Jabin said:

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Nobody is forcing their pre-suppositions on science. It is my view that it precisely those presuppositions that define science, and which makes science useful.

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Except all of the founders of science were doing wonderful science without those presuppositions. And there are today thousands of Christians who are scientists and who do not necessarily share in those presuppositions. So it's not the presuppositions that makes science useful.

Also, there's lots in science where we do look for indicia for non-materialistic explanations. For example, when archaeologists find flint cherds, they have to determine whether they were caused by purely materialistic means or created by non-materialistic means, i.e., humans. They have developed a test to make that determination (but don't ask me to recite the elements of the test because I have no idea). Concluding that the cherds were created by humans and thus stopping the analysis of how they might be created naturally is not anti-science.

Similarly, the various efforts to listen for intergalactic messages from intelligent sources (SETI) have developed tests to be able to distinguish random noise from non-materialistic intelligent signals. If one of those radio signals ever passed the test, concluding that some extra-terrestrial intelligence had sent it would not be anti-science. (Interestingly, DNA passes all of the tests used by the various SETI groups.)

Bill Dembski has come up with a test which he terms "specified complexity". He explains it as:

"An event exhibits specified complexity if it is contingent and therefore not necessary; if it is complex and therefore not readily repeatable by chance; and if it is specified in the sense of exhibiting an independently given pattern. Note that a merely improbable event is not sufficient to eliminate chanceby flipping a coin long enough, one will witness a highly complex or improbable event."

Intelligent Design - Bill Dembski

An example he provides is Mt. Rushmore. Anyone taking a look at it immediately recognizes that it was created by non-materialistic causes. It is not an abdication of science to do so. Rather, it is recognizing the evidence that something intelligent has interfered with natural processes.

He also provides this further example:

"The important thing about specifications is that they be objectively given and not arbitrarily imposed on events after the fact. For instance, if an archer fires arrows at a wall and then paints bull's-eyes around them, the archer imposes a pattern after the fact. On the other hand, if the targets are set up in advance ("specified"), and then the archer hits them accurately, one legitimately concludes that it was by design."

So to recognize that something super-intelligent has jiggered with the universe and life is not anti-science. To the contrary, it is willingly following the evidence and not being sidetracked by erroneous presuppositions.

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Except all of the founders of science were doing wonderful science without those presuppositions. And there are today thousands of Christians who are scientists and who do not necessarily share in those presuppositions. So it's not the presuppositions that makes science useful.


Can you name any important discoveries by the early founders of science (or even in modern science) where the reliance on supernatural causes were central to that discovery and to the methods and by which the discoveries were made? Are the actions of God explicit in gravitational theory or machinations of the Calvin cycle?

For example, when archaeologists find flint cherds, they have to determine whether they were caused by purely materialistic means or created by non-materialistic means, i.e., humans. They have developed a test to make that determination (but don't ask me to recite the elements of the test because I have no idea). Concluding that the cherds were created by humans and thus stopping the analysis of how they might be created naturally is not anti-science.

Did you mean to say that they have a test to distinguish flint pieces that had been worked and shaped by humans from flint pieces that had not? If so, all this shows is that it is possible to detect human influences on the flint based on prior knowledge of human workmanship. This analogy does not translate to divine agency in the formation of objects that are not shaped/made by humans. Is there an analogous test to perform on the cherds rejected by the test above that they were or were not created by God?

Similarly, the various efforts to listen for intergalactic messages from intelligent sources (SETI) have developed tests to be able to distinguish random noise from non-materialistic intelligent signals. If one of those radio signals ever passed the test, concluding that some extra-terrestrial intelligence had sent it would not be anti-science. (Interestingly, DNA passes all of the tests used by the various SETI groups.)

Yes, this would be evidence of the existence of an intelligent extra-terrestrial life form and of course would be perfectly in line with science. However, this is not a relevant analogy for detecting the action of a divine agent in the origin of living beings, for example. There is no such "test" for that. What would be the level of perceived improbability or the level of complexity observed in a biological system that we could objectively conclude could not have arisen through natural processes and thus demanded a designer? Appeals to things like Dembski's specified complexity are flawed in my view. It boils down to a basic God of the gaps argument. Arguments by ID types that seemingly improbable biological structures like the eye, flagellum, complicated biochemical pathways etc. should be classified as meeting the specified complexity threshold don't hold water in my view. We can go more down that route if you want, but those ideas were pretty much put to bed 25 years ago in my view.

An example he provides is Mt. Rushmore. Anyone taking a look at it immediately recognizes that it was created by non-materialistic causes. It is not an abdication of science to do so. Rather, it is recognizing the evidence that something intelligent has interfered with natural processes.

I find this strange. Actually, It is the recognition that HUMAN intellgence interfered with natural processes. The faces on Mount Rushmore are known in advance to be etched by humans and we know humans exist. The appearance of human faces on the mountainside reflects the structure of human handywork that we are already familiar with and that we recognize as reflecting a human cause (art, sculpture, construction, demolition etc.). The key word is human. We can all agree that humans exist, and that they make things that we recognize as being of human design and construction. This analogy is not of any use at all in trying to make inferences about the potential "intelligent design" of natural structures by some divine agency. A tree, a bacterium, a human has no such a priori reference point as to their purported design. We do know that things like organisms assemble and come about in ways that are totally different than things designed and built by humans. Organisms go through an organic development from a cluster of undifferentiated cells that divide and differentiate eventually into a full organisms. They do so without a potentially observed maker carrying out every step. This is all beside the point that we aren't straight-forwardly aware of the existence or even the possibility of such a divine creator. The cart is before the horse.

"The important thing about specifications is that they be objectively given and not arbitrarily imposed on events after the fact. For instance, if an archer fires arrows at a wall and then paints bull's-eyes around them, the archer imposes a pattern after the fact. On the other hand, if the targets are set up in advance ("specified"), and then the archer hits them accurately, one legitimately concludes that it was by design."

Design by humans

ramblin_ag02 said:

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It's fine to be skeptical of a scientific theory. It's actually great, but you have to propose something that explains the facts better and is more useful over all. The theory of evolution is useful to explain all kinds of things in the fossil record and following DNA changes over time. We can witness genetic selection under pressure in real time, and we've even witnessed speciation in simple organisms. No one here is giving a working alternative to evolutionary theory. Everyone is just sorting of saying, "I don't like it and it doesn't explain everything," and then *crickets*. There is nothing magical about leading theories. Newton was right about physics until he wasn't. But it didn't happen because people didn't like Newton's theories. It happened because we found something better. So if you want to toss out the theory of evolution, then just find something better. Until then, it's the most useful biological theory we have.

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It's not just that it's the best or most useful idea in biology, it's that the entirety of the field becomes incoherent without it. Evolution is the foundational premise of ALL modern biology. When someone says they "don't believe in evolution", they really don't understand what they're saying. They are by necessity rejecting EVERYTHING that is down stream of that, because if the base premise of evolutionary theory is false then so is everything else. For example, you must by necessity reject the entire modern understanding of molecular genetics. But people don't do that. Nobody has the audacity to claim DNA isn't real because it's too absurd on its face. But evolution is in many ways nebulous and vague enough, and not so immediately important to your day to day life, that you can reject it without much consequence.

Aggrad08 said:

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Sure plenty of YEC are sweet people that has nothing to do with it. The issue is constantly talking past each other when someone fundamentally isn't really interested in what the scientific evidence is. It's a waste of time and it's also deceptive. To say "I'm not convinced by the science" is a claim that might literally be true but it reads a bit different than "no realistic scientific evidence could persuade me". There is an implication in the first sentence that the evidence is wanting that doesn't truly exist.

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Ultimately it's just a consequence free way of rejecting something outright that prevents any cognitive dissonance from developing.

There is significantly more physical, observable and testable evidence for evolution than the force we call gravity. Nobody in any scientific domain disputes this. Yet nobody denies the existence of gravity. Why? One, because its existence doesn't threaten core existential belief systems of billions of people. Two, the consequences for rejecting the existence of gravity are immediate and swift. You either live as if gravity exists or you die very quickly. Thee are no personal consequences for claiming evolution is a lie. You can live your whole life with this belief and it change nothing about your day to day existence.

Infection_Ag11 said:

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ramblin_ag02 said:

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It's fine to be skeptical of a scientific theory. It's actually great, but you have to propose something that explains the facts better and is more useful over all. The theory of evolution is useful to explain all kinds of things in the fossil record and following DNA changes over time. We can witness genetic selection under pressure in real time, and we've even witnessed speciation in simple organisms. No one here is giving a working alternative to evolutionary theory. Everyone is just sorting of saying, "I don't like it and it doesn't explain everything," and then *crickets*. There is nothing magical about leading theories. Newton was right about physics until he wasn't. But it didn't happen because people didn't like Newton's theories. It happened because we found something better. So if you want to toss out the theory of evolution, then just find something better. Until then, it's the most useful biological theory we have.

