource) what any of them are or why they are important to the picture?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->All they really tell us is that mud and rock gets deposited in layers - beyond that, any sort of time frame, any sort of "age" is anybodies guess.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
There are an overwhleming number of indepedant methods that can be used to date natural phenomenon. It isn't even just that these methods are all individually reliable (though they are, and no serious objections have been maintained against them). It's that they all cross-confirm each other: they give the SAME dates. This is one of the most powerful forms of evidence there is, because even if you argue (however impluasibly) that the calculations and assumptions underlying each of these methods is wrong, you are still left with the fact that they all coincidentally gave the SAME wrong answer. But if the methods were truly flawed, then this would be an astounding coincidence. What explains the coordination of these dating methods: the coverging agreement? Only truth: truth coordinates in a way that error cannot.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->And I know you will bring up carbon dating - but even then you are dealing with pre-suppositions, like that carbon (or whatever atom your studying) has decayed at exactly the same rate in the past as it does now. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
But this isn't simply an arbitrary pre-supposition. It's based on tons of research into radioactive decay and hundreds of different sorts of tests of the phenomenon to understand the basic regularities behind it. No one thought up radioactive decay with the explicit intention of attacking creationism. It was developed for entirely different purposes originally, and out of a genuine wish to try and figure out the mysteries of creation.
And, as I said: fine, doubt that carbon dating works at a constant rate (actually, this is another tip-off: carbon dating isn't used for anything other than very very recent things because it has a very short half-life: different isotopes or different atoms are used for longer range dates). Why then does it happen to match up with other sorts of dating phenomenon, like tree rings or seafloor spreading or magnetic polarity reversals? How do you explain how all these methods, which each represent independant lines of figuring out the dates of things, all give the same answers?
There is a much more extensive discussion about how all these things fit together here:
<a href='http://forums.tolkienonline.com/viewtopic.php?t=85498&sid=44c9c8410c3b169081091aef7509f0dd' target='_blank'>http://forums.tolkienonline.com/viewtopic....1091aef7509f0dd</a>
But for now, suffice to say that the evidence being used isn't just a bunch of random assumptions: it's all based on very tested and cross-confirmed natural phenomena, all compared and verified. Most of it wasn't snidely made up just to mess with creationist beliefs. In fact, a lot of the major evidences (some developed by scientists who were very religious in their private lives) were argued against very harshly by many scientists (many of whom were non-believers in their private lives) until the evidence ultimately convinced people. It wasn't all a big conspiracy to undermine religion. It really was an honest and spirited debate that increased our knowledge of the world, carried on by people of all sorts of different opinions, most of which concerned just rival ideas and who didn't give a thought to having it in for this or that religious belief. And the basic evidence and argument used to justify these methods is no different than what we're all familiar with with any of the truths in our daily lives. If you want to assert that there is some flaw in the reasoning, it's not fair to simply hint at it and then wave it away dismissively. Out with it! What's your <i>actual</i> objection or testable alternative scenario?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->My overall point is this: We both find plenty of evidence to support our positions, and we both differ on our core beliefs - our presuppositions.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Science does not require presuppositions outside positing the common reality we all share and asking that people play by "well, then show me" rules. That is, if you claim that the evidence says something, then make your argument. And let's consider the evidence and whether it really does fit that argument. If you think they are missing a part of the puzzle, then by all means: MAKE AN ARGUMENT. Otherwise, you are basically just in the business impugning people's motives and judgements, which is plain uncouth. And it is especially abusrd considering that many of the strongest defenders of evolution are religious believers themselves who believe that God created the universe and natural laws. To them, the accusation that they are myopically denying the possibility of God would sound absurd and insulting.
Why is this theory taught as scientific fact when it can't even handle that basic argument? Lets not forget the considerable gaps in animal history - going from invertabrate to vertabrate to name just one. There are thousands of missing links with no fossil records - yet apparently they all happened!
here is another bit of evidence: <a href='http://www.halos.com/' target='_blank'>Halos.com</a>
and another: <a href='http://www.aboundingjoy.com/molecular-fs.html' target='_blank'>Dealing with the molecular level</a>
and another:<a href='http://www.adam.com.au/bstett/ReligAntiquityofEarth.htm' target='_blank'>A short list of discrepancies</a>
I could go find more, but this should give you enough to deal with for a while.
Oh, but wait - my evidence comes from "Christian" sources - so it can't be reliable - they are already bias! And so the world keeps turning - there is nothing new under the sun. Science strives to preserve its own, while ignoring anything to the contrary.
More like this:
First to an RNA like precursor, then to an organsim that is mostly RNA like with some proteins, then to an organism that is RNA encased in a lipid bilayer, then to an organism that uses DNA as a storage medium for its RNA code, then to an organism where the DNA has hijacked the cell and enslaved the RNA (poor guys), then....
And so on.
Also, plant and animal cell lines diverged from a common ancestor, not directly from each other.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->And I know you will bring up carbon dating -<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Someone who REALLY knows their stuff will bring up Uranium/Lead dating, which is used to date the oldest rocks known and it doesn't suffer your little 'problem'. This is because these atoms are often surrounded by structures called zirconian cages, that prevent the entry and exit of atoms in the structure. The dates are completely consistent between non-zirconian cage trapped atoms and those in other cages in other parts of the rock.
Obviously, nobody attacks this because it is pretty infallible as a system goes, lacks the problems that carbon dating has and can date rocks to BILLIONS of years, rather than thousands.
Kind makes attacks on carbon dating pointless now doesn't it?
No, it doesn't, no more than the theory of Gravity needs to explain why dogs like to smell butts. In science, theories are formulated to accomplish <i>specific</i> tasks. In the case of evolution, it is to explain adaptation and design GIVEN life. As I've already told you, it is the field of Abiogenesis that examines the origin of life.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Why is this theory taught as scientific fact when it can't even handle that basic argument?<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I dunno, why is the theory of magnetism taught when it can't even explain why the sky is blue? Same insane sort of question. It doesn't handle that argument because it was never meant to in the first place, and mechanism discovered only applies to already "living" creatures.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Lets not forget the considerable gaps in animal history - going from invertebrate to vertebrate to name just one.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't understand: what gap are you talking about? How is that a gap? In what? The progression from simple notochord to full bony vertebrate is not some great mystery.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->There are thousands of missing links with no fossil records - yet apparently they all happened!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This may come as a shock to you, but there could be 0 fossils ever found, and common descent and evolution would be just as powerful as ever. Darwin never even expected to find as many as we've been lucky to find. Supporting common descent simply does not rely on finding every single fossil species that ever lived, and indeed it is highly unlikely that fossils even formed for every species that ever lived. Fossil formation conditions are extremely rare, and because of the way species branch, you generally are only likely to find those from established dominant populations rather than the new branches. What fossils do tell us are very very important and helpful. But no one expects to find a perfect record of every single last creature that ever lived, nor does the theory require it. Fossils are icing on the cake and welcome gifts to the party (because they help us nail down vauge dates and relations), but what we've found already more than establishes the basic structure of evolution over all of the major phyla throughout the years.
When evolution first finally became widely accepted as true, the major importance of fossils was not that they provided a complete record of anything (and again, they never and still are not expected to: each find is a lucky break, not the norm) but that they showed that the vast majority of species that had ever lived had gone extinct, and that there was a general pattern over the ages tracing through various lines of descent. Specific connections between specific modern animals and others are, of course, aided by fossil evidence, but the current technique of molecular "clocking" modern animals to each other is arguably much more powerful and accurate.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I could go find more, but this should give you enough to deal with for a while.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No. What you did was just google a bunch of articles to throw at me, most of which you probably even barely read over. That's extremely lazy, and I'm not going to waste my time reading someone else's work when you can't even be bothered to debate with me. If you have arguments that have convinced YOU from these articles, then YOU state them. If YOU can refute anything I said, YOU say it. I've seen this game played out over and over: people make a whole bunch of grand statements, then when challenged to support them, or in the face of a mass of evidence they cannot explain away, they feign "Oh, I'm suddenly very tired" or "Oh, I just got very busy" spam a few random articles at you, and run away, never to post again (heck, you even pretty much SAY that you are trying to stall me and keep me busy!)
Sorry, not playing that game. I'm happy to debate any of the claims in those articles, but only if there is a good faith effort on your part to respond to my objections. I could spend forty minutes composing a detailed response to those claims, all to have you respond "bah, it's all just dogmatic faith, evidence doesn't matter, ok, gg, bye bye." Most of the claims made can be answered simply by checking out talk-origins' handy look-up anyway: from a quick glance, it's the usual YEC stuff that's been debunked a million times before (po-ho? I haven't heard anyone try to sell me that one in awhile)
Also, I asked you a few specific questions about some of the basic concepts necessary to understand and evaluate abiogenesis. Did you know the answers or not? If not, then are pretending to know things you don't know.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Oh, but wait - my evidence comes from "Christian" sources - so it can't be reliable - they are already bias!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Again, you are basically insulting the thousands of Christian scientists who believe in and work on evolution. The problem with those articles is not who wrote them, but that they don't make very good arguments, don't provide reliable evidence, and they aren't even from actual scientists who've published these claims within their own field. Robert V. Gentry, for instance, from whom the po-ho stuff is taken from, isn't a geologist: he's a physicist, and as such his work is incredibly sloppy (so sloppy that geologists can't even figure out how he drew his samples). Your last link, laughably, in addition to outright lies about there not being evidence for this or that, contains some claims that even most YECreationists have called for their own movement to stop using because they are so laughably, embarrassingly wrong. For some reason, this stuff never dies. I'm surprised you didn't drag out the old "moon dust" trope.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->And so the world keeps turning - there is nothing new under the sun. Science strives to preserve its own, while ignoring anything to the contrary.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Scientists have dealt with all these sorts claims constantly, over and over. They aren't some renegade knowledge being surpressed by the orthodoxy: they're junk science that has not withstood scientific scrutiny. They haven't been ignored: they've been roundly debunked, often without any further response at all from people who made them up other than to keep repeating the same debunked claims, sell books about them off the internet, and make a fat buck.
