Creation vs Evolution

[hecd2]

SocaliCatholic:

Alec,

Thank you for your honesty. It is great to know that you used to be Catholic at one point in time. I will pray that you might come back to Church someday God willing. I would like to further understand your reasoning becuase you are an educated scientist and I am not and my belief is that truth can never contradict truth. Also that our job is to do the best we can to understand the truth. So if you have arrived at some truth that I have not after all your studies it would be of great interest to me.

What would be your reason as to why it should be impossible to put no faith into the teachings of the Catholic Church? If you knew somehow that God existed, would you still not want to have faith in God if you knew God Loves you?

Dear Socali,

I must say that you post the most thought provoking questions. Why am I lapsed and now a firm agnostic? We have moved from a confrontational stance where we were arguing with some venom to this. On the way, you asked me what evidence would represent a real problem for the Theory of Evolution, how a non-scientist could get a working knowledge of the science and what aspects of the Catholic faith I accede to and why. In every case, your questions were thought provoking and I answered them as honestly as I could.

Now I am going to baulk at answering a question. Other than repeating the Laplacian aphorism with reference to God: ‘I did not need that hypothesis’, I don’t want to say more. I have no desire to undermine the faith of you or anyone else. I don’t want to set out to be a source of scandal. What’s more, atheism and Catholicism are not correlated with education or intelligence. There are many devout Catholics who are vastly more kinowledgeable, more talented and far cleverer than I am. Being educated in science does not lead a person to agnosticism.

Also if the fact of evolution did indeed occur, then would that would be an objective truth whether or not I am some crazy, uneducated creationist that is in complete denial of all the facts.

Indeed so - whatever stance you or I take, whatever is the truth will be the truth.

Alec
homepage.ntlworld.com/macandrew/Grenada_disaster/Grenada_disaster.htm

 

[SocaliCatholic]

hecd2:

Dear Socali,

I must say that you post the most thought provoking questions. Why am I lapsed and now a firm agnostic? We have moved from a confrontational stance where we were arguing with some venom to this. On the way, you asked me what evidence would represent a real problem for the Theory of Evolution, how a non-scientist could get a working knowledge of the science and what aspects of the Catholic faith I accede to and why. In every case, your questions were thought provoking and I answered them as honestly as I could.

Now I am going to baulk at answering a question. Other than repeating the Laplacian aphorism with reference to God: ‘I did not need that hypothesis’, I don’t want to say more. I have no desire to undermine the faith of you or anyone else. I don’t want to set out to be a source of scandal. What’s more, atheism and Catholicism are not correlated with education or intelligence. There are many devout Catholics who are vastly more kinowledgeable, more talented and far cleverer than I am. Being educated in science does not lead a person to agnosticism.

Indeed so - whatever stance you or I take, whatever is the truth will be the truth.

Alec
homepage.ntlworld.com/macandrew/Grenada_disaster/Grenada_disaster.htm

Alec,

Please I assure you that if you are anxious about sharing any data that might lead to scandal, I have read your parental advisory label but please induldge me. As it stands, I never expected to be challenged so thoroughly by scientists on here on the topic of evolution, you have done a much better job than most biologist that I have ever talked to in the past on the subject.

Think of it this way, if you refuse to share your knowledge with me, then I would consider you a liability to the practice of good science becuase you have shared your knowledge about evolution and now I am at an impasse and need your data that conficts with mine to run my experiments on reconcilling my faith people who believe in evolution becuase I do not accept theistic evolution. Its one or the other.

 

[Sistersamm]

Okay, Phil, I’m back from my research and found this, not sure if its what you’ve already seen, read, heard or whatever, but thought it worthy of a post for someone who’s intrested.

"Darwin could not find any good examples of intermediate links in the fossil record, but he had hope. He wrote his book in the mid 1800’s. As a result he figured that geology was sitll in its infant stage as a science and that geologists just hadn’t found the intermediate link fossils yet. He was convinced that as time went on, geologists would find these intermediate links. He said that the intermediate links were currently just “missing” from the fossil record, but they would be found in time. So, has geology uncovered them? **NO. **Dr. David Raup, the curator of the Chicago Feild Museum of Natural History says, “Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded…ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. by this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as the result of more detailed information. (Feild Museum Bulletin January 1970) He says (and most experts on the fossil record agree) that the missing links are still missing! Darwin saw this fact as strong evidence against evolution, and Dr. Raup says that the situation is worse now than ever! The fossil record then, is strong evidence against evolution.”