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It's not just that it's the best or most useful idea in biology, it's that the entirety of the field becomes incoherent without it. Evolution is the foundational premise of ALL modern biology. When someone says they "don't believe in evolution", they really don't understand what they're saying. They are by necessity rejecting EVERYTHING that is down stream of that, because if the base premise of evolutionary theory is false then so is everything else. For example, you must by necessity reject the entire modern understanding of molecular genetics. But people don't do that. Nobody has the audacity to claim DNA isn't real because it's too absurd on its face. But evolution is in many ways nebulous and vague enough, and not so immediately important to your day to day life, that you can reject it without much consequence.

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To be fair, I don't think anyone is rejecting evolution wholesale. . . . just the implications of what evolutionary process can do over long periods of time. YECs accept that evolution can result in differences between a gorilla and a bonobo but not a gorilla and a human. And I think that a level of consistency is maintained here for someone who believes in a 6k-ish year old Earth. After all, the kind of speciation in question here requires long time periods. A young Earth and 'no common ancestry' would be fairly compatible.

If the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, then evolution as a natural explanation for the diversity of life is much more viable. For someone convinced of an old Earth, but not the viability of 'macro-evolution', then the possibilities become very weird. You would need something like a God that constantly pops new species into existences, watches them go extinct and then pops new species into existence.

All this to say that I think the denial of evolution as an explanatory tool for the diversity of life is more tied to the assumption of a very young Earth than technical concerns with evolution. I think this is why I have tried to focus on the age of the Earth rather than the large scale possibilities of diversification of life over long times. Those evolutionary possibilities are all moot if you believe in an Earth not old enough to ever realize those possibilities.

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For example, you must by necessity reject the entire modern understanding of molecular genetics.

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That's absurd nonsense. I know lots and lots of molecular biologists who do not accept evolution in terms of a universal common ancestor.

And years ago I had to hire a molecular biologist as an expert witness. He was not a Christian and believed in classical/neo-Darwinian evolution. Yet he explained to me that there is absolutely no or very little connection between evolution and molecular genetics.

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All this to say that I think the denial of evolution as an explanatory tool for the diversity of life is more tied to the assumption of a very young Earth than technical concerns with evolution.

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I apologize for not already responding to your last post to me. I'll try to get to it.

But your statement above is not true at all. The vast majority of scientists who are Christians and reject unguided evolution and/or a universal common ancestor also believe in an old earth. For example, thousands of scientists belong to or ascribe to Intelligent Design, which is a rejection of unguided evolution and/or a universal common ancestor. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of those scientists believe in an old earth and ancient life.

They believe that when one looks at the actual evidence for evolution, it is an absurd belief. It cannot explain most of what we see in life today and is contradicted by the fossil evidence, among other reasons.

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I'll let you describe what you think evidence suggests.

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I completely agree that the evidence suggests that the universe is billions of years old based on starlight. I am very familiar with the explanation you made so well.

However, there is lots of additional evidence about light speed, time, gravity, and other fundamental forces and factors that we cannot explain. One example is that the universe is supposed to be 93 billion light years in diameter (46+ light years in every direction from earth), yet the universe is also supposed to be only 13.8 billion years old. That means that the observable universe cannot be more than 2x13.8 billion light years in diameter, or 27.6 billion light years.

That discrepancy is attempted to be brushed away by the facile explanation that the expansion of the universe explains the extra difference. But I have two questions in response that no one has yet been able to explain to me: 1) doesn't that mean that the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, which is impossible, and 2) isn't that based on untestable assumptions?

We also know that gravity can cause all kinds of weird things to the passage of time and the speed of light. The movie Interstellar is supposedly a roughly accurate depiction of some of those weird things. How do we know, for certain, what has happened to time and the speed of light over billions of years? Especially at the beginning of the universe, all kinds of strange things had to have had occurred.

Some non-Christian astrophysicists are now speculating as to the existence of something called white holes. I will readily admit that I do not really understand them, but it is my impression that they might have the opposite effect on time and light of black holes. That is, time would move infinitely slow in the middle of the white hole compared to everything outside of it.

Your explanation is based on observations made from a tiny speck 2/3 of the way out on the Milky Way galaxy, billions of light years away from the stars you mention, and billions of years away from the times you postulate. Any extrapolations from those infinitesimally small data sets have to be viewed with skepticism.

I also see no problem at all with the idea that God created a universe with the appearance of age, just as he created the world and presumably Adam with the appearance of age.

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Religious knowledge and subjective experiential knowledge that cannot be tested, independently tested, verified, falsified, or explained in anything like scientific terms.

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Of course it can. You are making those very arguments in your post. It's just that I disagree with your arguments and conclusions.

(As an aside, much of what is today claimed to be scientific knowledge is also subjective experiential knowledge that cannot be tested, verified, or falsified. Or if it is, proponents make lots of excuses for it.)

When your only response is ad hominem attacks, it's impossible to discuss further.

It's interesting that, essentially, your only response is to call me a liar. Oh, well. Your beliefs in my credibility do not change or diminish the truth of what I posted.

Perhaps you should be more intellectually curious and not so arrogant in what you think you know.

But, for the sake of others who might be reading, the biologist I retained was the leading American biologist in his field. I had essentially unlimited funds to hire whomever I wanted.

Examples of molecular biologists who reject traditional Darwinism include several from the Discover Instititue and who have credentials that can match anyone's:

Doug Axe
Michael Behe (may not be strictly a molecular biologist but close enough)
Michael Denton
Ann Gauger
Richard Gunasekera
Scott Minnich
Paul Nelson (philosopher of biology w/ PhD from Chicago)
Richard Sternberg
Ray Bohlin
Mariclair Reeves
Jonathan Wells (deceased)


Also:
Todd Wood
Art Chadwick
Laura Tan
Caroline Crocker
John Sanford (very famous Cornell geneticist)

In addition, I personally know several biological/medical scientists from UT Southwestern who believe that Darwinian evolution is eyeroll ludicrous.

Finally:

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According to recent research, there are an estimated 113,000 Darwin skeptic scientists and academics in the United States alone (Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, How Religious Are America's College and University Professors?, working paper Harvard University, Oct. 5, 2006).

"A 2005 poll by the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Social and Religious Research found that 60% of American medical doctors reject Darwinism, stating that they do not believe humans evolved through natural processes alone. Thirty-eight percent of the American medical doctors polled agreed with the statement that 'humans evolved naturally with no supernatural involvement.' The study also reported that one-third of all medical doctors favor the theory of intelligent design over evolution" ("Evolution," Conservapedia).

Dr. Jerry Bergman has compiled a list of about 3,000 "Darwin Skeptics," including about a dozen Nobel Prize winners. See https://www.rae.org/essay-links/darwinskeptics/.

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Scientists Who Do Not Believe in Darwinian Evolution


Plus the following list of 1000+ prominent scientists (many of whom are biologists including molecular biologists) who do not believe in Darwinian evolution:

Scientific-Dissent-List-05012023-2.pdf

Infection_Ag11 said:

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I'm happy to talk about molecular genetics, evolution, etc. with you. But claiming you know a lot of molecular geneticists who reject evolution is one, false and two, not an argument. Even if it were true it would be irrelevant because then you'd just know a lot of wrong molecular geneticists.

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I cannot discuss molecular genetics with you because I lack even a rudimentary understanding of it. I was simply responding to your clearly false and ridiculous claim that "you must by necessity reject the entire modern understanding of molecular genetics."

As I've edited my post above to show, I do in fact know "a lot of molecular geneticists who reject evolution" and there are hundreds more molecular geneticists who reject evolution.

You need to get out more and meet scholars who don't agree with your close-minded assumptions.

My post was a commentary on the logical and factual relationship between the two concepts, evolution and genetics. It was not a literal statement that no person on earth believes in one but not the other, it was merely the acknowledgement that there is no possible way to coherently argue for that. Anyone who genuinely understands both fields and is being intellectually honest must by necessity acknowledge both as reality. Obviously not everyone does that.

To acknowledge all the concepts within the field of modern genetics and then to claim "macroevolution" (I hate that term but understand it's the distinction most I'd be speaking to with this post use) can't happen is like acknowledging the inherent aerodynamic properties and nature of a sparrow's wings but then denying that sparrows can fly. One is not only a necessary extension of the other, but YOU CAN ACTUALLY WATCH SPARROWS FLY. Biologic evolution is a necessary process that will occur if the totality of our current understanding of genetics is even remotely accurate, and you can watch evolution happen in real time. There are numerous examples of witnessed speciation events. We can watch the sparrows fly, so to speak.