And before you launch your defensive claims of bias again, let me just note in conclusion that science is <i>extremely</i> broad in terms of the diversity of beliefs of acredited scientists working and publishing in their fields. There are biologists who are Hindus, who are Muslims, who are Catholics, who are Mormons, who are Protestants, who are non-believers, who are baseball enthusiasts. You speak of bias, and the fact is, it wouldn't work without a vast conspiracy involving thousands of people most of whom in real life often dislike each other, rarely share the same religious beliefs, and would love to prove some grand new theory and become famous and knock down each other's arguments. But as scientists, they also play by the rules of evidence: if some claim doesn't hold up in the face of the evidence, they admit it and move on. Plate tectonics held up. Evolution held up. Polonium halos didn't. The research on magnetism that undergirds the claim about the magnetic field decaying "too fast" didn't hold up: and that was 30 years ago! Are individual scientists biased? Sure. But because of the self-correcting nature of science, because of the fact that it demands common evidence available to all, it is a social endeavor that helps correct any bias.
You can of course deny that. It's in your interest to just casually dismiss it. But then, anyone can make such a argumentless dismissal. There's no power to doing so, other than to make yourself feel better.
Second, you seemed to insinuate that because I googled a few articles means that I know nothing on the subject of evolution, nor did I hand pick those articles which I presented to you. My good sir, that could not be farther from the truth. You show me much dishonor by swipeing them aside "because I probably didn't read them myself" (which I did). - So I get called lazy.
I'll give you another link - if you want on <a href='http://www.trueorigin.org/abio.asp' target='_blank'>Why Abiogenesis is Impossible</a>
but to cut and paste some reasons for you:
Scientists have yet to discover a single molecule that has “learned to make copies of itself” (Simpson, 1999, p. 26). Many scientists seem to be oblivious of this fact because
Articles appearing regularly in scientific journals claim to have generated self-replicating peptides or RNA strands, but they fail to provide a natural source for their compounds or an explanation for what fuels them... this top-down approach... [is like] a caveman coming across a modern car and trying to figure out how to make it. “It would be like taking the engine out of the car, starting it up, and trying to see how that engine works” (Simpson, 1999, p.26).
Many highly complex animals appear very early in the fossil record and many “simple” animals thrive today. The earliest fossils known, which are believed to be those of cyanobacteria, are quite similar structurally and biochemically to bacteria living today. Yet it is claimed they thrived almost as soon as earth formed (Schopf, 1993; Galtier et al., 1999). Estimated at 3.5 billion years old, these earliest known forms of life are incredibly complex. Furthermore, remarkably diverse types of animals existed very early in earth history and no less than eleven different species have been found so far. A concern Corliss raises is “why after such rapid diversification did these microorganisms remain essentially unchanged for the next 3.465 billion years? Such stasis, common in biology, is puzzling” (1993, p. 2). E. coli, as far as we can tell, is the same today as in the fossil record.
and one last problem to end this post with:
Based on a geochemical assessment, Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen (1984 p. 66) concluded that in the atmosphere the “many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical evolution rates would have been negligible” in the various water basins on the primitive earth. They concluded that the “soup” would have been far too diluted for direct polymerization to occur. Even local ponds where some concentrating of soup ingredients may have occurred would have met with the same problem.
Furthermore, no geological evidence indicates an organic soup, even a small organic pond, ever existed on this planet. It is becoming clear that however life began on earth, the usually conceived notion that life emerged from an oceanic soup of organic chemicals is a most implausible hypothesis. We may therefore with fairness call this scenario “the myth of the prebiotic soup” (Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen, 1984, p. 66).
so there you have it - hopefully this will be worth your time and energy reading, and I look forward to your rebuttal.
The answer to the first of my questions actually is all about that.
Oxygen, while it may be vital to our lives now, is extremely destructive to simple carbon-based chemistry. Our atmosphere currently has a high level of oxygen: enough to, at normal temperatures, "burn" up carbon compounds. We are more familiar with this "burning" as the decay of organic matter, but it's essentially the same as what happens in a fire: CO2 is released, oxygen is consumed, and the carbon-organic material is broken down. Any simple organic carbon compounds that formed today would oxidize to death because they have no protection from the harsh chemical effects oxygen. Some of the simplest lifeforms around today are still "allergic" to oxygen in this way, but they have at least some degree of protection that even simpler life would lack. So abiogenesis probably could not happen in Earth's current environment. (Of course, there is also the even bigger problem of all the bacteria around today in virtually every place we look: they would almost certainly quickly consume and thus destroy any simpler organic lifeforms that arose).
In the conditions of the early earth, however, free oxygen was a rarity. That's why the fact that the early earth had a chemically reductive environment around the time when life first appeared is so important: this is precisely the sort of chemical environment such a process would require!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Second, you seemed to insinuate that because I googled a few articles means that I know nothing on the subject of evolution, nor did I hand pick those articles which I presented to you. My good sir, that could not be farther from the truth. You show me much dishonor by swipeing them aside "because I probably didn't read them myself" (which I did). - So I get called lazy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Actually, the lazy part was in basically trying to have the articles do your work for you, which is akin to blowing me off. If I wanted to read articles, I could go read them: I don't need you to point this stuff out to me. I've read it a zillion times before, and I know where to find all of it. And almost every last claim is already pre-refuted on talk-origins and other such debunking database websites. The purpose of messageboards is to actually discuss the concepts in our own words.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Scientists have yet to discover a single molecule that has “learned to make copies of itself” (Simpson, 1999, p. 26). Many scientists seem to be oblivious of this fact because<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This article seems deeply confused. It's title is "abiogenesis is impossible" yet all it talks about is how scientists have yet to hit upon the exact mechanisms. Well, of course they haven't. But what does that have to do with proving it _impossible_, or even implausible?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The earliest fossils known, which are believed to be those of cyanobacteria, are quite similar structurally and biochemically to bacteria living today. Yet it is claimed they thrived almost as soon as earth formed (Schopf, 1993; Galtier et al., 1999). Estimated at 3.5 billion years old, these earliest known forms of life are incredibly complex.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Again, this is highly confused. We don't really know what the bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago were "structurally" like other than they they were single celled. Indeed, at 3.5 billion years, all we have are highly speculative <i>hints</i> that life may have already been on the planet. Single cells really don't fossilize. This article is falsely claiming that we somehow can know what early bacteria were like, and that they are virtually the same to modern bacteria. But we don't know that, and everything we DO know about the diversity of single-celled prokaryotes found today suggests that they have changed quite a LOT in several billion years, diversifying immensely.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Furthermore, remarkably diverse types of animals existed very early in earth history and no less than eleven different species have been found so far. A concern Corliss raises is “why after such rapid diversification did these microorganisms remain essentially unchanged for the next 3.465 billion years? Such stasis, common in biology, is puzzling”<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't understand the issue here at all. It's common... and therefore... puzzling? What? I highly suspect the author of this piece of quote mining, as he is definately guilty of later in the essay. For instance, he quotes Dawkins and Denton (both strong proponents of the idea that abiogenesis is not only plausible, but even inevitable) out of context, leaving out entirely the parts where they go on to discuss why these events are to as improbable as they seem because of specific mechanisms and conditions that would catalyze the event. This sort of tactic is very common in creationist literature, and highly dishonest.
The most famous example are people who quote Darwin saying "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus for different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." They then end the quote and claim that even Darwin had to "admit" that his theory could not explain things as wonderous as the eye. Why is this so dishonest? Because in that passage, Darwin was making a "Perils of Pauline" concession: trying to empathize with people's incredulity that his mechanism of natural selection could explain the eye. It was a rhetorical device that, quoted out of context, makes it sound like Darwin is admitting defeat. But what IS the context? Well, after making that concession, Darwin then goes on to explain why that common wisdom and natural incredulity is, in fact, mistaken, because he can in fact describe in detail how such a seemingly complex structure could have arisen through minor variation, and he then proceeds to do so.
Anyway, as to why bacteria remain unchanged: when organisms are very well suited to their environments, and when environments are very similar they don't tend to diversify as much. This is no strange thing. Bacteria are indeed extremely well suited for their particular lifestyle: so well suited, in fact, that they remain the dominant lifeform on this planet to this day! (in biomass and number of individuals and coverage, and so on) While lots of other lifeforms have adapted their way into new lifestyles, the basic niche occupied by bacteria is a fertile one.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->E. coli, as far as we can tell, is the same today as in the fossil record.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Again, this is extremely misleading, bordering on lying. What we have in the "fossil record" on early bacterial-type life is nowhere near enough to compare to modern bacteria. The best we have are imprints of what MIGHT be basic cell structures: not anything clear enough to compare to modern life and declare them identical, or even declare them to be E. coli! But the way the authors place this in the article it sounds like E. Coli wouldn't have changed for 3.5 billlion years. And this misleading claim is made even more bizarre by the fact that the authors later say in the SAME ARTICLE that there is no real fossil record to go on before 600mya. Which is true, but then how can they get off with implying that "we" know that modern bacteria is "exactly" like ancient bacteria?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Based on a geochemical assessment, Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen (1984 p. 66) concluded that in the atmosphere the “many destructive interactions would have so vastly diminished, if not altogether consumed, essential precursor chemicals, that chemical evolution rates would have been negligible” in the various water basins on the primitive earth.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Again, this is another very common tactic. This particular study is part of what's common in science: debate. In this case, Thaxton et al concluded one thing about the early earth at one point... but then were proven wrong in many respects. And indeed that was a long time ago. But this outdated and swamped-out research is cherry-picked out of the distant past because it says what the authors of the article want it to say. No mention is made of the hundreds of other papers coming to different conclusions, or of the modifications that Thaxton et al. made to their own conclusions. Creationists often pull the same trick with the moon dust argument I referenced earlier: picking and dicussing only a single set of measurements from almost 30 years ago as to dust accumulation on the moon, they conclude that there is not enough of it for the moon to have existed as long as it supposedly has. But this single measurement was shown over and over again in later and much more sophisticated measurements to be in error. Why is that never mentioned?
