Evolution and Creationism

[buffalo]

And a quote from Prof Crisp: “Bdelloid rotifers are microinvertebrates with unique characteristics: they have survived tens of millions of years without sexual reproduction”.

You don’t believe the planet is even one million years old. Why are you linking to people who base their work on things you categorically deny?

Once again you miss the central points and you and the authors will always try to weave the explanation into the dogma. Start connecting the dots.

The central point is what the other poster had asked. Give me some evidence of HGT in advanced organisms. I did.

 

[Freddy]

Can we agree the tree of life has fallen and is now a tangled web?

Forget tangled webs. Why do you constantly link to people whom you believe are absolutely wrong in the very scientific basis for their work?

And what’s wrong with me not being able to reproduce with chimps? This is one of the bedrocks of your argument so you need to explain it.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

And a quote from Prof Crisp: “Bdelloid rotifers are microinvertebrates with unique characteristics: they have survived tens of millions of years without sexual reproduction”.

You don’t believe the planet is even one million years old. Why are you linking to people who base their work on things you categorically deny?

Once again you miss the central points and you and the authors will always try to weave the explanation into the dogma. Start connecting the dots.

The central point is what the other poster had asked. Give me some evidence of HGT in advanced organisms. I did.

So we should trust what it says in that article. Why? You don’t…

 

[buffalo]

Why do you constantly link to people whom you believe are absolutely wrong in the very scientific basis for their work?

Do you mean by basis the modern synthesis? The foundations of their basis is being rocked.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

Why do you constantly link to people whom you believe are absolutely wrong in the very scientific basis for their work?

Do you mean by basis the modern synthesis? The foundations of their basis is being rocked.

They base their work on scientific evidence. Are you saying we should reject their work?

Nah, of course not. We should accept the parts of their work that support anything you say regarding evolution and disregard anything they say which you don’t accept.

Edit: there were a couple of home truths written at this point but I’ve deleted them. But seriously, you need to consider the moral implications of what you are doing. And I don’t mean in regard to the moral aspects of evolution.

 

[buffalo]

They base their work on scientific evidence. Are you saying we should reject their work?

Some of it. When a new discovery is made one needs to consider it. This guy didn’t do the research on the other stuff. He is merely repeating what he has learned in the past and trying to weave it all together. If he didn’t he wouldn’t get published, so they all have to play the game.

When we start putting it all together we see the foundation is built on sand.

“The great majority of people we are talking to were educated in biology 30 or 40 years ago and they really have no idea of the sea change that has occurred.”

“the house of cards, the citadel if you like is empty, but many people still do not know that.” 54 min

 

[Freddy]

If he didn’t he wouldn’t get published, so they all have to play the game.

That makes as much sense as saying that the guy working on the orbital mechanics for a moon shot still thinks the world is round. I mean, all these rocket scientists wouldn’t get published if they suggested the earth was flat.

And every scientist in physics and biology and geology and astropyhsics and astronomy and radiology and I don’t know how many other branches would lose thier funding and never be published if they suggested the world was only a few thousand years old.

But anyway, onto the bedrock argument. The one that says that we devolve. That it’s a bad thing to lose the ability to reproduce. What was the reason why it’s so bad we can’t reproduce with apes?

 

[buffalo]

The one that says that we devolve.

[Dr. John Sanford “Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome”]​

“a vastly superior operating system”​

“a galaxy of design and complexity”​

“over 90% of the genome is actively transcribed”​

“the genome has multiple overlapping messages”​

“data compression on the most sophisticated level”​

“more and more the genome looks like a super super set of programs”​

“more and more it looks like top down design”​

“the reality is everybody is mutant”​

“the selection process really has nothing to grab hold of”​

“so it’s kind of a trade secret amongst population geneticists,any well informed population geneticist understands man is degenerating”​

“so in deep geological time we should have been extinct a long time ago”​

“the human race is degenerating at 1-5% per generation”​

"so personal and so immediate, because there is no circle of life where things where things stay the same, and it’s not an upward spiral of evolution, things keep getting better and better, it is a downward spiral​

Dr. John Sanford "Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome"1/2​

Dr. John Sanford “Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome” 2/2​

 

[Freddy]

Large font size doesn’t increase the validity of any given post. It’s like shouting at a foreigner in English. It doesn’t help.

You have agreed that losing the ability to reproduce with a chimp was a bad thing. I’m still waiting to hear from you why that is so

 

[Techno2000]

That could’ve happened, but Noah only brought his family. That would’ve been back stabbing someone, unless they died before the flood, but IDK.

Actually, that comes from private revelations, that Noah hired many men to help build the Ark, and in the end, they and their families were saved too.