No one denies that evolution occurs and can be seen in genetics.

It is unguided evolution with a universal common ancestor where the controversy exists. And unlike a bird flying, no one can see either of those. And the best evidence is that both elements of that belief are not only wrong, but ludicrously wrong.

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It was not a literal statement that no person on earth believes in one but not the other, it was merely the acknowledgement that there is no possible way to coherently argue for that.

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How do you know? Have you bothered to even read the arguments written by any of the scholars whose name I listed?

I just read what you pasted there and didn't click any links. To me that reads like a poorly worded question that will receive ambiguous responses on which you can project your bias.
If the question is did "humans evolved naturally with no supernatural involvement." Then here are all the groups that would answer no: YEC, Evolution deniers, ancient aliens, transpermia, a God that created and set everything in motion 13 billion years ago and has been hands off ever since. Even an agnostic would answer that with a "maybe" which was probably counted as a no by the author
I think the only group that would answer that question with yes would be atheists abiogenesis evolutionists. I would expect that group to be small especially in the US.

I Googled a definition of Intelligent Design and got " The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. "
Therefore if you believe God created the universe 13 billion years ago and God created and guided evolution through natural selection for those years then you believe in intelligent design.

For the purpose of modern science believing in a hands off God and believing in no God are effectively the same thing. You reach the same results through the same process.

I think you might be using scientists that believe in a hands off God as an appeal to authority to question evolution and the age of the universe when that isn't what those authorities are saying

Quad Dog, thanks for your courteous post, but I believe that you have the sides in the debate defined incorrectly.

Modern science allows for no role for God whatsoever. The presumption and assumption of modern science is that purely naturalistic processes are the only permissible explanations. When it comes to evolution, my rough understanding is that Darwinism explains all biological change via "survival of the fittest". A modification of Darwinism called neo-Darwinism adds random mutation as another cause of biological change. But neither will permit any intelligent agency in causing, guiding or directing that change. All also insist that all changes are entirely random.

Michael Behe is a biologist within the ID community that believes in evolution and a universal common ancestor, I think. But he absolutely rejects the idea that evolution is purely random processes. Because of that rejection, he is scorned by mainstream biologists. His most famous argument against randomness is "irreducible complexity". That is, he points to many structures in biology that cannot have evolved because they are irreducibly complex. If you take any part away from them, they serve no purpose. Thus, an earlier form of that structure would have provided no survival benefit to the host critter. Dr. Behe believes that God had directed evolution.

Unlike Dr. Behe, most ID proponents do not believe in a universal common ancestor. That belief is frequently depicted as a tree, with all life forms branching off from that ancestor. The vast majority of ID proponents believe instead that the origin and development of life is best depicted as a lawn with many completely separate life forms with their own origins and development.

I've got a lot of stuff to do this evening and in the next few days so I may not post on this thread any longer.

I believe that is a false dichotomy. I think there is though room for people to believe a God said "Let there be light, let there be natural selection, let their be random mutations " and then completely believe with atheist 100% naturalistic scientists on everything else. This is a good readhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution
"theistic evolution as the position that "evolution is real, but that it was set in motion by God", and characterizes it as accepting "that evolution occurred as biologists describe it, but under the direction of God"

Someone like Catholic priest Georges Lematre who created The Big Bang theory might believe that.

Popes agree with me too
"Evolution and belief in a Creator] are presented [by some people] as alternatives that exclude each other. This clash is an absurdity … [T]here is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding …."

Pope Benedict XVI said in a 2007 speech,

Jabin said:

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All this to say that I think the denial of evolution as an explanatory tool for the diversity of life is more tied to the assumption of a very young Earth than technical concerns with evolution.

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I apologize for not already responding to your last post to me. I'll try to get to it.

But your statement above is not true at all. The vast majority of scientists who are Christians and reject unguided evolution and/or a universal common ancestor also believe in an old earth. For example, thousands of scientists belong to or ascribe to Intelligent Design, which is a rejection of unguided evolution and/or a universal common ancestor. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of those scientists believe in an old earth and ancient life.

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God-guided evolution (intelligent design) and common ancestry are not incompatible, are they? Lets say that God created the first single cellular life on this planet a few billions years ago and then guided it from that stage to where we are now. In this case, guided evolution still very much agrees with common ancestry.

What are the alternative possibilities for someone that believes in an old earth but not in common ancestry? The Christian scientists that you mentioned above that believe in an old Earth, but no common ancestry. . . how do they justify something like the changes in observed species in the fossil record? What are the options?

* I suppose they could argue that God created all species 3 billion years ago and that all species alive today, including humans have been around for billions of years. I don't think this is a popular idea. I don't think any Christian scientists are arguing that humans have existed for billions of years ago.

* Maybe they could say that no life existed until 6000 years ago when God created all species. Again, I don't think this is a popular idea.

* Or maybe for 3 billion years, God created species and watched them go extinct and then created new species. With an old Earth, there must be some mechanism to allow species to evolve into other 'kinds', right? Or else we just have a tinkering God creating life and watching it die out for billions of years.

* Maybe a hybrid type option I can think of is that God allowed for a process of evolution from common ancestry for all of life on the planet and then simply created humans from nothing at some point. This solution would allow for common ancestry for all life on the planet, but set humans apart from that process.

What I am trying to say is that for someone who adopts an old Earth model, the explanations for billions of years of life, but NO common ancestry begin to look very weird. So again, guided evolution is intelligent design. And it would not rule out the possibility of common ancestry. All it does, really, is change the mechanism from a random natural process to an undetectable supernatural one.


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Maybe a bit of a side note, but the concern that I have with billions of years of guided evolution is what I have referred to here on this forum as the Rube Goldberg God problem. Rube Goldberg machines are these overly complicated chain reaction contraptions. We recognize them as not being efficient and we recognize them as being unnecessarily complicated. But, this is exactly what 3 billion years of God-guided evolution to get to 'us' resembles.

I think the Rube Goldberg analogy is good for perspective as well. Imagine a 3 billion year long line of dominoes. Each domino only being able to see whats behind it, but not seeing what is in front of it. And imagine one of those dominoes thinking the entire chain reaction exists for this one particular domino. This is how humans think. The world has food, that food must exist just for us. The world has resources, these resources must exist just for us. The sun gives us light and warmth, it must be there solely for us. The moon and stars give us information about the seasons, they must exist for that purpose. We are important, the universe must revolve around us. And then how do you square that with the fact that this planet has 'belonged' to us for a few hundred thousand years? Dinosaurs existed for 165 million years. An argument could just as easily be made that this Earth exists was created for and exists for dinosaurs.

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God-guided evolution (intelligent design) and common ancestry are not incompatible, are they?

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I'm not an expert by any means on this topic so my response is off-the-cuff. I suspect you're correct. You can find Christians who hold to just about any permutation of creation, evolution, and age of the earth. I suspect that the folks at Biologos claim to be both Christians and evolutionists (and presumably believe in UCA). My guess is that the problem with that belief system from a Christian perspective is not that it contradicts any specific Biblical passage, but that it contradicts some or many orthodox theological beliefs that are directly tied to Biblical passages.

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What are the alternative possibilities for someone that believes in an old earth but not in common ancestry? The Christian scientists that you mentioned above that believe in an old Earth, but no common ancestry. . . how do they justify something like the changes in observed species in the fossil record? What are the options?

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Again, I'm not an expert on this and am a little hesitant speaking for others. I think that the vast majority of scientists associated with ID believe in an old earth but not in common ancestry. (Texas A&M's own famed engineering prof Walter Bradley holds to that belief.)They believe that life was created in billions of different forms billions of years ago. They differ strongly from what you postulated as to the fossil record. They would agree that the record shows changes within species (the famed horse series, for example), but only occasionally changes from one species to another and never from one family to another.

They assert that the fossil record contains much less evidence of evolution between species than is commonly asserted. They also strongly assert that the fossil record has millions of examples of new species suddenly emerging without any antecedent species. The Cambrian Explosion is one of their prime examples in support of that assertion.

Besides the fossil record, they point out the impssibility of evolution between families (i.e., completely new forms and functions being created). They point out that information is never created by random processes but is always created by an intelligent agent, and that mutation almost universally destroys information rather than creating it. So it is impossible for new information to have been randomly added to single cell organisms to become multiple cell organisms, for organisms with 2 chamber hearts to become 4 chambers, and for our lemur-like "ancestor" to have added the information to become a human with a giant brain.

They also point to irreducible complexity. Many, many parts of biological creatures have no functional purpose if any component is removed. Thus, it is impossible for those parts to have evolved since a simpler version with fewer components would have offered no competitive survival or sexual advantage.