It also gives the false sense that all the different abiogenesis hypothesises being proposed are spurred on by the failure of one after the other. But in fact, the main problem in abiogenesis right now is not that all the main ideas have been ruled out, but that there are too MANY different possibilities, and we aren't sure which one is the most promising to pursue.
The paper is flawed in the most basic sense because it discusses DNA. But no one thinks that abiogenesis produced DNA right off the bat: they suspect instead that it produced a much simpler form of RNA, which in addition to being far simpler also has the special property of being able to weakly mimic some functions of proteins (which is important for theories abou self-catalysis).
Note also how they carefully couch their discussion of the smallest known forms of life as "the smallest known <i>nonparasitic</i> life." As I noted earlier, "life" is a pretty flimsy term, because it's not really what we're interested in. We might or might not consider viruses to be "alive" (viruses are basically just RNA (which is itself just a chain of amino acids) with a chemical raincoat) but that is irrelevant to whether they can self-replicate, which is all we really care about.
Now, as they state, viruses that we know today are generally found in a "parasitic" lifestyle, in some cases living in bacteria and exploiting them in order to reproduce. But that doesn't mean that's the only way they CAN function, and indeed, plenty of experiments (most famously "Speigelman's monster" which I referenced) have shown that the raw RNA from a bacteriophage and its single enzyme can function just fine outside the environment of a bacteria's body as long as the basic components of organic chemistry are around (which is what the "soup" is all about). In fact, just the enzyme itself without any of the RNA is enough to re-create the RNA of Speigelman's monster. While this isn't in itself a demonstration of abiogenesis at work, the point is that the simplest replicators and evolvers we know of (so far!) are FAR FAR less complicated than giant things like E. coli.
And notice how the authors of this paper essentially TRICKED the reader into overlooking that whole line of inquiry with the "non-parasitic" hedge word and briefly dismissing (wrongly) the ability of virus-like replicators to function without a bacterial host. They also claim "millions" of atomic parts... but these are for the bacteria, not the viruses. Speigelman's self-replicating "monster" has less than a thousand letters in its sequence, and the enzyme that can generate it has even less than that, and there are no real "atomic parts" to speak of at all: just the RNA replicating and the enzyme. So are these authors really trying to inform, or are they trying to spin the truth? I think this example says everything one might need to hear on that score.
That's all I have time to run through at the moment. But I want to renew my appeal that we not just trade articles, or you just keep pumping out article after article for me to have to refute at length. If you have doubts, express them in your own words. Explain why YOU don't understand how evolution can do what it claims to do (and let's work on evolution before getting back to abiogenesis, since it's more directly on topic).
Yes I am an atheist and can argue in a rather amusing sarcastic way. So don’t get me started on any afterlife god hogwash.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->There are thousands of missing links with no fossil records - yet apparently they all happened!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Ok a little gem of knowledge here. The chances of an animal becoming a fossil in the first place is remote. Depending on the climate it may not happen at all. Its by pure chance that fossils are formed. Its by even rare luck that we find fossils. So the chances of finding a particular species to suit the ravenous creationist critics can be hard!
Second fact we have only been digging for fossils over the last 170 odd years, not everything has been found yet. I agree there are thousand of "transitional species" that haven’t been found yet. But believe me we haven’t yet found 1% of all extinct species yet! In time those species will be found. Already we have found hundreds of transitional species. We have already shown through transitional species how scales evolved into feathers. Monkeys into humans. The list goes on. I suggest you do research before saying "you haven’t found everything yet, therefore your incorrect". Which is basically what your saying and to be honest that sounds stupid!
It's important to note that this clamor for "transitional" species is itself a gross misunderstanding of evolution. In reality, there are no "transitional" species. Or, alternatively, EVERY species is transitional. That's because every creature back downwards on the tree of life is its own particular success story, not a depot on the way to somewhere else. These particular creatures are only "transitional" in hindsight. In reality, evolution has no foresight: a lizard with feathers is not "on its way" to becoming a bird. It is simply a lizard with feathers. It's offspring may or may not eventually evolve into birds, but if they do that is because the environment suits such a path, not because it was an inevtiable or intended direction.
All modern living life is simply a single sample in time, not the endpoint of evolution. It too is as much "transitional" as any living thing that lived prior.
He has never pulished anything in any mainstream peer reviewed journal relevant to biology or molecular biology. In short, treating him and his work as if it were the peer-checked insight of an expert in the field he's talking about would be a bad idea. While not directly relevant to the need to address his arguments, his credentials are highly dubious, as is his knowledge of the relevant fields.
I also wanted to post this graphic from talk.origins:
<a href='http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/views.gif' target='_blank'>http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/views.gif</a>
It basically sums up the apparent disconnect between the sort of things that molecular biologists and chemists discuss and the things that creationists envision. If you don't know what a hypercycle or a protobiont is, then that's exactly the point: most creationist literature that tries to deal with the subject of abiogenesis is either woefully uninformed about the field it is attacking, or at best skims through some of the relevant scientific literature and pulls out a bunch of random cites that dicuss the problems that scientists are always discussing with each other... without including the context that these very same scientists are in fact working right then and there on figuring those problems out (that's what science DOES after all!)
Ok a little gem of knowledge here. The chances of an animal becoming a fossil in the first place is remote. Depending on the climate it may not happen at all. Its by pure chance that fossils are formed. Its by even rare luck that we find fossils. So the chances of finding a particular species to suit the ravenous creationist critics can be hard!
Second fact we have only been digging for fossils over the last 170 odd years, not everything has been found yet. I agree there are thousand of "transitional species" that haven’t been found yet. But believe me we haven’t yet found 1% of all extinct species yet! In time those species will be found. Already we have found hundreds of transitional species. We have already shown through transitional species how scales evolved into feathers. Monkeys into humans. The list goes on. I suggest you do research before saying "you haven’t found everything yet, therefore your incorrect". Which is basically what your saying and to be honest that sounds stupid! <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
To get a little perspective on how "difficult" it is to form a fossil, if all the people in the United States were to die right now, statistically speaking one person's skeleton would be preserved as a fossil. Then, of course, there's the chance that that one fossil is destroyed by the elements, rocks moving, etc. <u>Then</u>, of course, someone would have to come along at the right time to see it poking up out of the ground. Given all this, it's not surprising we have found so few fossils relatively speaking. <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Now, I understand, burying someone (or thing) 6 feet under is not condusive to fossil creation - neither is dying and having your body exposed to the elements. How then could these be formed? Perhaps a giant catastrophy? Perhaps a catastrophy large enough to form all the various layers these fossils are present in? Hmm, makes one think...
FOSSIL GRAVEYARDS
Perhaps the most challenging fossil phenomena for Darwinian apologists to explain are the vast graveyards of animal remains that are found throughout the world. Ongoing excavations in the Gobi Desert tell of one such sight that has become an embarrassment to evolutionists. Twenty-five therapod dinosaurs have been discovered along with 200 skulls of mammals. There is no evidence of the several million year evolutionary gap or of the iridium boundary that is thought to delineate when the dinosaurs became extinct. "The Gobi Desert of Central Asia is one of the earth’s desolate places. Yet the Gobi is a paradise for paleontologists. ...Our expeditions, jointly sponsored by the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and the American Museum of Natural History, have excavated dinosaurs, lizards and small mammals in an unprecedented state of preservation. Freshly exposed skeletons sometimes look more like the recent remains of a carcass than like an 80-million-year-old fossil. In yet another ironic twist, the rocks of the Gobi appear to be missing precisely those strata that currently hold the greatest public interest: no sections found thus far include the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary, when the dinosaurs became extinct. Whatever cataclysm wiped out the dinosaurs (and many other species then on the earth), its mark on Central Asia seems to have been erased." (Novacek, Michael J., Mark Norell, Malcolm C. McKenna, and James Clark, "Fossils of the Flaming Cliffs," Scientific American, vol. 271, 1994, pp. 60-69, as cited in Morris, 1997.)
Nor is the Gobi unique. Joe Taylor is perhaps the world’s premiere creator of fossil casts for museums and universities. In his fascinating book, Fossils, Facts, and Fantasies, he analyzes several of these sites around the world. In the United States one finds a profusion of skeletons in a hillside dinosaur graveyard in New Mexico, in the famous Bone Cabin Quarry of Wyoming, and at other sites. In Alberta, Canada there is a huge graveyard that stretches for many miles and holds innumerable dinosaurs bones. In Agate Springs, Nebraska a fossil graveyard of around 9,000 animals was found buried in alluvial deposits. The remains of hundreds of rhinos, three-toed horses, camels, giant wild boars, birds, plants, trees, sea shells and fish are mixed and intermingled in great confusion. In Tanzania, Belgium and Mongolia similar massive catastrophes captured vast populations and trapped them in a fossil graveyard of sediments and debris.