Again, I take my information from Exploring Creation with General Science by Dr. Jay L. Wile.
I find this really great thought provoking information. Check out Apologia Science and then check out The Institute for Creation Research and the work of Dr. Steven A. Austin.
Enjoy your evening.

 

[wanerious]

Sistersamm:

Darwin saw this fact as strong evidence against evolution, and Dr. Raup says that the situation is worse now than ever! The fossil record then, is strong evidence against evolution."

Again, I take my information from Exploring Creation with General Science by Dr. Jay L. Wile.

Hi,

Unfortunately, Dr. Wile only seems to provide a portion of Dr. Raup’s quote, and indeed just that bit that seems to doubt evolutionary theory. In fact, the context of Dr. Raup’s quote is his proposal that the gradualistic view of old-Darwinism is outdated and not supported by the evidence. There are few, if any, modern scientists who would disagree. Dr. Raup certainly believes in common descent. There are a number of modern theories to account for the complexities of fossil and geologic evidence. As is true of most theories, the original formulation is modified over time as technology and observations increase in number and quality. Here’s a more thorough description of how Raup (and others) have been misrepresented:

Raup link

I would be skeptical of any scientist willingly misrepresenting the work and writings of others.

 

[Vindex_Urvogel]

Apologia100:

Here is what I mean by context. In our time, we have donkeys (equis asinus), mules, and horses (equis caballus). We know empirically that donkeys and horses are different species of the genus Equidae. Mules are the offspring of the pairing of a donkey and a horse. If one were to look at the skeleton of a donkey, mule, and horse without the modern context of being 3 independent species, one could reasonably assume that the donkey evolved into a mule, which in turn evolved into a horse. One would then make the determination that a mule is a transitional species between a donkey and a horse. But in context we know that is not true.

Umm…this is just not how phylogenetic systematics works. No one posits orthogenic, linear statements of ancestor-descendant relationships because they are simply not scientific. An actual paleontologist would look at the specimens in question and upon analysis of their character distributions conclude that the taxa constitute successively more remotely nested terminals within a singular clade. Your point is quite irrelevant to the modern practice of phylogenetic reconstruction.

Vindex Urvogel

 

[SocaliCatholic]

Vindex Urvogel:

An actual paleontologist would look at the specimens in question and upon analysis of their character distributions conclude that the taxa constitute successively more remotely nested terminals within a singular clade.

Can you please translate this part so I can understand it.

 

[Ghola5]

There is no Evolution with out Creation. The universe had to be created first before it, or anything in it, could “evolve”. Whichever way you look at it, in my opinion God had a hand in it.

 

[hecd2]

SocaliCatholic:

Alec,

Please I assure you that if you are anxious about sharing any data that might lead to scandal, I have read your parental advisory label but please induldge me. As it stands, I never expected to be challenged so thoroughly by scientists on here on the topic of evolution, you have done a much better job than most biologist that I have ever talked to in the past on the subject.

Think of it this way, if you refuse to share your knowledge with me, then I would consider you a liability to the practice of good science becuase you have shared your knowledge about evolution and now I am at an impasse and need your data that conficts with mine to run my experiments on reconcilling my faith people who believe in evolution becuase I do not accept theistic evolution. Its one or the other.

Dear Socali - I really am very reluctant to go down this particular rat hole. I don’t have any special ‘data’, I certainly cannot prove that God does not exist and you shouldn’t look to me for some revelation that will make the scales fall from your eyes or anything like that. As I said, cleverer, better educated people than I am, have the same evidence and data as I have and more, and reach the conclusion that God is real and present. It comes down to a matter of predisposition and judgement.