Finally, they point out that much of the science underlying classical evolution fits no definition of science. Rather, it is a compilation of "just so" stories. Something "could" have happened. We can "imagine" that something happened. "Species X evolved a trait because it helped them survive." That latter statement is extremely common even though it clearly violates both classical and neo-Darwinism since both postulate that all evolution is random.

I cannot speak to your bulleted points/questions because I do not know the answers.

ETA:

The folks who believe in an old earth but reject a UCA are not stupid neanderthals. Doug Axe, for example, has his PhD from CalTech and taught at Cambridge. Richard Sternberg who has two PhDs was the Managing Editor of the Smithsonian's Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington until he had the audacity to publish a paper written by Steve Meyer, a famous ID proponent. If you examine the vita of the Discovery Institute's Fellows, you'll see that all of them are similarly well credentialed.

I say that not to prove that they're right on the basis of pedigrees, but rather to counter the argument that anyone who doesn't believe in classical evolution is anti-science, poorly informed, and downright stupid.

Jabin said:

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I'll let you describe what you think evidence suggests.

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I completely agree that the evidence suggests that the universe is billions of years old based on starlight. I am very familiar with the explanation you made so well.

However, there is lots of additional evidence about light speed, time, gravity, and other fundamental forces and factors that we cannot explain. One example is that the universe is supposed to be 93 billion light years in diameter (46+ light years in every direction from earth), yet the universe is also supposed to be only 13.8 billion years old. That means that the observable universe cannot be more than 2x13.8 billion light years in diameter, or 27.6 billion light years.

That discrepancy is attempted to be brushed away by the facile explanation that the expansion of the universe explains the extra difference. But I have two questions in response that no one has yet been able to explain to me: 1) doesn't that mean that the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, which is impossible, and 2) isn't that based on untestable assumptions?

We also know that gravity can cause all kinds of weird things to the passage of time and the speed of light. The movie Interstellar is supposedly a roughly accurate depiction of some of those weird things. How do we know, for certain, what has happened to time and the speed of light over billions of years? Especially at the beginning of the universe, all kinds of strange things had to have had occurred.

Some non-Christian astrophysicists are now speculating as to the existence of something called white holes. I will readily admit that I do not really understand them, but it is my impression that they might have the opposite effect on time and light of black holes. That is, time would move infinitely slow in the middle of the white hole compared to everything outside of it.

Your explanation is based on observations made from a tiny speck 2/3 of the way out on the Milky Way galaxy, billions of light years away from the stars you mention, and billions of years away from the times you postulate. Any extrapolations from those infinitesimally small data sets have to be viewed with skepticism.

I also see no problem at all with the idea that God created a universe with the appearance of age, just as he created the world and presumably Adam with the appearance of age.

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Religious knowledge and subjective experiential knowledge that cannot be tested, independently tested, verified, falsified, or explained in anything like scientific terms.

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Of course it can. You are making those very arguments in your post. It's just that I disagree with your arguments and conclusions.

(As an aside, much of what is today claimed to be scientific knowledge is also subjective experiential knowledge that cannot be tested, verified, or falsified. Or if it is, proponents make lots of excuses for it.)

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There are some good / short videos on youtube that explain where the 90 billion number comes from. But, I don't think that the exact size and age of the universe is important to my worldview. Only the scale. Whether the universe is thousands of years old or billions of years old is important.

I don't know the details on the white holes. But if they are found and studied and understood, and if they lead us to an understanding of a very young universe, I want to know.

And I completely agree with your comments about skepticism. Particularly on topics of great importance. . . . which is a huge reason why I reject religion. Divine Hiddenness

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I would like to know more about what subjective arguments I am making or why much of modern science is based on subjective experience. I am not saying you are wrong, but I still think there are categorical differences between different claims.

I can imagine what some of the subjective knowledge passed off as scientific knowledge might be. And I might agree with some of it. There is plenty of sketch science out there. There are a lot of science-adjacent issues that are highly politicized, and I'm trying to keep out of this gray area and stay within the 'hard sciences' in order to make a point.

So, I want to focus on religious knowledge.

Take personal revelation. How do you test someone to verify they were spoken to by God? How do you verify that what was revealed to them is accurate? How would you prove someone to be mistaken if they told you God spoke to them? These are inherently impossible tasks.

And take religious purpose statements. How would you conduct an experiment that would prove that our purpose in life is to worship God? How would you be able to show these purpose statements as false?

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Take personal revelation. How do you test someone to verify they were spoken to by God? How do you verify that what was revealed to them is accurate? How would you prove someone to be mistaken if they told you God spoke to them? These are inherently impossible tasks.

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I am quite skeptical of such claims as well, so I am completely unable to answer your question. In the past, such claims tended to be corroborated by miracles, miracles that were witnessed and recorded by numerous people. That doesn't seem to be the case with such claims today.

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And take religious purpose statements. How would you conduct an experiment that would prove that our purpose in life is to worship God? How would you be able to show these purpose statements as false?

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Not all knowledge is derived from experiments and true/false tests. In fact, the vast majority of what we know to be true cannot be proven through experiments or true/false tests. For example, I know without any doubt that my mother loved me but cannot conduct an experiment to prove that fact. I cannot prove that I am sitting in a chair as I type this response but it would be silly and unreasonable to deny that the chair exists or that I am sitting in it. We cannot prove that George Washington lived, but it would be the height of unreasonableness to deny his existence and his role in history.

To me, the key fact on which my beliefs are centered is not creationism, the age of the earth, or anything like that. The key fact is the historical reality of Jesus Christ. That reality includes not only his existence, but also his death, his resurrection, and his existence as the incarnation of God on earth. Skeptics today claim that there's not enough evidence to support those claims. My response back is what evidence could God have provided given the technology and means of the day? By those standards, God provided extraordinary evidence, both in type and quantity.

I want to start off addressing your ETA - I don't think anyone that disagrees with classical evolution is stupid. Everyone has a picture of reality. And that picture is informed to us by science, religion, culture, language, our experiences, and a host of things. That some people have differing pictures of reality does not mean that some people are stupid. It means they've built their model of reality on a different combination of the above.

I am suggesting that for someone to hold a picture of reality whereby the Earth and the universe were created 6,000 years ago requires that their picture of reality be heavily influenced by a religious or cultural influence. As you stated a couple of posts above, the universe has the appearance of age and there is a suggestion of an old universe. To believe to the contrary is to place a high value of a religious tradition OVER science when building your picture of reality. No one here is saying that you or anyone else is stupid.

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Again, I'm not an expert on this and am a little hesitant speaking for others. I think that the vast majority of scientists associated with ID believe in an old earth but not in common ancestry. (Texas A&M's own famed engineering prof Walter Bradley holds to that belief.)They believe that life was created in billions of different forms billions of years ago. They differ strongly from what you postulated as to the fossil record. They would agree that the record shows changes within species (the famed horse series, for example), but only occasionally changes from one species to another and never from one family to another.

They assert that the fossil record contains much less evidence of evolution between species than is commonly asserted. They also strongly assert that the fossil record has millions of examples of new species suddenly emerging without any antecedent species. The Cambrian Explosion is one of their prime examples in support of that assertion.

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First off, I think that unless you are able to explain what a fossil showing changes from one 'family' to another would look like, you can't use this argument. I can show you a fossil of a creature with gills and with feet. Or a fossil with a reptilian skeleton, tail, and teeth, but with feathers, wings, and a furcula like a bird.

What are the implications of a scenario where God created all of the 'kinds' 3 billion years ago? We would expect to see humans, dinosaurs, bird, fish, inspects, and everything else within every rock and fossil layer, right? When we find a fossil of a T-Rex sitting immediately adjacent to a chimpanzee in the same rock layer, then we should not ignore this. But, until we observe these things, should we simply just assume they exist?

The Cambrian Explosion is a period of 30 million years. It is not 'overnight'. 30 million years is only a small amount of time on the scale of the planet, but it still offers plenty of time for radical biological change.

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Besides the fossil record, they point out the impssibility of evolution between families (i.e., completely new forms and functions being created). They point out that information is never created by random processes but is always created by an intelligent agent, and that mutation almost universally destroys information rather than creating it. So it is impossible for new information to have been randomly added to single cell organisms to become multiple cell organisms, for organisms with 2 chamber hearts to become 4 chambers, and for our lemur-like "ancestor" to have added the information to become a human with a giant brain.

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'Impossibility of evolution between families' is an assertion that cannot be justified. "Informatoin is never created by random process but is always created by an intelligent agent" is an assertion that cannot be justified. Those statements are pure opinion and you cannot pass them off as though they are simple everyday facts.

New information is added to organisms through natural process. We see it, we observe, we know it can happen. Lets just go with gene duplication.