One of the most fascinating fossil graveyard of all is located in the southern United States. The Ashley Beds is an enormous phosphate graveyard that contains mixed remains of man with land and sea animals, notably dinosaurs, pleisosaurs, whales, sharks, rhinos, horses, mastodons, mammoths, porpoises, elephants, deer, pigs, dogs, and sheep. This catalogue of fossils from the phosphate beds was given in the records of Major Edward Willis who displayed them at multiple expositions (Willis, "Fossils and Phosphate Specimens," 1881.) Professor F.S. Holmes (paleontologist and curator of the College of Charleston’s Natural History Museum) described the fossil graveyard in a report to the Academy of Natural Sciences: "Remains of the hog, the horse and other animals of recent date, together with human bones mingled with the bones of the mastodon and extinct gigantic lizards." There can be little doubt what extinct gigantic lizard he referenced for he pictured a hadrosaurus on the front of his 1870 book The Phosphate Rocks of South Carolina and captioned it: "Skeleton of a Fossil Lizard eighteen feet in Length." Moreover, on page 31 he wrote, "It was in this Post-Pleiocene age, the period when the American Elephant, or Mammoth, the Mastodon, Rhinoceros, Megathereum, Hadrosaurus, and other gigantic quadrupeds roamed the Carolina forests, and repaired periodically to these Salt-lakes"... (p. 31.) The mixing of these remains was pell-mell throughout the roughly 40 square mile area of this deposit around Charleston, South Carolina. By one estimate, bones made up 65% of the extraordinary phosphate deposits in the region of the Ashley River basin before it was largely mined out. (Keener, J.C., The Garden of Eden and the Flood, 1901, p. 244.) Evolutionists have cast about trying to propose a credible mechanism for mixing creatures from Cretaceous to Holocene in this stratum, but none has been satisfactory and the matter has been expunged from current references to this site. (Watson, John Allen, Man, Dinosaurs, and Mammals Together, 2001, p. 7.)
Fossil formation is indeed very rare, though there are indeed some known places where sudden catastrophic events (like volcano ash, the way it worked in Pompei) can lay down many fossils in a single area. Again, mentioning one or two of these few locatins we are aware of IN THE ENTIRE WORLD is not good cause to lean back and say "ha, it seems fossil formation isn't so rare after all!" But unfortunately, these catastrophic events don't have any of the evidence of a worldwide flood, as you are implying.
But this was a tipoff as to where your latest copy/paste comes from: it seems to have been taken from the website of Genesis Park, which appears to be a Kent Hovind/Henry Morris (of the ICR)-type project.
<a href='http://www.genesispark.org/genpark/home.htm' target='_blank'>http://www.genesispark.org/genpark/home.htm</a>
Hovind, Morris and the ICR are considered to be joke, even amongst creationists. They quote-mine ridiculously (completely out of context quotes), try to pass off ancient and long-ago refuted work as a authoritative, and even just outright lie. Morris believes that all the fossils and major sediment layers come from a worldwide flood: an idea so preposterous, so belied by geological evidence, that it simply defies words. All three of the paragraphs here basically try to support versions of that claim.
All three also seem to be missing out on some basic information about geology, such as the fact that finding a complete geologic column is rare (though there are 25 locations in the world) because sediment layers are not laid down everywhere all the time on the planet. It's not surprising that a site like the Gobi might be missing the K/T boundary: sediment might well have been eroding away at that time in that particular place rather than being added. Again, the article tries to make this sound outrageous and telling, but it's just not. The reason the quote says it's "ironic" is simply because for such a trove of exciting dinosaur era fossils, it's unfortunate that it doesn't include the layer during their extinction, which was in hot demand at the time. "Freshly exposed skeletons sometimes look more like the recent remains of a carcass than like an 80-million-year-old fossil." doesn't mean that the fossils are litterally decaying fleshy bodies, just a hyperbolus way of saying that the quality (fidelity) and the completeness of the fossils is very high.
The second paragraph is the same thing: trying to write about fairly prosiac information as if they posed some surprising or deep threat to modern geology or evolution.
In the latter paragraph, I've never even heard of some of these things, but considering that the primary sources cited came from things that were published in the 19th century (!!!), it looks pretty obvious that they were stretching to find SOMETHING to support their claims. Yet they can't find any sources post-1901 (before modern geology was even invented!) to back up their claims about fossils in a disjointed geological strata. In this case, I'm guessing that "none has been satisfactory" means "scientists figured out the apparent discrepancy like, 70 years ago, but we're not going to mention that, and just claim that they haven't."
In short, flood geology is just batty. To explain a worldwide flood, creationists would have to overcome the fact that the "flood" somehow sorted the fossils into discrete layers in which only certain kinds of animals are found in each layer, and not by weight/density as they would have been if the layers were all put down in a flood. And, of course, there is the problem that the layers simply CANNOT have been laid down all at once anyway. Even if you refuse to acknowledge the reality of radioactive dating, there are tons of other methods that can verify this. I present two of them in my longer essays that I linked to in my first few posts.
Now: do you plan on ever getting around to address the basic arguments I made? Can you explain to me in your own words why you find evolution to be so implausible, common descent not true, the age of the earth not true? Either we get into an actual discussion here, or I'm going to stop jumping through these pointless hoops.
first of all, I find it implausable because of the absolute miniscuile chances involved.
It violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics - at its core, evolution must always violate this law. It is the "origin of life" equivalant to falling up hill.
Genetic mutation has never been observed to improve, modify or make an organism more complex.
here is a small cut/paste from nature:
Turtles have been turtles for two hundred and fifty million years. Turtles have an incredible skeleton. They live inside boxes and their limb girdles are inside the rib cage. That should mean millions of years of evolving. We should find millions of quarter turtles then half turtles and so on... We don't! The very first turtles were perfect turtles. There is not one fossil of any transitional or pre-turtle.
There are various mountains around the world, Matterhorn and Mythen Peak to name 2, where the fossil records are upside down. In fact, these sort of mountains appear on all the major continents. Explain upside down when there are millions of years involved. - the best evolutionists can come up with is that these mountains traversed cross country - mysteriously. Matterhorn apparently traveled for 30-60 miles.
Tree trunks that pass through multipal strata - evidence of either 100million year old trees, or some sort of catastrophy.
A relatively shallow mississippi river delta dates that river ~5-10 thousand years old.
Instances where using radioactive dating to discover that the higher strata are older than the lower strata.
decay of the earths magnetic field belies an earth billions of years old. Evolutionary theories to compensate for this are cubersome at best.
comet desintegration - if the galaxy was billions of years old, all the comets would be gone.
Saturns rings are unstable - they should have stableized in about 1 million years - yet they still haven't, suggesting a younger galaxy.
The fact that our galaxy hasn't rotated in on itself yet - the inner parts of a galaxy rotate faster, causing the outer portions to "fall inward" - yet we are still far enough out to be on one of the very first rotations of our own galaxy (if not the first)
So, there you have it - multiple reasons for a young earth, nay a young solar system and a young galaxy - and all in my own words!!
You do realize how large a timescale we're talking here? Like <u>nothing</u> that can be reproduced in a lab. Miniscule chances have a tendency of working out over long periods of time.
Also, consider how unlikely this universe as we know it is. How in the world do we exist here? How do we overcome these enormous odds? Answer: infinite universes, which if you read up on your physics is an increasingly likely possibility. Eventually the odds evened out, and we exist in the one universe where all these physical laws as we know them panned out.
Same thing for evolution: eventually, given enough time and enough planets, life as we know it spawned on one of them. It'd be a statistical impossiblity if life <u>didn't</u> form this way.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->It violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics - at its core, evolution must always violate this law. It is the "origin of life" equivalant to falling up hill.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
There are always exceptions to laws, especially when you try to apply laws relating to chemical interactions to the infinitely more complex entity that is life. Newton's Laws of Gravitation have been proven to only apply in a limited spectra of speeds and sizes; why can't the Law of Thermodynamics have exceptions as well?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Genetic mutation has never been observed to improve, modify or make an organism more complex.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You're kidding right? Bacteria mutating randomly, forming genes that produce resistance to standard pennicilin, you've never heard of that?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->here is a small cut/paste from nature:
Turtles have been turtles for two hundred and fifty million years. Turtles have an incredible skeleton. They live inside boxes and their limb girdles are inside the rib cage. That should mean millions of years of evolving. We should find millions of quarter turtles then half turtles and so on... We don't! The very first turtles were perfect turtles. There is not one fossil of any transitional or pre-turtle. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Did you just ignore the whole, "The fossil record is incomplete" thing we just talked about?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->There are various mountains around the world, Matterhorn and Mythen Peak to name 2, where the fossil records are upside down. In fact, these sort of mountains appear on all the major continents. Explain upside down when there are millions of years involved. - the best evolutionists can come up with is that these mountains traversed cross country - mysteriously. Matterhorn apparently traveled for 30-60 miles.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Well, when you look at how unstable the Earth and its tectonic plates are, it's not surprising that mountains "traveled"; actually, it was the plates underneath them that were moving. Heck, the mountains are created at the faults between two tectonic plates, is this motion and turbulence in the fossil record really that surprising?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Tree trunks that pass through multipal strata - evidence of either 100million year old trees, or some sort of catastrophy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What, the only catastrophes in history was Noah's Flood? Of course there are random disturbances in the general pattern; Earth changes too quickly for everything to be uniform.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->A relatively shallow mississippi river delta dates that river ~5-10 thousand years old.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What's your point? That entire region of the Americas was an inland sea at one point, it only dried out in recent history (geologically speaking). It's not surprising that the Mississippi is a "new" river. If you expect ALL rivers to date back to the dawn of time, you seriously need to brush up on your geology.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Instances where using radioactive dating to discover that the higher strata are older than the lower strata.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Once again, <u>instances</u>! We're looking at the overwhelming majority of the time! Nothing is constant on this planet, especially the planet itself. Rocks are moved, mountains are formed, hills are leveled, seas are drained, etc etc etc. But the fact that, through all this turmoil, certain things prove true the vast majority of the time leads to the inevitable conclusion that those things represent the truth.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->decay of the earths magnetic field belies an earth billions of years old. Evolutionary theories to compensate for this are cubersome at best.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
1) Evolutionary theories I've studied actually rely on the Earth being billions of years old; it's calculations that the earth is only a few million years old that throws off the evolution theory.