I’ll offer a couple of thoughts though, since you have been so flatteringly insistent

• I see the way that the Universe unfolds according to impersonal physical rules that lead inevitably to the formation of galaxies, stars and planets, the development of life on at least some planets, and the evolution of that life to a complex self-regarding organism like mankind
• When I look at religions across the world and throughout the ages, I see the anthropology and the psychological motivations that humans have developed through various evoltionary mechanisms for religious beliefs that have no correlate in reality. Pascal Boyer wrote a powerful, sensitive book, called ‘Religion Explianed’ that deals with these ideas. Particular religious beliefs do seem to me to be arbitrary

And now let me balance this and my own prejudices by recommending another book. It is called Life’s Solution and it’s written by Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of the Royal Society and a Christian. He is a theistic evolutionist. The thesis of his book is that evolution is more constrained to arrive at a limited number of solutions than we generally think, and he sees the hand of God in this.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[hecd2]

SocaliCatholic:

Vindex Urvogel:

An actual paleontologist would look at the specimens in question and upon analysis of their character distributions conclude that the taxa constitute successively more remotely nested terminals within a singular clade.

Can you please translate this part so I can understand it.

What he means is that the science of cladistics works by comparing a large number of different characters in different organisms to build a phylogeny - that is a tree that shows the order in which they share common ancestors with one another. A clade is that set of organisms that share a particular common ancestor. A taxon is a phylogenetic identity: a species, a family or some higher group. Paleaontologists do not use characters revealed by fossil data to conclude direct ancestor/descendant relationships. That’s what he was saying. Here is a very simple phylogeny to show you what one might look like:

… — Macaque monkey
…—
…—
…—…—Gorilla
— … —
…—…—
…—… —…— Chimpanzee
… — … —
…—…—
…—
… —
…— Human

Is this at all helpful?

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[SocaliCatholic]

hecd2:

What he means is that the science of cladistics works by comparing a large number of different characters in different organisms to build a phylogeny - that is a tree that shows the order in which they share common ancestors with one another. A clade is that set of organisms that share a particular common ancestor. A taxon is a phylogenetic identity: a species, a family or some higher group. Paleaontologists do not use characters revealed by fossil data to conclude direct ancestor/descendant relationships. That’s what he was saying. Here is a very simple phylogeny to show you what one might look like:

… — Macaque monkey
…—
…—
…—…—Gorilla
— … —
…—…—
…—… —…— Chimpanzee
… — … —
…—…—
…—
… —
…— Human

Is this at all helpful?

Alec
evolutionpages.com

Yes it is very helpful thank you Alec, but now I am really confused becuase if I compare what you said and Urvogel said and Apologia100 said

Apologia100:

Here is what I mean by context. In our time, we have donkeys (equis asinus), mules, and horses (equis caballus). We know empirically that donkeys and horses are different species of the genus Equidae. Mules are the offspring of the pairing of a donkey and a horse. If one were to look at the skeleton of a donkey, mule, and horse without the modern context of being 3 independent species, one could reasonably assume that the donkey evolved into a mule, which in turn evolved into a horse. One would then make the determination that a mule is a transitional species between a donkey and a horse. But in context we know that is not true.

So it seems that Apologia100 was concluding that if a archaeologist dug up some fossils and put them back together that it was likely that he could get them confused that they evolved from one source becuase the horse and donkey and mule looked simmilar?
Vindex Urvogel:

Umm…this is just not how phylogenetic systematics works. No one posits orthogenic, linear statements of ancestor-descendant relationships because they are simply not scientific. An actual paleontologist would look at the specimens in question and upon analysis of their character distributions conclude that the taxa constitute successively more remotely nested terminals within a singular clade. Your point is quite irrelevant to the modern practice of phylogenetic reconstruction.

So was Urvogel clarifying that fossils don’t get put back together and compared so simplistically right?

Why I am really confused is even if there are distinct animals rebuilt from fossils, what is the critical data like DNA that archaeologists or whoever does it, builds or reconstructs the family tree?

Um, in other words how do people know that becuase things look the same (I think its phenotype right) that they are related by evolution just becuase we look the same or share some simmilar DNA. Can’t it be possible that we just have things in common becuase of the chemical makeup of life? Does it have to imply that we evovled from the same source?

Thanks for helping me I am trying to make sense of all this and not knowledgeable in this area.