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Finally, they point out that much of the science underlying classical evolution fits no definition of science. Rather, it is a compilation of "just so" stories. Something "could" have happened. We can "imagine" that something happened. "Species X evolved a trait because it helped them survive." That latter statement is extremely common even though it clearly violates both classical and neo-Darwinism since both postulate that all evolution is random.

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The statement "Species X evolved a trait because it helped them survive" is misleading. Statements are made like this and they unintentionally assign purpose and intention to random process. What should be said is something like "A random mutation in species X allowed for a higher probability that individuals with that mutation would pass on their genes and thus the mutation became more common."

Jabin said:

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Not all knowledge is derived from experiments and true/false tests. In fact, the vast majority of what we know to be true cannot be proven through experiments or true/false tests. For example, I know without any doubt that my mother loved me but cannot conduct an experiment to prove that fact. I cannot prove that I am sitting in a chair as I type this response but it would be silly and unreasonable to deny that the chair exists or that I am sitting in it. We cannot prove that George Washington lived, but it would be the height of unreasonableness to deny his existence and his role in history.

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I feel like we are getting somewhere maybe. . .

You know that you mother love you. And would you present this information to me as 'scientific knowledge' or as some other form of knowledge? I expect the latter, right?

So, can we agree that presenting knowledge which is not informed by science as science is to misrepresent that knowledge?

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Skeptics today claim that there's not enough evidence to support those claims. My response back is what evidence could God have provided given the technology and means of the day? By those standards, God provided extraordinary evidence, both in type and quantity.

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God appeared to only one tribe in the world and sent his son to spread the word through the entire planet despite the fact that he barely travelled outside an area the size of Rhode Island. What evidence could God have provided given the technology of the day?

- Instead of only communicating to one tiny little tribe in a corner of the Middle East, He could have communicated to all tribes across the globe.

- Instead of sending one messenger, Jesus, to deliver a message, he could have send a thousand messengers to deliver the same message to all tribes across the globe.

- He could have provided information that would have been impossible to know for anyone alive at the time.

- He could give everyone on the planet the same revelation.

- He could have continued to send his representatives to Earth to teach us.

- Jesus could have written the Bible rather than rely on people to write it for him decades after his life.

In this case, the 'technology of the day' is literally a limitless and all powerful God!!!

Recycling another analogy. . . . Imagine being the CEO of General Electric and trying to implement a new company policy by hiring your cousin to be an assistant in a customer service call center in Indiana and asking them to disseminate the policy to 125,000 employees. And then observing, as the CEO, for 2000 years, as GE employees argue and fight over the legitimacy of this company policy. And the result being that 70% of your employees don't believe your nephew was even related to you and the 30% that do have splintered into 10,000 tribes, many who hate each other and have fought wars over who has the better interpretation of the policy.

What if, instead, the CEO sent out huge company wide memos? And then created a team of a hundred persons to go implement the policy around the world. And created a way for employees to reach out and get feed back and clarification on the policy direction?

Are we to judge God's ability to communicate by the 'standards' of a tribal civilization 2000 years ago? How about we judge God's ability to communicate by the standards of all powerful magical super being who would have perfect and flawless knowledge about how best to communicate to His people.

The problem here isn't with some people rejecting the message or rejecting God. The problem here is that the majority of people alive today or who have ever lived simple are not convinced that the Christian message is real. Not because they reject God. And not because they hate God. But because they are simply not convinced. If this isn't a failure of communication. . . what is?

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I am suggesting that for someone to hold a picture of reality whereby the Earth and the universe were created 6,000 years ago requires that their picture of reality be heavily influenced by a religious or cultural influence. As you stated a couple of posts above, the universe has the appearance of age and there is a suggestion of an old universe. To believe to the contrary is to place a high value of a religious tradition OVER science when building your picture of reality.

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Not quite correct. I place a high value on the historical reliability and trustworthiness of scripture. And its not that I value scripture over science. Rather, I trust scripture over our current understanding of science. Where they clearly differ, I suspect that our understanding of science is wrong.

Science tells us nothing. Only scientists do, and that is through the filter of the science media. Scientists are often wrong in their interpretation of the data they observe, and their interpretations are frequently mischaracterized to us lay people by the science media.

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What are the implications of a scenario where God created all of the 'kinds' 3 billion years ago?

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I'm not sure that most of the OEC (old earth creationists) believe that God created all of the kinds at one instant.

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The Cambrian Explosion is a period of 30 million years. It is not 'overnight'. 30 million years is only a small amount of time on the scale of the planet, but it still offers plenty of time for radical biological change.

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Most believe it was 15-20 million years. Regardless, it was an extraordinarily short time in terms of geology and evolution. 19-35 new phyla suddenly appeared, with no predecessors in the fossil record.

I don't know what the basis is for your assertion that it "offers plenty of time for radical biological change." Such changes take hundreds of millions of years according to standard evolutionary dogma. Even ardent evolutionists recognize the Cambrian as a major problem that is not easily explained. It is the major reason why Stephen Gould developed his theory of "punctuated equilibrium". That is, the fossil record does not support gradual change but rather sudden and dramatic changes, as well as sudden appearances.

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"Informatoin is never created by random process but is always created by an intelligent agent" is an assertion that cannot be justified. Those statements are pure opinion and you cannot pass them off as though they are simple everyday facts.

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I thought that you believed in science, and that science is based on observation? If that is correct, can you point to one instance in which information has been created by purely random processes?

What do you mean that gene duplication is a creation of information through random processes? I have no idea what you mean by that statement.

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So, can we agree that presenting knowledge which is not informed by science as science is to misrepresent that knowledge?

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Absolutely. But I am doing no such thing in any of these threads. My beliefs are informed by science. They are just not informed exclusively by science. As intelligent humans, we can hold beliefs based on multiple sources of information and knowledge.

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- Instead of only communicating to one tiny little tribe in a corner of the Middle East, He could have communicated to all tribes across the globe.

- Instead of sending one messenger, Jesus, to deliver a message, he could have send a thousand messengers to deliver the same message to all tribes across the globe.

- He could have provided information that would have been impossible to know for anyone alive at the time.

- He could give everyone on the planet the same revelation.

- He could have continued to send his representatives to Earth to teach us.

- Jesus could have written the Bible rather than rely on people to write it for him decades after his life.

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And if he had, you'd still not be convinced and would argue that he should have done something else. You ignore the facts that he had hundreds if not thousands of eyewitnesses, the existence of whom are attested by Roman writers. He left 3 written eyewitness accounts and 2 accounts written by contemporary witnesses, a documentary record unrivaled in the ancient world.

And he did do much of what you demand: he did communicate to all tribes across the globe via the Bible (that, in fact, is the mission of Wycliffe Translators); he did send messengers in the form of missionaries to all tribes across the globe; and he did give everyone on the globe the same revelation in the form of the Bible.

And I suspect that your list is not serious. If Christians claimed that Jesus had personally written the Bible, I strongly suspect that you'd still be skeptical and would not believe.

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What if, instead, the CEO sent out huge company wide memos? And then created a team of a hundred persons to go implement the policy around the world. And created a way for employees to reach out and get feed back and clarification on the policy direction?

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Isn't that exactly what he's done? Isn't the Bible that huge company wide memo? And aren't church leaders and missionaries that team of persons with the responsibility to implement it? Catholics and Orthodox believe that church leaders with formal positions provide clarification on policy uncertainties. Protestants believe that church leaders and scholars can do the same.

Finally, don't let the doctrinal disputes on this board mislead you into thinking that there are that great differences. All of us Christians agree on the basics and facts and are arguing about the details and application. All Christians throughout the world agree that Jesus Christ was real, that he was the Son of God, and that he died via crucifixion and was raised from the dead. There really is no disagreement or confusion about the essence of the company-wide memo.

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The problem here isn't with some people rejecting the message or rejecting God. The problem here is that the majority of people alive today or who have ever lived simple are not convinced that the Christian message is real. Not because they reject God. And not because they hate God. But because they are simply not convinced. If this isn't a failure of communication. . . what is?

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I couldn't disagree more. I suspect that you and other skeptics would not be convinced no matter the quantity or quality of the evidence. No matter what evidence is presented, you'd demand something different. Further, most people who reject Christianity do so not because of a lack of evidence since the vast majority have not even considered it. As the skeptics on here point out frequently, the vast majority of people hold to their religious beliefs for cultural reasons, not intellectual reasons.

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Not quite correct. I place a high value on the historical reliability and trustworthiness of scripture. And its not that I value scripture over science. Rather, I trust scripture over our current understanding of science. Where they clearly differ, I suspect that our understanding of science is wrong.

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So, how much you value and trust science is contingent on whether or not it confirms scripture?

You've spend the last how many pages pointing out the bias and unreliability of science and you openly admit that you assume science to be wrong when it disagrees with your bias??? This is absolutely absurd and undercuts everything you've said about the problems with current science.