2)The earth's magnetic field has been reversing polarity ever since the earth was formed, and there is geological evidence to support this. If the earth's magnetic field is truly "decaying", then humanity is about to suffer the misfortune of one of these changing periods.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->comet desintegration - if the galaxy was billions of years old, all the comets would be gone.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
H'what? You think the comets would all be clumped together and attatched to planets because of gravity? If gravity were that strong, the moon be about to crash into the Earth. If I'm not mistaken, the moon is actually getting farther away from Earth....
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Saturns rings are unstable - they should have stableized in about 1 million years - yet they still haven't, suggesting a younger galaxy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
"Should have"? According to who? What basis of comparison do you have for this? Also, what does the formation of Saturn's rings have to do with Earth's formation? They weren't necessarily at the same time.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The fact that our galaxy hasn't rotated in on itself yet - the inner parts of a galaxy rotate faster, causing the outer portions to "fall inward" - yet we are still far enough out to be on one of the very first rotations of our own galaxy (if not the first)<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Tell ya what, if you can explain the exact mechanics behind the monster of a black hole at the center of our galaxy, and what its effect is on how this galaxy spins, then someone might have a chance at answering that. As it stands, we don't have a good enough knowledge of astrophysics to concretely explain this. But then again, you don't have any proof that we should be spiraling inwards anyway. For all you know, I could claim, "Due to the strange effects of black holes and dark matter, our solar system should be dancing across the galaxy like a super ball," and you couldn't really disprove me. That's how little you know.
Now, professional astrophysicists could debunk my claim. But they also could debunk yours. End result: a nullified argument.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->So, there you have it - multiple reasons for a young earth, nay a young solar system and a young galaxy - and all in my own words!!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
These are simplistic explanations that an unresearched high school student came up with off the top of his head. I'm sure there are even more clever ways of shooting your arguments down, but the fact that <i>I</i> can take a good crack at it is telling indeed.
Nice job avoiding Apos's questions though. <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->
I don't understand. How do you calculate the "chances" when you don't even understand the process? That's like saying that you can judge the chances of rolling a "64" with 6 dice without even knowing what pips the dice have on them, or how many sides they have.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->It violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics - at its core, evolution must always violate this law. It is the "origin of life" equivalant to falling up hill.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No, it doesn't (and indeed, this is another of the creationist arguments that even most creationists have given up using since it's so embarrasingly wrong). The 2nd law does not preclude or prevent chemical reactions!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Genetic mutation has never been observed to improve, modify or make an organism more complex.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Wrong, though misleading as well (since it is selection among variations that technically does the improving/modifying/complexifying, not single mutations directly)
As I explain in this post:
<a href='http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showpost.php?p=1199441&postcount=66' target='_blank'>http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showpost.p...41&postcount=66</a>
our experience with dogs demonstrates in a direct way that mutation HAS to have increased variation within populations, or else there would have been no differences for our breefing (artificial selection) to work on. But that's evne silly to bring up, because the point has been demonstrated bajillions of times by running things like fruit flies or mice through evolutionary filters. They adapt, they change, and these changes are the result of mutations because they are the result of variations. We've observed speciation in both the lab and in the wild.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Turtles have been turtles for two hundred and fifty million years. Turtles have an incredible skeleton. They live inside boxes and their limb girdles are inside the rib cage. That should mean millions of years of evolving. We should find millions of quarter turtles then half turtles and so on... We don't! The very first turtles were perfect turtles. There is not one fossil of any transitional or pre-turtle. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If that is a cite, where is the citation? Regardless, this is nonsense. I won't go over the problem with the idea that any one species is "transitional" between anything else ("half-turtle!??!" what is this person smoking?!), but this link notes the many many different sorts of turtle species we find in the fossil record, with som clear patterns in their development over time.
<a href='http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1b.html#rept2' target='_blank'>http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transi...rt1b.html#rept2</a>
As to why turtles haven't changed much (they HAVE changed: the fossil species simply aren't "exactly" the same as modern turtles), this is because evolution works via adaptation. If an animal is extremely well-suited to its environment already, then it is unlikely that the old form will be "given up upon." However, that doesn't preclude some species or groups within a species ALSO evolving further along other lines, it's just that we wouldn't recognize them as turtles any more, after a point. And the original line of turtles would still be there as well (evolution _doesn't_ predict that old species are eradicated by new ones: hence why there are still apes even though we AND modern apes both evolved from a common ancestor that was also technically an ape)
And that's a deeper point. Our very language that we use to describe living things is misleading. It divides animals into very gross categories that supposedly have hard, bright lines dividing one from another. That's a very Platonic way of thinking, and yet when it comes to the natural world, it's very unhelpful because nature is full of gradual transition rather than bright lines. So in a sense, creationists are setting people up when they claim that "turtles" never evolved from anything or to anything. That's because if they did, they wouldn't be called "turtles" anymore! But the fat is, evolution works by gradual steps. There is no generation where on thing becomes another: no point at which one species gives birth to a new species. Instead general names like "turtle" are assigned in HINDSIGHT, with the bias of only considering those animals alive today and then naming them. Animals of the past, however, are unlikely to fit, and do not fit, the categories we created in this era.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->There are various mountains around the world, Matterhorn and Mythen Peak to name 2, where the fossil records are upside down. In fact, these sort of mountains appear on all the major continents. Explain upside down when there are millions of years involved. - the best evolutionists can come up with is that these mountains traversed cross country - mysteriously. Matterhorn apparently traveled for 30-60 miles.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is almost embarrasing. "the best evolutionists can come up with" is called "basic geology" where I come from. Mountains rise and fall. Geologic strata twist and fold over on themselves, and so on. Our planet's surface is a dynamic one: as the recent horrible earthquake inspired tsunami aptly demonstrated.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Tree trunks that pass through multipal strata - evidence of either 100million year old trees, or some sort of catastrophy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
talk.origins has a page on this that's better than what I could write:
<a href='http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/trees.html' target='_blank'>http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/trees.html</a>
In short though: even <i>creationist</i> geologists from <b>100 years ago</b> understood the phenomena that created polystrate tree fossils. Knowledge of even basic geology (that layers can be laid down at radically different speeds) rebuts this silly claim. I mean good grief: this isn't even a MODERN creationist claim. Duane Gish was making this argument back when he was popular 20 years ago, for goodness sakes!
Don't you think that, if polystrate trees REALLY proved that modern geology had it all wrong, that geologists would take it seriously? I mean, if it really means what you claim it does, it would be VERY obvious proof that geology has things totally wrong about the composition of layers and call for a total revolution within the field. Countless geologists would stand to make themselves famous and very rich by researching this breakthrough. But the reality is, polystrate trees fit in jsut fine with modern geology, and they have for more than a HUNDRED YEARS (before modern geological methods even existed).
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->A relatively shallow mississippi river delta dates that river ~5-10 thousand years old. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Never heard of this one: going to have to get a cite for it.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Instances where using radioactive dating to discover that the higher strata are older than the lower strata.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's not entirely clear what this means. See the bit about geology above if what you mean is that higher (physically in one location) strata are found to be older than lower (physically in one location) those below it. Strata are often folded over on themselves. If what you mean is that actual higher (as in, younger in the geological column) strata are dated older then lower (geologicaly) strata, then I'm going to have to see a cite for that claim to figure out what the specific situation is that you're refferring to. But then, I thought you didn't believe in radioactive dating anyway?!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->decay of the earths magnetic field belies an earth billions of years old. Evolutionary theories to compensate for this are cubersome at best.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What sort of refutation is that: YOU say that they are cumbersome? Do you even know what they are? It sounds like you are just quoting someone on this without knowing what they are talking about. In fact, I'm pretty sure you ARE just quoting it, because someone pulled this exact same one out on me recently.
Our magnetic field is not constant. In fact, NO magnetic field based on what's in our planet (the rotating core) is constant. Our field measurably waxes and wanes (it doesn't just "decay"), and even periodically (anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 years) reverses polarity (North becomes South). This isn't just a "theory": this is recorded right in igneous rocks where iron filiments are "pointed" towards magnetic north when the rock is cooling, and get frozen that way when its fully cool. This direction completely switches periodically, following the pole reversal. You can call it "cumbersome" if you want, but it's also the truth.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->comet desintegration - if the galaxy was billions of years old, all the comets would be gone.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Except not. The Oort Cloud and the Kupier belt (the part of the cloud that passes through the plane of our solar system) are where comet-like bodies reside near our solar system. This is where comets come from: periodically spit by gravity out of their distant orbits to spin around the largest mass in the area: the sun.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Saturns rings are unstable - they should have stableized in about 1 million years - yet they still haven't, suggesting a younger galaxy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
First of all, no: try 100 million years. Regardless, Saturn didn't always have its rings (they are basically gravitationally captured space debris), and its moon's gravitationally "shepard" the rings. When the rings formed around Saturn doesn't have anything to do with the age of anything anyway. Are you claiming that Saturn supposedly always had rings: even before the solar system formed?!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The fact that our galaxy hasn't rotated in on itself yet - the inner parts of a galaxy rotate faster, causing the outer portions to "fall inward" - yet we are still far enough out to be on one of the very first rotations of our own galaxy (if not the first)<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is particularly silly in that anyone with a computer can simulate galaxies and show that it's not true. This subject is really too complicated to get into at length (lots and lots of physics), but suffice to say that if it were so obvious, then you'd be able to cite even one acredited scientist who studies these sorts of things who thinks its true. The idea that the thousands of people that study and model these sorts of things are ALL part of some giant conspiracy to hold back information like this is just absurd.
I should also note that most of these arguments, if not all of them, and perhaps while written out by you, are virtually verbatim from Kent Hovind. Contrats on being decieved by one of the most dishonest of all creationists, Dr. Dino himself! (and many of these arguments are on Answers in Genesis' page of "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use") <a href='http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dont_use.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dont_use.asp</a>
You can, of course, keep throwing these claims at me if you want. But you could also stop and think "well, why do all these arguments I've heard turn out to be so bogus, so laughably silly in light of all the modern sciences, even those done by highly religious people who would have no reason to engage in any conspiracy to cover up the truth. Maybe while I'm not yet convinced of evolution or the age of the solar system or anything like that, I should also be a little more suspicious of the people who came up with all these bogus arguments too."