 

[Duke12VonFalkenburg]

Let’s say you have a large room. It’s fully enclosed and is about the size of a football field. The room is locked, permanently, and has no doors or windows, and no holes in its walls.

Inside the room there is…nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not a particle of anything. No air at all. No dust at all. No light at all. It’s a sealed room that’s pitch black inside. Then what happens?

Well, let’s say your goal is to get something – anything at all – into the room. But the rules are: you can’t use anything from outside the room to do that. So what do you do?

Well, you think, what if I try to create a spark inside the room? Then the room would have light in it, even for just a moment. That would qualify as something. Yes, but you are outside the room. So that’s not allowed.

But, you say, what if I could teleport something into the room, like in Star Trek? Again, that’s not allowable, because you’d be using things from outside the room.

Here again is the dilemma: you have to get something inside the room using only what’s in the room. And, in this case, what’s in the room is nothing.

Well, you say, maybe a tiny particle of something will just show up inside the room if given enough time.

There’s three problems with this theory. First, time by itself doesn’t do anything. Things happen over time, but it’s not time that makes them happen. For example, if you wait 15 minutes for cookies to bake, it’s not the 15 minutes that bakes them, it’s the heat in the oven. If you set them on the counter for 15 minutes, they’re not going to bake.

In our analogy, we’ve got a fully enclosed room with absolutely nothing in it. Waiting 15 minutes will not, in and of itself, change the situation. Well, you say, what if we wait eons? An eon is merely a bunch of 15-minute segments all pressed together. If you waited an eon with your cookies on the counter, would the eon bake them?

The second problem is this: why would anything just “show up” in the empty room? It would need a reason why it came to be. But there is nothing inside the room at all. So what’s to stop that from remaining the case? There would be nothing inside the room to cause something to show up (and yet the reason must come from inside the room).

Well, you say, what about a tiny particle of something? Wouldn’t that have a greater chance of materializing in the room than something larger like, for example, a football?

That brings up the third problem: size. Like time, size is an abstract. It’s relative. Let’s say you have three baseballs, all ranging in size. One is ten feet wide, one is five feet wide, one is normal size. Which one is more likely to materialize in the room?

The normal-size baseball? No! It would be the same likelihood for all three. The size wouldn’t matter. It’s not the issue. The issue is whether or not any baseball of any size could just “show up” in our sealed, empty room.

Continued…

 

[Duke12VonFalkenburg]

If you don’t think the smallest baseball could just show up in the room, no matter how much time passed, then you must conclude the same thing even for an atom. Size is not an issue. The likelihood of a small particle materializing without cause is no different than a refrigerator materializing without cause!

Now let’s stretch our analogy further, literally. Let’s take our large, pitch-black room and remove its walls. And let’s extend the room so that it goes on infinitely in all directions. Now there is nothing outside the room, because the room is all there is. Period.

This black infinite room has no light, no dust, no particles of any kind, no air, no elements, no molecules. It’s absolute nothingness. In fact, we can call it Absolutely Nothing .

So here’s the question: if originally – bazillions of years ago – there was Absolutely Nothing, wouldn’t there be Absolutely Nothing now?

Yes. For something – no matter how small – cannot come from Absolutely Nothing. We would still have Absolutely Nothing.

 

[Duke12VonFalkenburg]

If there ever was Absolutely Nothing, there would still be Absolutely Nothing today. Since there is something (you, for example), that means that Absolutely Nothing never existed. If it ever did, you wouldn’t be here reading this right now. Absolutely Nothing would still be here.

So there was never a time when Absolutely Nothing existed. Therefore, there has always been something. But what? If we go back to the very beginning, what was the Something that must have existed? Was it more than one Something, or just one? And what was it like, judging by what exists today?

Let’s explore the quantity issue first. Let’s call into mind again our large, pitch-black, sealed-off room. Imagine that there are ten tennis balls inside the room. As far back in time as we can go, there was only this: ten tennis balls.

What happens next? Let’s say we wait an entire year. What’s in the room? Still just ten tennis balls, right? Because there is no other force in existence. And we know that ten ordinary tennis balls – no matter how much time passes – cannot spawn new ones. Or anything else for that matter.

Okay, what if there were six tennis balls in the room to begin with? Would that change the situation? No, not really. Alright then, what if there were a million tennis balls? Still no change. All we’ve got in the room is tennis balls, no matter how many there are.

What we find out is that quantity is not an issue. If we go back to the very beginning of all things, the quantity of the Something that must have existed is not what’s important. Or is it?

Remove the tennis balls. Now inside the room is a chicken. Now we wait a year. What’s inside the room? Just one chicken, right? But what if we started out with one hen and one rooster in the room? Now we wait a year, what do we have? A bunch more chickens!