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Science tells us nothing. Only scientists do, and that is through the filter of the science media. Scientists are often wrong in their interpretation of the data they observe, and their interpretations are frequently mischaracterized to us lay people by the science media.

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How about all of the scientists you've listed in the posts above? Are you open to possibility that they might be biased individuals mischaracterizing scientific information and drawing wrong conclusions? Or do we trust them because arrive at conclusions we like?

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I thought that you believed in science, and that science is based on observation? If that is correct, can you point to one instance in which information has been created by purely random processes?

What do you mean that gene duplication is a creation of information through random processes? I have no idea what you mean by that statement.

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One of the common arguments against common ancestry is the suggestion that natural process can only remove or change information, but cannot add information and complexity. Gene duplication is a counter example. Genetic information is added by creating copies of a gene within a genome. The copied genes can provide the raw material for development of new functions. This is something we observe and that we know can and does happen.

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So, how much you value and trust science is contingent on whether or not it confirms scripture?

You've spend the last how many pages pointing out the bias and unreliability of science and you openly admit that you assume science to be wrong when it disagrees with your bias??? This is absolutely absurd and undercuts everything you've said about the problems with current science.

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That's a gross mischaracterization of my position and of my words. Now you are losing your characteristic "Kurt cool" so it's probably time to end what was a civil discussion.

I don't ever assume science is right or wrong since science is a process, not something that can tell me anything. All that you or I know about science is what scientists, or more likely journalists, tell us. And if I read something about science that doesn't make sense, I'll suspect it's wrong and, depending on my time and interest, may dig deeper. But even then all I have are suspicions, not assumptions.

On the other hand, you seem to assume that Scientism is always right. The replacement for God in your worldview is not science, but what is now coming to be called Scientism. You seem to have a blind faith in it, even if it's outside of your personal knowledge or expertise.

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How about all of the scientists you've listed in the posts above? Are you open to possibility that they might be biased individuals mischaracterizing scientific information and drawing wrong conclusions? Or do we trust them because arrive at conclusions we like?

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Of course I'm open to that possibility. Why are you so angry? Why are you misstating me?

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One of the common arguments against common ancestry is the suggestion that natural process can only remove or change information, but cannot add information and complexity. Gene duplication is a counter example. Genetic information is added by creating copies of a gene within a genome. The copied genes can provide the raw material for development of new functions. This is something we observe and that we know can and does happen.

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I don't think that you're right on this. But if you are, I'd like to learn more. Any links or resources that you can share so that I can dig deeper? I know that your statement of made frequently, but is there any evidence to support it?

Jabin said:

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- Instead of only communicating to one tiny little tribe in a corner of the Middle East, He could have communicated to all tribes across the globe.

- Instead of sending one messenger, Jesus, to deliver a message, he could have send a thousand messengers to deliver the same message to all tribes across the globe.

- He could have provided information that would have been impossible to know for anyone alive at the time.

- He could give everyone on the planet the same revelation.

- He could have continued to send his representatives to Earth to teach us.

- Jesus could have written the Bible rather than rely on people to write it for him decades after his life.

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And if he had, you'd still not be convinced and would argue that he should have done something else. You ignore the facts that he had hundreds if not thousands of eyewitnesses, the existence of whom are attested by Roman writers. He left 3 written eyewitness accounts and 2 accounts written by contemporary witnesses, a documentary record unrivaled in the ancient world.

And he did do much of what you demand: he did communicate to all tribes across the globe via the Bible (that, in fact, is the mission of Wycliffe Translators); he did send messengers in the form of missionaries to all tribes across the globe; and he did give everyone on the globe the same revelation in the form of the Bible.

And I suspect that your list is not serious. If Christians claimed that Jesus had personally written the Bible, I strongly suspect that you'd still be skeptical and would not believe.

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I couldn't disagree more. I suspect that you and other skeptics would not be convinced no matter the quantity or quality of the evidence. No matter what evidence is presented, you'd demand something different. Further, most people who reject Christianity do so not because of a lack of evidence since the vast majority have not even considered it. As the skeptics on here point out frequently, the vast majority of people hold to their religious beliefs for cultural reasons, not intellectual reasons.

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If He had done those things, it would convince me. But, thank you for speaking for me. You clearly know me better than I know myself.

I find the evidence in favor of the truth of Christianity to be insufficient. Rather than accept that or agree to disagree, you think my disbelief is a matter of what. . . dishonesty? You think I'm insincere in my concerns about the truth of Christianity? You think that because I come to a different conclusion than you, that my disbelief is just willful rebellion against something I know to be true?

I do not ignore the eyewitnesses. And I do not ignore the accounts. I find them lacking and insufficient the same way you find the eyewitness accounts of every other religion to be insufficient.

God did not communicate his message to all tribes via the Bible. Men communicated this message across the globe the same way they spread other religious, cultural, and political ideas. Its what people do. . . . people think their religion and ideas are best and so they spread it to their neighbors. Christianity isn't unique in this. The fact that Islam is spreading isn't evidence that the work of Allah is being done. Its evidence that people spread their own ideas to their neighbors.

I have been happy to agree to disagree with you on this thread, but I think the above is just insulting. And if you want to continue this thread, my condition is that you need to at least extend me the courtesy of believing in my sincerity. My concerns are serious and I am serious when I say that given the right evidence, I would believe. If you want to be an ass and tell me I'm lying, then F U.

I'm sorry if I've taken this too personally, but, what was the reaction you expected to telling me that I'm being dishonest and insincere?

And I'll stop here before I say anything else that I'll regret.

ramblin_ag02 said:

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Edit for my disclaimer that didn't copy over: I haven't studied evolutionary biology in a long time, so please excuse any outdated information. But this is a general broad strokes of how it could develop using evolutionary processes

Start with the idea that the only thing that matters in evolutionary terms is DNA. Everything else is secondary, like the man controlling a giant robot. Only the man inside really matters. So the idea is to make your specific DNA spread as far and as wide as possible. Certainly one way to do that is just to create a lot of DNA and spill it all into the environment as a naked molecule. DNA is very stable naturally, so there were probably some organisms that did this in the past. You can imagine that some of this DNA was "eaten" by single celled organisms and then hijacked their cells. So you can imagine that a lot of these single cells started producing DNAse (enzymes that destroy DNA) as a defense mechanism, and they eventually started pumping that into the environment as well. Now just randomly dumping DNA into the world is a losing strategy, and those organisms die off or reduce greatly in number.

So you have to get a little trickier. Let's say that one of these former DNA dumpers starts packaging their DNA to prevent it from being easily broken down. This DNA now can survive an environment full of DNAse, but it gets harder for any other organism to pick it up. So maybe it starts getting aggressive and invasive, and you get something like the earliest viruses. Mobile DNA capsules that can invade other organisms and take over their machinery to make more viruses. So even in the realm of single celled organisms we have a packaged DNA delivery system.

Moving on to intentional reproduction, most single celled organisms create a copy of all their internal parts, including DNA, and then they divide in half. That works well for a bacteria, but as you can imagine it's not the best solution for something like an elephant. Multicellular organisms have a lot of mass and specialized parts, and cloning yourself inside your own body is not a practical solution. You instead you form a structure that has all the genetic instructions and the minimum amount of material needed to to build a new organism from the ground up. And here we have eggs. At this point, eggs can only make clones of the original organism not counting environmental damage to DNA from things like chemicals or radiation. But we still see that even today, and it is called parthenogenesis. Many fish, reptiles, insects, and plants can reproduce this way when their eggs are not fertilized.

Now lets think of the earliest forms of this. You have an egg clone (or a million), and you just dump it off in the environment and move on. Imagine you are a similar organism, and you don't want to go through all the effort of creating all those eggs. It can be very energy intensive. So instead you create your own "virus", an invasive package of genetic material that can invade those eggs and turn them into clones of you instead. That's a lot more energy efficient than making a whole bunch of eggs yourself. Now you have sperm which invades eggs and alters their genetic material. At this point, you probably have most of these organisms producing both eggs and sperm.

Now imagine a billion year battle between sperm and eggs. The eggs get more defenses and the sperm gets more aggressive. Egg laying and sperm producing get streamlined so most individuals only do one or the other. The egg layers get more protective, even bringing the eggs inside their bodies. So the sperm producers develop anatomy that can still get to the eggs anyway. Eventually you reach a sort of stalemate, where you end up with some number of egg producers and some number of sperm producers in any population every generation. At this point their DNA back and forth has so intermingled their genetic material so much that they are basically just two versions of the same organism. At that point you can find eggs that need sperm to fertlize them before they can grow into a new organism, and you get all sorts of genetic diversity from the combination. Long term, that diversity is a winning strategy in a dynamic, hostile environment.