This is why I hate religion it breads stupidity!
"Give a man a fish he will fead for a day. Give a man religion and he will starve to death while praying for a fish"
/me rolls up sleeve.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->It violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics - at its core, evolution must always violate this law. It is the "origin of life" equivalent to falling up hill.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
2nd law dictates the direction heat must travel and the quantity of energy that gets transferred. Evolution and this 2nd law collide? Hmm I guess if the man has been out in the hot sun all day and the wife sitting in a bathtub full of ice we may be able to calculate the thermal equilibrium of the two. Dude sprouting random physical laws without evidence makes you look stupid Mkay.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Genetic mutation has never been observed to improve, modify or make an organism more complex.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Wrong again. IT has been observed in the common house fly which can go through many generation in the space of a month. Much easier to observe than a mouse or human who’s life span are years not days. Now the experiment consisted of exposing the flies to certain physical and chemical harm. over a period of weeks those flies who’s genes gave them an advantage survived and those flies who couldn’t cope died. Therefore "natural selection" at work. Therefore random genetic mutation proved to give these flies an advantage. I will try and find the paper, I have it lying around the house somewhere.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Turtles have been turtles for two hundred and fifty million years. Turtles have an incredible skeleton. They live inside boxes and their limb girdles are inside the rib cage. That should mean millions of years of evolving. We should find millions of quarter turtles then half turtles and so on... We don't! The very first turtles were perfect turtles. There is not one fossil of any transitional or pre-turtle. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Wrong again. Your going well today aren’t you!! There has been one species that has been found to bridge the gap called Ecuatorianas . However unfortunately we haven’t found many more. So because one species hasn’t had "millions of fossils" found means everything is incorrect?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->here are various mountains around the world, Matterhorn and Mythen Peak to name 2, where the fossil records are upside down. In fact, these sort of mountains appear on all the major continents. Explain upside down when there are millions of years involved. - the best evolutionists can come up with is that these mountains traversed cross country - mysteriously. Matterhorn apparently traveled for 30-60 miles.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Let me introduce you to something called tectonic drift. Such a process along plate areas causes mountains. Because such process has that much pressure and every .Rock strata can be rotated a full 180 degrees. For more information on tectonic drift
<a href='http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/vwlessons/plate_tectonics/introduction.html' target='_blank'>http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/vwless...troduction.html</a>
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Tree trunks that pass through multipal strata - evidence of either 100million year old trees, or some sort of catastrophy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
OK have you ever seen a cliff? a small incline hill. This is not uncommon to see a tree stretching over 2-3 sediment layers. After a landslide or some such event a tree may fall over. given that its on an angle when the sediment builds up again we can see the tree stretching over such a "long period" of time. Its something that geologist get taught every early on. Another explanation is where strata has become twisted and uplifted due to plate movement and continent compression. Its no miracle. Nothing fancy.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->A relatively shallow mississippi river delta dates that river ~5-10 thousand years old.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
To be honest I don’t know anything about the Mississippi delta. However if its like any other delta of river 5-10,000 years old seems about right. Being shallow is the sediment build up due to its age. Now your point being ? ITs shallow therefore the worlds as old as the Mississippi?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Instances where using radioactive dating to discover that the higher strata are older than the lower strata.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Hmm, See above when it comes to tectonic movement. Or another explanation is depending on the rock surrounding it is quite possible to have a more radioactive layer than the one bellow. this can throw off testing techniques. Even though your testing for a particular isotope its quite possible for it to become contraindicated by the surrounding rock.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->decay of the earths magnetic field belies an earth billions of years old. Evolutionary theories to compensate for this are cumbersome at best.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The church is an expert on astronomy now as well? the magnetic field is fading but it also regenerates itself from time to time. its just like a glacier. sometimes its in advance sometimes its retreating. It goes through these stages. go to the nasa website Im sure you will find heaps of information about it.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->comet desintegration - if the galaxy was billions of years old, all the comets would be gone.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
ROLF !!! New stars new planets new everything is being created as we speak. YES including comets! Comets can be trapped in a field of debris called the kuiper belt and also the Oort cloud. They are where all the rubble from our solar system exists. Many icy and rocky bodies exist out there. they collide from time to time and a new dormient icy Rockey body flies towards the centre of our solar system as it gets closer to the sun it begins to heat up and POW!!!! a new comet is born. Once again its by chance that two bodies collide out there.
Or when a neighbouring star passes by , the shear gravity of that neighbouring solar system slingshots many huge meteorites and comets our way. Once again you prove didely squat !
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Saturns rings are unstable - they should have stableized in about 1 million years - yet they still haven't, suggesting a younger galaxy.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Of course its rings are unstable!! dude you know how they were formed? They were formed by 2 or more moons colliding and disintegrating. IT wasn’t meant to have any rings but it does. All the dust is in a decaying orbit as it wasn’t launched by a man made fully calculated mission. . IT isn’t meant to re-stabilize. There isn’t some force going "those rings are meant to be there" . They just happened and its going to disperse. I have no idea why that suggest a young galaxy as that is happening inside a solar system, inside a planetary system! IT suggest FA to a young universe!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->The fact that our galaxy hasn't rotated in on itself yet - the inner parts of a galaxy rotate faster, causing the outer portions to "fall inward" - yet we are still far enough out to be on one of the very first rotations of our own galaxy (if not the first)<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
OK this galaxy is a spiral galaxy agreed? well To begin with it didn’t have its lovely spiral shape. Our galaxy has become the size it is by cannibalizing other galaxies. infact we are predicted to swallow the small/large ( cant remember which) Mangellic clouds in the next 100 million odd years. This galaxy started off small and grew. Now we don’t fall "inward" as we are in an "orbit" that’s why we are on the outer arm. we are constantly falling over the horizon of the galaxy. It spins faster in the middle because of more mass. It is theorized that a black hole is at the centre of our galaxy because of the way it spins and how fast it is spinning. To say we are on our first rotation is bull dust . We are on the outer reaches for no particular reason. Space out here is less dense than in the middle that’s why we lag behind in the spinning savy?
How can that be true when many of the greatest scientists who ever lived were religious? Even Darwin was a Christian (though to be fair he became more of an agnostic later in life).
First of all, the treas I refered to as being multi-strata are well known. They came from certain coal mines. They are petrified. The remains don't have a root system, and for all intentes and purposes, they look as though they are plunged through millions of years of evolutionary history.
This raises doubt for me - the fact that these trees can even exist says that labeling strata with an age is not a good idea - especially when scientists go around the world and say "this is terassic, and this is - insert age - ", but in other parts of the world the layers are reversed.
Concerning the Oort Cloud - last time I checked, it too is still just a theory.
Concerning your fruit flies, you are talking about survivial of the fiittest, micro-evolutoinary stuff. Hey, thats all fine and dandy - But the net result was, those fruit flies are still fruit flies. In order for evolution to work, that fruit fly needs to Grow, or Evolve in such a way that it is no longer a fruit fly, and it needs to do it randomly without getting itself killed, and without the new trait being harmful to it. Macro-evolution - big picture - there is a distinct difference, and the second of those two can't happen. -feel free to show me a case where it has.
Second law of theromodynamics - yes it deals directly with energy and the transfer of heat - but it explains more than that. It explains why your cloths get worn, why things break, why people / animals / everything has to eat, why the sun burns out. To put it in its most basic terms, things go from a state of order to a state of disorder - naturally. Now apply that to evolution, if you will. Evolution insists that creatures get MORE complex over time - going from a state of disorder to order! Now, this is not a natural thing - which is why I compaired it to falling uphill.
In order to circumvent that rather large problem, evolutionists say "but in small instances - like on earth - that can change! We get our energy from the sun!" Great, thats all fine and dandy. That still doesn't mean that there is any driving factor to imbue this sunlight into making things more complex. So I bake a planet for a few eons - can I expect life? By that reasoning mercury should be overflowing with organics!
You atempted a refute of the earths magentic field decay, citing a "cyclical" nature of renewal. I suppose that you are referring to the polarity reversal that happens every so often. Now, I havent brought up the flood until now - at least not directly, but here is another great spot where it fits the evidence. Dont you think that massive crust upheaval could cause a polarity reversal? - infact several of them (think earth quake aftershock) - as sediments are being laid down world wide?
See, evolutionists <b>assume</b> renewal comes with the polarity reversal - because if it doesn't renew, then it doesn't fit their timeline. All we know is it changes direction - renewal is just another theory.
Just one more little question I have. How come recorded history is only ~ 10,000 years old? All of our records of "man" (bones, what have you) seem to indicate that ancient man was at least as smart as modern man. Don't you think that perhaps ancient man would look at the skin of the animal he just killed and think to write on it? - to at least paint a picture? I mean, these ancient guys have been around millions of years! - Some of them have to have stores to tell. - surely we would find more of them - heck they had millions of years to reproduce!
On the contrary. I suggest that a shorter, much more recent stone age would fit the evidence we find. It would do well to explain the small numbers and the lack of stuff left behind.
Now I know at least one of you is a "Christian disliker" at best - but perhaps if you put some of that bias away, you might see were not all stupid fishless prayers.
First of all, the treas I refered to as being multi-strata are well known. They came from certain coal mines. They are petrified. The remains don't have a root system, and for all intentes and purposes, they look as though they are plunged through millions of years of evolutionary history.
This raises doubt for me - the fact that these trees can even exist says that labeling strata with an age is not a good idea - especially when scientists go around the world and say "this is terassic, and this is - insert age - ", but in other parts of the world the layers are reversed.
Concerning the Oort Cloud - last time I checked, it too is still just a theory.