 

[SocaliCatholic]

hecd2:

Dear Socali - I really am very reluctant to go down this particular rat hole. I don’t have any special ‘data’, I certainly cannot prove that God does not exist and you shouldn’t look to me for some revelation that will make the scales fall from your eyes or anything like that. As I said, cleverer, better educated people than I am, have the same evidence and data as I have and more, and reach the conclusion that God is real and present. It comes down to a matter of predisposition and judgement.

I’ll offer a couple of thoughts though, since you have been so flatteringly insistent

• I see the way that the Universe unfolds according to impersonal physical rules that lead inevitably to the formation of galaxies, stars and planets, the development of life on at least some planets, and the evolution of that life to a complex self-regarding organism like mankind
• When I look at religions across the world and throughout the ages, I see the anthropology and the psychological motivations that humans have developed through various evoltionary mechanisms for religious beliefs that have no correlate in reality. Pascal Boyer wrote a powerful, sensitive book, called ‘Religion Explianed’ that deals with these ideas. Particular religious beliefs do seem to me to be arbitrary

And now let me balance this and my own prejudices by recommending another book. It is called Life’s Solution and it’s written by Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of the Royal Society and a Christian. He is a theistic evolutionist. The thesis of his book is that evolution is more constrained to arrive at a limited number of solutions than we generally think, and he sees the hand of God in this.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

Thanks Alec for what you said. I can appriciate your conclusions about God based on your reasoning. Can I try to ask you about God in a different way with respect to your own data on the matter?

All things else being equal, and with respect to whatever means you believe something like evolution for example, if evidence for God was presented in by the same means would you believe in God?

NO. then why do you believe in evolution.

YES. Then I will do my best to try to construct a way to arrive at the conclusion God from the same rational methodology that evolutionary biologists use.

YES part II Better yet could you save me years of strife and just tell me how you think by a formal description? Such as if fossil A is without a doubt creature ABC, then we can conclude that if the reasoning used to reason fossil A implies creature ABC then there must be some universiality to the truth of this type of thinking that can be applied elsewhere.

**YES part III ** Let us assume that if God exists that he will make Himself known to all people who desire to know Him by whatever means of reason they have. That if God in fact did exist then he will allow a means to know Him using the reason [R,eb] [Reason, evolutionary biologist] and the circumstances of [A,hecd2] [Alec, hecd2] so that if we were to combine the universal [R,eb] and the circumstancial[A,hecd2] then God could be shown to exist if we could establish the link between the logical necessity of God being reachable by reason, with the reason of [R,eb] with respect to the circumstances of [A,hecd2]

 

[Vindex_Urvogel]

SocaliCatholic:

Can you please translate this part so I can understand it.

Character distribution analysis is the heart of phylogenetic reconstruction. If you are analyzing taxa X, Y, and Z you assess the distribution of the characters (a, b, c, d, e, f,…) present within these taxa. Coding of character states for all discrete characters listed for taxa X, Y, and Z produces a data matrix which is subject to algorithmic analysis under a variety of constraints. Results are mapped graphically as topologies displaying nested hierarchies of clades underwritten by synapomorphic characters at each node.

Urvogel Reverie

 

[Vindex_Urvogel]

SocaliCatholic:

So was Urvogel clarifying that fossils don’t get put back together and compared so simplistically right?

Yes, Apologias version of paleontological research and systematic analysis is severely flawed and out of touch with how both are carried out.

Urvogel REverie

 

[Sistersamm]

Good to know, thanks for giving a place to keep learning on this most wonderful debate. I still believe what God has placed on my heart and that is, to believe that as He recorded it, it is so.

In the end, I have to wonder if the angels are watching us and wondering why this is so important. There are souls that need saving. Are we to know all? Certainly not. Will we? He says so. In the mean time, its good to be reaching as long as its to Christ.

I pray you will find what your looking for in the computer screen. And even more, that God himself will reveal to you what you really long for.

So bless you and thankyou for this most intresting discussion.