I'm sure someone else with more recent knowledge can clean this up a bit, but I think that gets the gist

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So, at what point did it become fun?

Where did I use the words dishonest or insincere, or any synonym for them? I did not intend to communicate those concepts nor did that thought ever cross my mind.

I do believe that you, like all humans, do not know yourself as well as you think you do. You appear to believe that your conclusions are completely inductive. My response is that no human is completely inductive in their reasoning or conclusions. We are all strongly affected by our biases and presuppositions. I am and you are too.

Jabin said:

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Where did I use the words dishonest or insincere, or any synonym for them? I did not intend to communicate those concepts nor did that thought ever cross my mind.

I do believe that you, like all humans, do not know yourself as well as you think you do. You appear to believe that your conclusions are completely inductive. My response is that no human is completely inductive in their reasoning or conclusions. We are all strongly affected by our biases and presuppositions. I am and you are too.

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You asked me what evidence God could have provided. I give you a list. Your response is to tell me that those things wouldn't actually convince me and tell me that my list is not serious. Congrats, you didn't use the words dishonest and insincere. Although, I think serious and sincerity are pretty similar approximations in this context.

Why don't you think the things on my list will convince me? Do you think I am lying? Do you think I care about winning an internet argument? Do you think I am unwilling to be wrong or to change? Do you think I just hate God? Do you think I am insincere about wanting to know what is true? I'm telling you what would convince me and you just say 'nope'. . . what am I supposed to do with that?

When I left the church 25 years ago, I was told constantly by friends and family that I just needed to do 'this' or 'that' or that I needed to pray more or pray a different way. At some point you have to take me for my word that I've tried, I've considered it, and I don't believe it.

I probably snapped too quickly, and I apologize for that. But, don't tell me my list isn't serious and don't tell me what would or wouldn't convince me. You aren't me. At some point you have to take my word for it and believe that I'm serious or don't take my word for it and don't think I'm serious. If its the latter, why are having this talk?

I apologize for offending you and for using words that conveyed Impressions I did not intend.

On the other hand, you have similarly challenged my good faith, claiming that my biases cause me to give credit only to scientists that confirm my biases. That is, in essence, and ad hominem attack since it has nothing to do with the merits or lack of merits of either of our arguments. Rather, it is going to my character and person.

Regardless, I still consider you one of the better and more intellectually honest posters on this forum and feel bad that I offended you. Again, please forgive me.

Jabin said:

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I apologize for offending you and for using words that conveyed Impressions I did not intend.

On the other hand, you have similarly challenged my good faith, claiming that my biases cause me to give credit only to scientists that confirm my biases. That is, in essence, and ad hominem attack since it has nothing to do with the merits or lack of merits of either of our arguments. Rather, it is going to my character and person.

Regardless, I still consider you one of the better and more intellectually honest posters on this forum and feel bad that I offended you. Again, please forgive me.

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To be fair, I said:
"How about all of the scientists you've listed in the posts above? Are you open to possibility that they might be biased individuals mischaracterizing scientific information and drawing wrong conclusions? Or do we trust them because arrive at conclusions we like?"

I only mean to ask you to consider your bias as you ask me to do the same (as well you should).

And no apology needed. Regardless of what I think I read, I should be more careful about not looking for bad intentions where bad intentions don't exist.

Despite the fact that I get fired up on this board from time to time, I like to think that I'm a pretty even keel person and it normally takes an awful lot to get me upset. Maybe its something about the message board format. Maybe repressed rage from being so calm otherwise. . . who knows.

If it makes you feel any better, that made me chuckle, and it is rare for anything I read on the internet to make me chuckle or laugh.

Digital communication is absolutely the very worst way to communicate because one cannot convey body language, intonation, or any of the other myriad ways we used to communicate to each other. I used to be general counsel of a company and by virtue of that "wonderful" role got forced into many personnel issues and disputes. Once I had to intervene in a fight between two Engineers who had not spoken to each other for over a year. The first thing I discovered was that they were in cubicles right next to each other. The dispute had originated in a misunderstood email from a year previous, had escalated from there, and neither one had made any effort to speak to the other about the disagreement. They each had assumed the worst of the other.

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Schools also don't teach that the possibility that the Earth is flat. . . . . should they?

The fact that a young Earth is not taught in schools is not automatically indication that there is a conspiracy against young Earth theories. Consider the possibility that young Earth models are excluded on the basis that they are simply not considered to be 'good' science by the overwhelmingly vast number of the world's geologists. If schools were required to teach the controversy on every scientific question for which 0.1% of the world's scientists disagreed, children in school would learn literally nothing.

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No, they shouldn't teach that the earth is flat. "good science" assumes a standard in which to measure it by. If those determining the standard are all evolutionists then here lies a problem.

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Also, on what grounds do you say hydrological sorting is a better way of determining age?

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When it comes to rock layers, I'm not saying hydrological sorting is a better way of determining age. I'm making the claim that the Rock layers were all deposited at once and sorted during the underwater event.

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I believe that the idea that the sun and moon and stars exist for our use is unjustifiably human-centric. The sun does not exist for you. The moon does not exist to tell you when it is day or night. The stars do not exist to tell you what season it is. The purpose of their existence has nothing to do with how we use them.

I have a coffee mug in my office that I use as a paper weight sometimes. By your logic, the coffee mug was made for the purpose of being a paper weight, right? That humans utilize the stars and moon for a purpose does not mean that the stars and moon exist for that purpose.

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Under an atheistic worldview you would be correct. The Sun and Moon just is. They function with no given purpose. (Nothing would have an objective purpose because there would be no universal truth). These objects serve the very purposes that God created them for all humanity for all time...

14 Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth"; and it was so. 16 God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also. 17 God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18 and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good. 19 There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

Coincidence?

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If there were a scientific article explaining how God created the universe, then that act would no longer be a miracle. . . . it would be science. You've made a fantastic argument for why supernaturalism, miracles, and religious base theories have no place in a science class.

Who says I've eliminated the supernatural as possibility? All I've said is that science lacks the tools to explore the supernatural. This is the realm of philosophy and theology. If I'm open to supernatural explanations, I don't think I'll find them by studying rocks.

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Do you support eliminating the religious theories of common ancestry an unguided big bang and non-life to life religious views?

Do miracles leave behind evidence that can be examined? I believe the Flood of Noah's day did for all of the various reasons in previous posts. In this event we can examine the globe, the massive death and destruction, and live burial of plants, trees, and animals.

When we say, we cannot consider the option of a global flood because its in the Bible, we eliminate using the scientific method to its full capacity. Example: In order to explain the world: 1. We cannot consider that God created it. 2. We have to be able to explain it without miraculous events. 3. Given that criteria, any idea is possible if we simply say it happened a long time ago. It's a rebranding the miraculous as scientific theories.

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But, you are correct that a purely materialistic explanation for the universe and life is missing a million pieces to the puzzle. The difference here is that I'm not claiming to know the answer. This world is full of people who all KNOW the deepest mysteries of existence. How lucky you all are to have access and to know your Truth is THE Truth.

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You are however claiming to know that in all of the mysteries, you know what the answer is not. You have access to the same truth claims I do.

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I wrote: 1. We have supernatural evidence detailed in the biblical text.

2. We have supernatural evidence of prophesies and fulfilled prophesies with some of the fulfillments coming outside of the biblical account and recorded in history.

You wrote:
1. No you don't. The Bible is no more 'evidence' of supernaturalism than Harry Potter is that Hogwarts exists. Something is not true because its written in a book. Nor is something true because other parts of the book can be shown to be true or historically consistent.

2. No, you don't. I had this debate with a coworker 15+ years ago. At his request, I read through a book detailing every prophesy. I then spent a couple weeks writing a response to every single prophesy pointing out why it is not proof of divine revelation or supernaturalism. In this case, I have studied this argument and I don't buy any bit of it.

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One could say we have plenty of evidence of this prophesy being fulfilled in this thread.

3 Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, 4 and saying, "Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation." 5 For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, 6 through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.

Why did Jesus quote Psalms 22:1 as he was dying on the cross?

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Your solution to question #3 is to invent a being who is, by definition, incomprehensible, and then pass this solution off as though it is a comprehensible solution. None of us have the slightest understanding what being outside of time and space means. None us has the slightest understanding of what being all powerful means. None of us have the slightest idea what it means to create existence or create natural laws or create matter and energy. Any explanation you give for explaining the meaning of an infinite term will inevitably be infinitely inadequate.

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This is not my position.
1. I didn't invent God, He invented me.
2. He's not 100% incomprehensible. He created us with a mind that can comprehend what He's revealed about Himself and His working in History.
3. If the infinite God was 100 percent comprehendible by my 3lb finite brain, then I would most likely conclude that I may have identified the wrong God or made Him up.