Concerning your fruit flies, you are talking about survivial of the fiittest, micro-evolutoinary stuff. Hey, thats all fine and dandy - But the net result was, those fruit flies are still fruit flies. In order for evolution to work, that fruit fly needs to Grow, or Evolve in such a way that it is no longer a fruit fly, and it needs to do it randomly without getting itself killed, and without the new trait being harmful to it. Macro-evolution - big picture - there is a distinct difference, and the second of those two can't happen. -feel free to show me a case where it has.
Second law of theromodynamics - yes it deals directly with energy and the transfer of heat - but it explains more than that. It explains why your cloths get worn, why things break, why people / animals / everything has to eat, why the sun burns out. To put it in its most basic terms, things go from a state of order to a state of disorder - naturally. Now apply that to evolution, if you will. Evolution insists that creatures get MORE complex over time - going from a state of disorder to order! Now, this is not a natural thing - which is why I compaired it to falling uphill.
In order to circumvent that rather large problem, evolutionists say "but in small instances - like on earth - that can change! We get our energy from the sun!" Great, thats all fine and dandy. That still doesn't mean that there is any driving factor to imbue this sunlight into making things more complex. So I bake a planet for a few eons - can I expect life? By that reasoning mercury should be overflowing with organics!
You atempted a refute of the earths magentic field decay, citing a "cyclical" nature of renewal. I suppose that you are referring to the polarity reversal that happens every so often. Now, I havent brought up the flood until now - at least not directly, but here is another great spot where it fits the evidence. Dont you think that massive crust upheaval could cause a polarity reversal? - infact several of them (think earth quake aftershock) - as sediments are being laid down world wide?
See, evolutionists <b>assume</b> renewal comes with the polarity reversal - because if it doesn't renew, then it doesn't fit their timeline. All we know is it changes direction - renewal is just another theory.
Just one more little question I have. How come recorded history is only ~ 10,000 years old? All of our records of "man" (bones, what have you) seem to indicate that ancient man was at least as smart as modern man. Don't you think that perhaps ancient man would look at the skin of the animal he just killed and think to write on it? - to at least paint a picture? I mean, these ancient guys have been around millions of years! - Some of them have to have stores to tell. - surely we would find more of them - heck they had millions of years to reproduce!
On the contrary. I suggest that a shorter, much more recent stone age would fit the evidence we find. It would do well to explain the small numbers and the lack of stuff left behind.
Now I know at least one of you is a "Christian disliker" at best - but perhaps if you put some of that bias away, you might see were not all stupid fishless prayers. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->First of all, the treas I refered to as being multi-strata are well known. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yes, they are well known. Well known examples of creationist nonsense which they can't find a single serious, published geologist out of thousands to endorse their 100 year-old nosnense. It's truly, unbelievably ridiculous. Christian creationists of a <b>100 years ago</b> were the ones that explained how polystrate trees work. That's because they were familiar with hte basic concepts of geology, of which you seem laughably ignorant. Tell me again about how geologists all over the world, from every nation and religion, every gender and ideology, in all sorts of competing schools and debates... tell me again how they are ALL somehow in on this plot to hide the evidence of a Young Earth by simply inventing crazy ideas like the geological column? I mean, you REALLY believe this tinfoil hat stuff?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Concerning the Oort Cloud - last time I checked, it too is still just a theory. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
When was the "last time you checked" exactly? Because the Oort cloud has been a commonly accepted fact in astronomy since the 50s.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Concerning your fruit flies, you are talking about survivial of the fiittest, micro-evolutoinary stuff. Hey, thats all fine and dandy - But the net result was, those fruit flies are still fruit flies. In order for evolution to work, that fruit fly needs to Grow, or Evolve in such a way that it is no longer a fruit fly, and it needs to do it randomly without getting itself killed, and without the new trait being harmful to it.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Last time I checked, that's not what you asked. You asked for increase in complexity even evidence of adaptation, and that's exactly what you got evidence of. Now that it's staring you in the face, you are spinning around and demanding something else instead. And th fact is, what we have at the end of the process is NOT the same sort of creature we began with. You can still call it a fruit fly if you want, but that's smoke and mirrors: they reality is that the evolved populations have traits that the past populations did not. If you want evidence of speciation, you should have asked for than in the first place. Let's get to that now then...
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Macro-evolution - big picture - there is a distinct difference, and the second of those two can't happen. -feel free to show me a case where it has.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
There is no barrier between "micro" and "macro" evolution. They are the exact same process, just happening over a longer period of time. Please: explain to me what would prevent small changes from building up to large ones over successive generations. What "stops" this from happening? The answer is: nothing. There is nothing that "prevents" small changes from accumulating. They can, and they do.
Speciation has been observed over and over and over again in nature. Longer-term developments, which take longer than all recorded human history, are reflected in the fossil record, but more importantly in the genetic record, where the divergence of genes from a common source is obvious.
For examples of observed speciation, try this article, one of my favorites:
Kluger, Jeffrey. Go fish. (rapid fish speciation in African lakes). Discover. V13. P18(1) March, 1992.
I could have posted any of a hundred published each YEAR on instances of speciation that took place within the history of human biological observation.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->To put it in its most basic terms, things go from a state of order to a state of disorder - naturally. Now apply that to evolution, if you will. Evolution insists that creatures get MORE complex over time - going from a state of disorder to order! Now, this is not a natural thing - which is why I compaired it to falling uphill.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Did you even read the Answers in Genesis website? Those people are hardcore Young Earth Creationists, and even they admit that this whole line of argument is utter bullplop.
The 2nd law does NOT state that things go from order to disorder in any general sense: the "order" refferred to is entropic order (i.e. energy content). It states instead that energy spontaneously disperses from being localized to becoming spread out: i.e. that systems cannot be perfectly efficient and work without a loss of energy (this is why perpetual motion machines are impossible). It has nothing to do with order in a general sense. If the 2nd law actually said what you claim it does, then things like snow flakes would be impossible.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->In order to circumvent that rather large problem, evolutionists say "but in small instances - like on earth - that can change! We get our energy from the sun!" Great, thats all fine and dandy. That still doesn't mean that there is any driving factor to imbue this sunlight into making things more complex. So I bake a planet for a few eons - can I expect life? By that reasoning mercury should be overflowing with organics!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Except that "reasoning" is insane. The point of the sun is not that it creates order or magically makes babies appear out of the dirt. The point is that it imparts energy: enough to make up for what's lost via entropy. That's all that matters as far as the 2nd law.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->You atempted a refute of the earths magentic field decay, citing a "cyclical" nature of renewal. I suppose that you are referring to the polarity reversal that happens every so often. Now, I havent brought up the flood until now - at least not directly, but here is another great spot where it fits the evidence. Dont you think that massive crust upheaval could cause a polarity reversal?<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Er, no. In case you didn't already know this, the earth's crust is an EXTREMELY thin layer on the outside of the Earth. The Earth's magnetic field, however, is generated by its rotating core via the dynamo effect. The entire surface of the Earth could blow up and it wouldn't affect the magnetic field one bit. Regardless, a worldwide flood (of which there is no evidence for in the geological record anyway) wouldn't cause the polarity to reverse every couple of 10,000 - 100,000 years (and these reversals date back, WAY back, in a staggered pattern that can be found in igneous rock amongst the strata).
You jump from one subject to the next like you have ADD. Before you were claiming that the field decays and thus the earth can't be very old. Now you are claiming that a worldwide flood somehow coaxed the field to reverse over and over. Can you make up your mind as to what crazy, nonsensical thing it's doing?
The only thing you seem to be able to shout is "well that's just a theory you made up to discredit the Bible." For all you seem to know, scientists just sit around in rooms all day making stuff up just because it will hurt creationists' feelings. The actual reality is very very different: thousands of competing scientists all studying the same evidence and doing actual RESEARCH to prove this or that, again and again. They don't generally give a damn about creationism vs. evolution debates: they are just trying to discover groundbreaking new stuff so they can get papers published and contribute to world knowledge. The pole reversals aren't just some dream an evolutionist had one night. They are solidly documented and TESTED ideas that have stood the test of time: ideas that, in fact, were developed by Christians!!!
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->How come recorded history is only ~ 10,000 years old? All of our records of "man" (bones, what have you) seem to indicate that ancient man was at least as smart as modern man.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yeah, all those cellphones they made! The reason recorded history is so recent to the point when we're around to comment on it is because... we're only now around to talk and think about it. If mankind had developed language and all the complex mechanisms of civilization earlier, then we'd live back thousands or millions of years ago, we'd have recorded history that went even FARTHER back and you'd still be here throwing out the same goofball argument about how our even earlier ancestors must have been smart enough to write Shakespeare. What a depressing thought. Anyway, the reason we don't have recorded history going back past 10,000 years or so is that that's about the time when mankind began (very crudely) to actually record history.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Some of them have to have stores to tell. - surely we would find more of them - heck they had millions of years to reproduce!<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
There are, of course, cave paintings that go back farther than 10,000 years. But, give early man a break. He had barely even developed a rudimentary language, much less learned to create complex oil paints.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Now I know at least one of you is a "Christian disliker" at best - but perhaps if you put some of that bias away, you might see were not all stupid fishless prayers.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Unfortunately for you, evolutionary biologists count tons of Christians amonst their number. The creationist side, however only seems to have nutcases like Hovind (who you are simply parrotting at me). It isn't your Christianity that makes you stupid: not at all. If you are being stupid, it's your own darn fault.
Man has always wanted things on his own terms. As of late the trend is for an Atheistic egocentric world view. In order to maintain this world view - along with a sence of "right" - man has to take God out of the picture - after all, it is God's laws that man breaks, and man doesn't want to feel guilty anymore.
In order to successfully pull God out of the picture, this world, this universe must be "caused" by natural processes - be it origin of life, evolution, speciation - everything must happen "naturally" and easily.