So quantity is important, IF inside the room are at least two things that can produce a third thing. Hen + rooster = baby chick. But quantity is not important if we’re talking about at least two things that cannot produce a third thing. Tennis ball + football = nothing.

So the issue isn’t quantity so much as quality. What qualities does the Something possess? Can it bring other things into existence?

 

[Freddy]

I think that Sir Roger Penrose came up with something similar:

“Penrose noticed that the past conformal boundary of one copy of FLRW spacetime can be “attached” to the future conformal boundary of another, after an appropriate conformal rescaling. In particular, each individual FLRW metric {\displaystyle g_{ab}}

is multiplied by the square of a conformal factor {\displaystyle \Omega }

that approaches zero at timelike infinity, effectively “squashing down” the future conformal boundary to a conformally regular hypersurface (which is spacelike if there is a positive cosmological constant, as is currently believed).”

It’s uncanny how your tennis balls and chickens map almost directly with his theory.

 

[rossum]

Once again you miss the central points and you and the authors will always try to weave the explanation into the dogma.

You say “dogma”. You are trying to criticise the science of evolution by likening it to a religiion, hence your “dogma”. That is a religious concept, not a scientific one.

In effect you are saying that science is superior to religion, and that when science becomes like a religion – “dogma” – it is less than real science, which is not contaminated by the religious concept of dogma.

Do you really think that science is superior to religion? A very strange attitude for someone who values religion so much.

 

[rossum]

So there was never a time when Absolutely Nothing existed. Therefore, there has always been something.

You are getting into cosmology here, and cosmology is very strange, almost as strange as quantum mechanics. The current Einsteinian universe is a four dimensional manifold with three dimensions of space and one time dimension. That universe started at the Big Bang, which is when time started. In cosmology you cannot assume that time exists. Time itself had a cause.

A number of standard assumptions that work in the ordinary world do not work in either cosmology or in quantum mechanics. When the entire universe is small enough to be treatable at the quantum scale, as in the few fractions of a second after the Big Bang, then we have both sources of strangeness superimposed. Hence we need to be doubly careful applying our normal assumptions to the Big Bang.

 

[Duke12VonFalkenburg]

Let’s go back to our chickens, but let’s get very exact, because such would be the case in the very, very beginning. We have a hen and a rooster in the room. They are in different parts of the room, suspended in nothingness. Will they produce other chickens?

No. Why? Because there’s no environment to work in. There’s nothing in the room except the hen and the rooster. No air to breathe or fly in, no ground to walk on, no sustenance for them to live on. They can’t eat, walk, fly or breathe. Their environment is complete nothingness.

So chickens are out. Chickens cannot exist or reproduce without some sort of environment. With an environment, they could spawn other chickens. And with an environment affecting them, maybe they could – though it seems absurd – change into a different kind of chicken over time. Something along the lines of an otter or a giraffe.

So we’ve got a room with no environment. Therefore, we need Something that can exist without an environment. Something that doesn’t need air, food or water to exist. That disqualifies every current living thing on this earth.

So, then, what about non-living things? They don’t need an environment, that’s true. But then we’re in the same predicament we were in with the tennis balls. Non-living matter doesn’t produce anything. Let’s say, instead of ten tennis balls, you had a trillion molecules of hydrogen. Then what happens? Over time, you still have a trillion molecules of hydrogen, nothing more.

While we’re talking about non-living matter, let’s also consider what it takes for that to exist. Ever heard of the Supercollider? Years ago the government embarked on an experiment to create matter. The Supercollider was miles and miles of underground tunnel through which atoms would travel at supersonic speeds and then smash into each other, in order to create a tiny particle. All that for the tiniest, most microscopic bit of matter.

What does that tell us? That our illustration of the ten tennis balls is not nearly as easy as it sounds. It would take an AMAZING amount of energy just to produce one tennis ball out of nothing. And nothing is all we have. The room has absolutely nothing in it.

 

[Duke12VonFalkenburg]

So here’s where we are. The Something that existed at the beginning must be able to exist without depending on anything else. It must be totally and fully self-sufficient. For It was alone at the very beginning. And It needed no environment within which to exist.

Second, the Something that existed at the very beginning must have the ability to produce something other than Itself. For, if It could not, then that Something would be all that exists today. But Something Else exists today. You, for example.

Third, to produce Something Else – out of nothing – requires an incredible amount of power. So the Something must have great power at its disposal. If it takes us miles and miles of corridor and the most energy we can harness, just to produce the tiniest particle, how much power would it take to produce the matter in the universe?

Let’s go back to our room. Let’s say we have a very special tennis ball inside the room. It can produce other tennis balls. It has that much power and energy. And It is completely self-sufficient, needing nothing else to exist, for It is all there is. It, this one tennis ball, is the Eternal Something.