No Jury has all of the information: Focus on what you can know and comprehend.

1. The creation account matches our reality: reproduction after kinds, purpose in the heavenly bodies.
2. The detailed events of the curse exists: pain in childbirth, cursed earth - thorns and thistles
3. Archeology agrees with the Historical claims.
4. History corroborates the Biblical historical accounts.
5. What the biblical calls 'sin' is the number one problem in all of our relationships with God, others, and ourselves.
6. Jesus was promised, came and died right on schedule.
7. The way He lived His life is consistent with someone being trustworthy.

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I don't use the term magic to be derogatory, but this is what we are talking about. Your solution is 'magic'. No explanation for the magic. No origin for the magic. No causation for the magic

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The origin for the supernatural is a supernatural God.
The explanation for the "magic" is because He chose to create.
Another explanation for the "magic" is so that people would have evidence.

p.s. I didn't get to everything and it's been a while. Missed this discussion.

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No, they shouldn't teach that the earth is flat. "good science" assumes a standard in which to measure it by. If those determining the standard are all evolutionists then here lies a problem.

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As someone who is not an expert in the scientific topics we are discussing here, it would be difficult for me to sit down with an expert in intelligent design or in young Earth geology and argue that their science is not good science. Similar, as a non expert yourself, I expect you would have difficulties sitting down with an evolutionary biologist or a geologist who supports an old Earth and convincing them that those things are good science.

Please don't take the following as anything like a personal attack . . .

I think that you accept scientific ideas about intelligent design and a young Earth because they confirm a religious belief. Because you do not have a deep enough scientific understanding of these items, your acceptance of ID and YEC is mostly going to be informed by religious experience and knowledge. And I wonder if your motivation is more about promoting of a religious views via science rather than just promoting good science.

Borrowing from an earlier example in the thread, lets say there is a question about whether or not a geological feature is made over millions of years or months. Is your resentment about the exclusion of the shorter time period ideas because you have a concern about human beings doing 'good science'? Or is your resentment about the exclusion of young Earth ideas because of the philosophical implications of what a young Earth would mean?

If your motivations for promoting ID and YEC ideas is to promote a supernatural conclusion as science, then here lies a problem.

Now, you might, rightly, point out that I am also not an expert and also do not have a deep enough scientific understanding in order to justify many of my positions. But instead of turning to religious knowledge and faith, I place a level of trust in scientific consensus. And the level of trust I place in science varies from topic to topic. As I've aged, I have become less and less trustworthy of nutrition science and I think that most of what you read today about nutrition was funded by someone who, coincidentally (wink), stands to make money off of the conclusions of that nutrition study. The same can be true with pharmaceuticals, climate science, and probably for a host of other fields. So, there are motivations for some scientists to do sketchy science and motivations for science reporters to misrepresent good science.

When I think about a field like physics, astronomy, geology, chemistry, I think that I am less skeptical. Geological research, for example, is mostly funded by governments and by companies who are looking to extract something to sell for a profit. I do not see the same motivations for the sketchy science. The motivations are far more clear. No one stands to gain anything or any money off of promoting intentionally bad science or misrepresented scientific ideas about geology, do they? Why would a government be interested in hiding evidence of a young Earth. Why would a mining company be interested in using less accurate models?

The idea that hundreds of thousands of trained scientists and all the world governments and all the world surveying and mining and drilling and ground resource based industries are following 'bad science' seems to me to be lacking an explanation. The idea that geologists haven't been exposed to the idea I think is weak. How could you even call a geologist that isn't reasonably aware of the history and competing ideas around their field that is their life's work an expert?

So, here is what I would say to you post above - Those determining the standards being all evolutionists is only a problem if its 'bad science' or if ID is better science. If ID and YEC want seats at the table, they have to be earned. Earned by using science that can be tested and verified and then be used to make predictions and show utility. Outside of maybe a few examples, every scientific field offers utility. And if the scientific community still rejects ID and YEC because of a bias, consider it a blessing. It is a blessing because it means that as soon as those ID and YEC scientists develop there models and theories to the points where they can show real world application and engineering potential, then they may be some of the most wealthy and powerful people.

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Under an atheistic worldview you would be correct. The Sun and Moon just is. They function with no given purpose. (Nothing would have an objective purpose because there would be no universal truth). These objects serve the very purposes that God created them for all humanity for all time...

14 Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth"; and it was so. 16 God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also. 17 God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, 18 and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good. 19 There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

Coincidence?

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This is just basic observation which has been assigned purpose by humans. Humans have done this for thousands of years and I don't see how this is different.

I don't know how to differentiate the claim that the purpose of the stars to tell us when its night and the claim that the purpose of lightning is for Zeus to demonstrate his authority over the skies.

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Do you support eliminating the religious theories of common ancestry an unguided big bang and non-life to life religious views?

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I see you've classified common ancestry and unguided evolution as religious ideas. As has been discussed on this board in the past, you can classify any idea as religious and any belief as 'religious' if you use a liberal enough definition of religion.

Assuming you do believe in a difference between a 'religious view' and a 'scientific view', then how do you differentiate? What is a 'scientific view' and what are its properties - such that it excludes things like common ancestry?

In other words, do theories like common ancestry and non guided evolution require assumptions that make it 'not scientific'? If yes, what are those assumptions? Specifically.

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Do miracles leave behind evidence that can be examined? I believe the Flood of Noah's day did for all of the various reasons in previous posts. In this event we can examine the globe, the massive death and destruction, and live burial of plants, trees, and animals.

When we say, we cannot consider the option of a global flood because its in the Bible, we eliminate using the scientific method to its full capacity. Example: In order to explain the world: 1. We cannot consider that God created it. 2. We have to be able to explain it without miraculous events. 3. Given that criteria, any idea is possible if we simply say it happened a long time ago. It's a rebranding the miraculous as scientific theories.

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Lets try a very simple example:

Imagine I have my hand open with nothing in it. An instance later, God manifests a pen into existence sitting in my hand by using of miracle and divine intervention.

In this scenario, the TRUTH about what happened is that God manifested this pen, a miracle occurred, and a pen was called into existence.

Now, lets try to create a scientific account of what happened. As an observer, you saw the open hand and then you saw a pen appear. How did the pen appear? Where did it come from? How did it get there? What is the matter that it was made of? Can you demonstrate how the pen appeared through appeal of what we know and observe elsewhere in nature? Do pens and other objects simply appear? Do we understand how they are manifested into existence?

At the end of the day, a scientific report on how a pen was manifested into existence by God cannot offer confirmation that God performed a miracle. It cannot describe how it was done. It cannot help you recreate the process. It cannot help us to manifest pens of our own. It offers no scientific utility for understanding the natural mechanisms for the manifestation of a pen because it was not a natural mechanism at work. The only utility we might gain from this example is philosophical. God gave me a pen! Now, I ask "why" instead of "how" and I explore the implications of receiving the pen.

What scientific theories or formulas can we derive from miracles? This is not about using the scientific method to its full capacity, this is about accepting the limitations of the scientific method. What is the scientific method:

Observation: Notice a problem or phenomenon.

Question: Ask a testable question.

Hypothesis: Propose a prediction.

Experiment: Test the hypothesis with controlled experiments.

Analysis: Examine data and results.

Conclusion: Determine if the hypothesis is supported.

Repeat: Refine and retest as needed.

Apply these steps to the miracle of the pen. I don't mean this rhetorically. I would like to see how you would apply these steps to prove a miracle occurred.

We can consider a global flood. That the idea came from the Bible is irrelevant. What is relevant is the proposed mechanism. If there is evidence of a flood, then there is evidence of a flood. If we cannot find a natural explanation, then to assign this to God is simply a God of the Gaps problem.

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You are however claiming to know that in all of the mysteries, you know what the answer is not. You have access to the same truth claims I do.

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I don't agree. I get tired of saying this over and over and over, but not only do I not know TRUTH about reality, I am positive that much of what I believe about reality is probably wrong.

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This is not my position.
1. I didn't invent God, He invented me.
2. He's not 100% incomprehensible. He created us with a mind that can comprehend what He's revealed about Himself and His working in History.
3. If the infinite God was 100 percent comprehendible by my 3lb finite brain, then I would most likely conclude that I may have identified the wrong God or made Him up.

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Consider the possibility of understanding '1' part of an infinite God. What is the mathematical limit of 1 over x as x approaches infinity? Zero!

My concern is not to do with 100% understanding of God. My concern is that there may not exist a small enough fraction an infinite being that would be comprehensible to a finite being.

Imagine an infinite number of grains of sand. Give me a fraction of infinity that is not also infinity. Any tiny little bit of an infinite God must also be infinite, right?

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The origin for the supernatural is a supernatural God.

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And what is the origin of the supernatural God?