Unfortunatly, these "natural" things are very rare and require very precise situations to happend. The evolutionist responds by throwing a few billion years at it.
So you see - it is a "massive conspiracy" - but it is one that people participate because they don't have a choice. If you want to live your life (I'm not talking you Apos specific) denying God and his work, then evolution is your only option. It flows directly from that sort of philosophy. Of course, this is a very easy and popular road to follow because "you can't prove God" - not to mention the "moral freedoms" and self pleasing lifestyle that it supports. Which leads us all the way back to square one.
It comes as no surprise to me that there are many more evolutionists than creationists. Through this discussion, I hope you have at least come to realize that there is more than one model - more than one timeline that "fits" the evidence. I also hope you realize that both models require "faith" - weather it be in God or a very lucky little planet hurling its way through space-time. Which requires more faith is entirely subjective.
This leaves one other class of people - Theistic evolutionists (Gods creation through evolution). Ultimatly, these people want it both ways. They want to be moral, and recognize God as the ultimate source of morality, but they don't want to be subject to him in the biblical sence. It starts with making the Bible a "good book" - then spreads to making it the "ten suggestions" - ultimately making it a smorgasboard of good ideas and "guidelines" - of course evolution fits well - after all, God has to fit Human Scientific Discovery, not the other way around. I'm not sure why they want to rob God of the ability to create the world in a weak - perhaps they are trying to please those in the "scientific" community, at the expense of Gods nature.
Of course: you've followed the "standard creationist handbook" to the letter so far, why not complete it by running away, with a few nasty parting shots? And run away you should. You've now left a permanent record on this webserver as to the fact that you are a person willing to criticize things that they then demonstrate, for all to see, that they don't understand in the slightest. That should be pretty embarrasing at this point. You've done little more than simply parrot some of the more laughable creationist arguments: arguments that I've repeatedly shown that even most fundamentalist Christian creationists, who AGREE with you about te Young Earth and the Bible being science, think are dishonest, wrong, and shouldn't be used. And yet, instead of admitting that you were in error, you self-righteously sulk away with some nasty words for everyone that doesn't think you have any ground to stand on. And really, who COULD respect such behavior?
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Man has always wanted things on his own terms. As of late the trend is for an Atheistic egocentric world view. In order to maintain this world view - along with a sence of "right" - man has to take God out of the picture - after all, it is God's laws that man breaks, and man doesn't want to feel guilty anymore.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You speak of below the belt, but this is simply one of the most nasty arguments one could make. Centuries of honest, sincere exploration of the cosmos to discover its mysteries: much of it done by CHRISTIANS who believed themselves to be exploring the wonders of God's creation, and you sum it all up as a petty attempt for people to justify stealing cookies out of the cookie jar.
How petty. When you are shown that all your arguments turn out to be lies that you got suckered into believing, instead of questioning the people who told them to you, you decide to impugn the motives of millions of incredible hardworking and honest people, most of them with such a diversity of opinions that there is simply no way to claim that they are all conspiring for any single purpose other than the one on which they all agree: that we should follow where the evidence leads us, and measure truth only against what we can all establish by proven argument and research.
What is ego-centric? Ego centric is thinking that mankind is the center of the universe: the sole purpose of all that exists. Ego-centric is in thinking that instead of subjecting your ideas to peer review: instead of testing them against the evidence, they are simply true because you believe them. Nothing could be more egotistical than that.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Through this discussion, I hope you have at least come to realize that there is more than one model - more than one timeline that "fits" the evidence.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You haven't even begun to demonstrate that this is the case. Though you have not actually presented ANY alternative timeline (just lamely suggested a worldwide flood) that accounts for the evidence we have, I very much doubt that if you did it would be different from the ones I've heard from creationists over and over. And far from fitting the evidence, their timeline is contradicted in so many different ways by the evidence, taken down by so many different arguments from disciplines of knowledge as remote as chemistry is from semiotics, that it may be one of the most decisively DISproven hypotheses of all time. Generate virtually any testable prediction from creationist theory, check that prediction against unknown evidence, and it turns out to be dead wrong.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I also hope you realize that both models require "faith" - weather it be in God or a very lucky little planet hurling its way through space-time. Which requires more faith is entirely subjective.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
No.
And here you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what's at stake. You are claiming that both science and creationism require faith: but in fact they don't work anything like each other. You begin with a conclusion, believed on faith, that the Bible is a literal account of reality. This is by far a minority extremist position even with Christianity, but it is your faith, and you are welcome to it. Next, you... well actually there is no next. You're already done. That's the end of your story because you have decided tout suite what the truth is without having to do any sort of work whatsoever in going out and looking for it.
Science is an entirely different process. It begins not with a conclusion, but with a set of observed facts: facts on which all can agree. Next, hundreds if not thousands of different people, each perhaps with their own agendas and biases, try to formulate hypotheses that would explain those facts. Next, they publically subject those ideas to the test: tests of evidence, designed by both themselves AND a host of skeptics. Tests that can be repeated by anyone who cares to try. And the results of those tests help rule out bogus hypotheses, suggest new lines of inquiry, discover new facts, and so on. And this process then continues apace, slowly adding to our knowledge by winnowing away the possible alternative explanations. Over time, major theories can be produced that explain all the relevant facts in one area and survive all testing. These then provide the framework for more incisive explorations of the specifics. And still, by their use in dredging up new evidence and facts, they are continually tested: for science has only two real rules: no one is a final authority, and no one gets to say "game over."
To claim that both methods are just "faith" is absurd. Not only is your method the only one that puts faith at it's center, your method is just, and there is really no better word for it: lazy. It requires nothing. No one actually has to go out and DO anything. No one even ever has to deign to look for facts. Now, sure, they CAN look for facts and try to squeeze them into their belief, but this is secondary: their beliefs didn't come from facts in the first place, weren't informed by them to begin with.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->I'm not sure why they want to rob God of the ability to create the world in a weak - perhaps they are trying to please those in the "scientific" community, at the expense of Gods nature.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Of course: if they disagree with your beliefs, the answer MUST be that they have some base motive, rather than that they are honest explorers into what they see as God's creation.
Hate to rain on your parade but modern humans have only been around for WAY WAY less than that. Infact modern homo sapiens or "humans" as creationists call them have only been around for less than 100,000 years.
For about 85,000 years of this man was in small tribes of about 20-40 individuals. They were hunter gathers and used a Hierarchal social pattern much like the one we use today. Like most social mammals this "pyramid" hierarchy leaves us constantly feeling of something more “greater and higher than ourselves” like a more important social member. Is it any wonder that when humans became smart enough to understand the world around us and start to ask questions that this primordial social Patten gave way to "higher beings" when there were no more higher social cavemen .
Recorded history as we know it started with the Greek's . However it goes back 5-10,000 years before when humans started to domesticate animals and live in larger groups. There were thousands of tiny societies each with there own record system its only when they started to merge is when common languages formed . Today we still have a hierarchal system in place, but our minds have not yet come to grasps with groups larger than 20-40 people. How many people are you in close and constant contact with? Im not talking about your work mate who works at the photocopier and you say “hi” as you pass him to your desk. Im talking about real friends and real family? On average no more than 40. See a remembrance to our ancestral friends? Its because even though we don’t like to admit it humans are still controlled by instincts. Religion is an instinct to the overwhelming felling of something else which rose from the murky depths of the primal mammal dominants, or sexual selection!
Your child has a much higher chance to survive if it’s the offspring of somebody that is high on the social ladder. Plus that person at the top of the social ladder usually will have better genes. It’s a simple premise that we are all still bound by.
This urge to have a better child with somebody at the top, has lead , in one way or another to religion as we know it today. The something greater than ourselves.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->till now I haven’t mentioned the flood<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Smart boy. But then you had to go mention it .
IT DIDNT HAPPEN , but hey lets amuse our friend here. If it did happen and the water is lapping at the top of Mt Everest. The world would have 3 times more water in it than it does now. If you were take a breath of air you would drown from the extra humidity. The bible is a moral guideline not a history/science book!!
This forum seems to have a more even mix of atheists and creationists. Over in the AusNS forums I was the only atheist in a similar debate. Unfortunately I was dealing with about six creationists two of which were admins. As you can guess when they started to lose they locked the topic The debate got interesting when a certain person disagreed against the carbon copy posts of the "bible bashers"
If anybody is interested by this discussion have a look at this one as its quite amusing: <a href='http://www.ausns.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9785' target='_blank'>Ausns Religion debate</a>
It is amazing how when you completely out debate a creationist, they just claim this 'victim' complex and then bow out of the debate without attempting to prove why they are right or why the evolutionists are 'incorrect'.
Essentially, all you have done is declared your defeat to superior arguments.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->So you see - it is a "massive conspiracy" - but it is one that people participate because they don't have a choice. If you want to live your life (I'm not talking you Apos specific) denying God and his work, then evolution is your only option<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Best of all, you end it with one of the most ignorant straw mans around.
Of course, anyone who has been in these debates or has been doing this for a while, is more than aware of what kinds of strawmans and tactics that creationists use. I unfortunately couldn't have joined in this when pepe was beginning to come out with the truely hillarious arguments I have come to love rebutting, but I was busy with another similar argument on a different forum.
Ironically, the creationists in that thread did the exact same tactics and refused to meet my arguments, just as Pepe did. Funny how this all seems to consistently work out to a similar conclusion. I admire you Apos for being so patient, and for a change I could read the rebuttals instead of writing them for once!
Man has always wanted things on his own terms. As of late the trend is for an Atheistic egocentric world view. In order to maintain this world view - along with a sence of "right" - man has to take God out of the picture - after all, it is God's laws that man breaks, and man doesn't want to feel guilty anymore.
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Atheists DONT believe in a god, GEDDIT? Egocentrical? Am I not a pinko commie no more?
EDIT: Sorry for the one liner, was provoked.