Let’s say the tennis ball produces another tennis ball. Which of the two will be greater, say, with respect to TIME? Ball #1. It is the Eternal Something. It has always existed. Ball #2, however, came into existence when produced by Ball #1. So one ball is finite with regard to time, the other infinite.

Which of the two will be greater with regard to POWER? Again, Ball #1. It has the ability to produce Ball #2 out of nothing – which also means it has the ability to unproduce (destroy) Ball #2. So Ball #1 has far more power than Ball #2. In fact, at all times, Ball #2 must depend on Ball #1 for its very existence.

But, you say, what if Ball #1 shared some of its power with Ball #2 – enough power to destroy Ball #1? Then Ball #2 would be greater, for Ball #1 would cease to be, right?

There’s a problem with this. If Ball #1 shared some of its power with Ball #2, it would still be Ball #1’s power. The question then becomes: could Ball #1 use its own power to destroy itself? No. First of all, to use its power, Ball #1 has to exist.

Second of all, Ball #1 is so powerful that anything that can possibly be done, can be done by Ball #1. But it is not possible for Ball #1 to cease to be, therefore it cannot accomplish this.

Ball #1 cannot be unproduced, for Ball #1 was never produced in the first place. Ball #1 has always existed. It is the Eternal Something. As such, it is existence. It is life, infinite life. For Ball #1 to be destroyed, there would need to be something greater. But nothing is greater than Ball #1, nor ever could be. It exists without need of anything else. It therefore cannot be changed by any external forces. It can have no end, for It has no beginning. It is the way it is and that cannot change. It cannot cease to be, for BEING is its very nature. In that sense, it is untouchable.

 

[rossum]

What does that tell us? That our illustration of the ten tennis balls is not nearly as easy as it sounds. It would take an AMAZING amount of energy just to produce one tennis ball out of nothing. And nothing is all we have. The room has absolutely nothing in it.

Energy? Here is Professor Hawking on the amount of energy in the physical universe:

There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.

– A Brief History of Time

As I said, cosmology can get very strange and ordinary assumptions do not always apply.

 

[Duke12VonFalkenburg]

There is an Eternal Something. Something has always existed. Something has no beginning. If this Something has any needs, It can fulfill those needs for Itself. It needs nothing else in order to exist. And It cannot produce an exact equal or another who is greater. Anything that is produced is not eternal. Therefore, the Eternal Something cannot produce another Eternal Something. It will always be greater than anything else that exists.

Now, could this Eternal Something be plural? Possibly. Let’s say that originally there were five Eternal Somethings. If that were the case, however, those five would be exactly the same with respect to time and power. All unproduced, all eternal, all able to do whatever is possible to do. This again shows us that quality, not quantity, is the real issue.

So, what do we know about the Eternal Something(s)? It is not alone. For Something Else exists. You, for example. Now you have to ask yourself, are you the Eternal Something, or one of the Eternal Somethings? If you are, then you have no beginning, no needs which you yourself cannot meet, and anything that can possibly be done can be done by you. Is that who you are? If not, then you are truly Something Else, not the Eternal Something or one of the Eternal Somethings.

Let’s go back to our large, pitch-black, empty room. But now let’s say that one molecule of hydrogen and one molecule of nitrogen are in the room. For argument’s sake, let’s say that these are the Eternal Somethings. They have always existed. Anything that can be done, can be done by Them.

So, They decide to produce Something Else, for They are the only things that exist in the room. But wait, can hydrogen or nitrogen decide anything? Well, for them to be the Eternal Somethings, They MUST have the ability to make a decision.

Think about it. The Eternal Something must choose to change things. The Eternal Something is eternal. It has always existed independent of another. More importantly, It alone has always existed. What does that mean? It means that no event can take place without the say-so of the Eternal Something.

The Eternal Something is all there is, period. Therefore, the only thing in existence that can change the Eternal Something’s aloneless is the Eternal Something Itself. There can be no force outside the Eternal Something because the Eternal Something is all there is.

Therefore, if one molecule of hydrogen and one molecule of nitrogen are the Eternal Somethings, no outside force can direct Them. They are all there is. They are the only force there is.

As the only force in existence, it is They alone who can change Their aloneness. There is nothing in existence that can arbitrarily, by chance, influence Them to produce Something Else.

Something Else could not be produced by chance. Why? Because, for that to happen, “chance” would have to overpower the hydrogen and nitrogen molecules. But They are all there is. Anything that can be done, can be done by Them. “Chance” is Something Else. Something Else cannot overpower the Eternal Something. In fact, at this stage, Chance does not even exist.