Lovingly,

 

[SocaliCatholic]

Vindex Urvogel:

Character distribution analysis is the heart of phylogenetic reconstruction. If you are analyzing taxa X, Y, and Z you assess the distribution of the characters (a, b, c, d, e, f,…) present within these taxa. Coding of character states for all discrete characters listed for taxa X, Y, and Z produces a data matrix which is subject to algorithmic analysis under a variety of constraints. Results are mapped graphically as topologies displaying nested hierarchies of clades underwritten by synapomorphic characters at each node.

Urvogel Reverie

Aha! So it really is more complex than most creationists give credit for. I think I can understand now why the evolutionists vs. creationists debate gets so heated now: Not enough credit is given for the amount of thinking and analysis by biologists that goes into producing theories such as evolution. And as hard your and hed2’s post are to read sometimes, that shouldn’t be taken as you guys are arrogant like some creationists post’s I’ve read, but in actuallity creaionists should be understanding to the amount of technical analysis that goes into developing these theories and it is not communicated easily which is why I can’t understand it.

 

[Vindex_Urvogel]

SocaliCatholic:

Aha! So it really is more complex than most creationists give credit for. I think I can understand now why the evolutionists vs. creationists debate gets so heated now: Not enough credit is given for the amount of thinking and analysis by biologists that goes into producing theories such as evolution. And as hard your and hed2’s post are to read sometimes, that shouldn’t be taken as you guys are arrogant like some creationists post’s I’ve read, but in actuallity creaionists should be understanding to the amount of technical analysis that goes into developing these theories and it is not communicated easily which is why I can’t understand it.

This is why evolution is so widely misunderstood and its opponents can so easily distort it.

Urvogel Reverie

 

[SocaliCatholic]

Vindex Urvogel:

This is why evolution is so widely misunderstood and its opponents can so easily distort it.

Urvogel Reverie

Thats precisely why earlier I asked Alec if he could come up with some ideas that I would have to prove to be true if I were to try to disprove it, rather than attack evolution in a way that all evolutionists would claim silly.

Have you read them and is there anything that should be added that you reccomend so when I disprove it you and Alec don’t get mad at me.

hecd2:

• If each species or family of living things were entirely unique and showed no sign of nested hierarchy
• If the genomes of different lineages contained entirely unconnected characteristics with no sign of shared ancestral events
• If complex multicellular organisms could be shown to pre-date or appear simultaneously with simple bacteria and archaea
• If different branches of life used many different and unrelated genetic codes
• If genetic adaptation as a consequence of environmental pressures should be shown not to occur
• If the likelihood of reproduction and transmission of genes was shown to be unconnected with the phenotype determined by the genotype
• If a natural barrier were found to the degree of change that could occur in a population over many generations
• If the universe could be shown to be 6000 years old
• If the rate of genetic drift in a population were shown to be totally inadequate to explain the genetic divergence of species in the time available.
• If we found evidence that the earth was seeded deliberately with each extant species by a race of aliens

I am sure there are others, but they are fine to be going on with. How do you think that evolution as a process can be disproved?

Alec
homepage.ntlworld.com/macandrew/Grenada_disaster/Grenada_disaster.htm

 

[Vindex_Urvogel]

SocaliCatholic:

Thats precisely why earlier I asked Alec if he could come up with some ideas that I would have to prove to be true if I were to try to disprove it, rather than attack evolution in a way that all evolutionists would claim silly.

Have you read them and is there anything that should be added that you reccomend so when I disprove it you and Alec don’t get mad at me.

I would add the lack of any homologies, morphological, embryological, and molecular. And of course, the demonstration of a lack of any fossil taxa displaying morphologies consistent with a branching pattern of speciation.

Urvogel Reverie

 

[buffalo]

SocaliCatholic:

Thats precisely why earlier I asked Alec if he could come up with some ideas that I would have to prove to be true if I were to try to disprove it, rather than attack evolution in a way that all evolutionists would claim silly.

Have you read them and is there anything that should be added that you reccomend so when I disprove it you and Alec don’t get mad at me.

Maybe we could add some cosmological things here.

Basically that the further we look the more design we find.

 

[wanerious]

buffalo:

Maybe we could add some cosmological things here.

Basically that the further we look the more design we find.

I’m not following… what kinds of cosmological things are evidence of design?