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buffalo
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Theistic evos throw out Genesis or do it such violence to twist its obvious meaning. They have to.
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Richca
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Glark
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This inconvenient truth cannot be overcome by applying one of the pillars of evolution science - unreasonable extrapolation. It goes like this: If a steak can survive three weeks in your freezer, soft tissue from a dinosaur can survive 65 million years buried in ice.
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Glark
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Please provide the name of one Church Father who agrees with you.
The Roman Martyrology gives the date 2957 BC as the year of Noah’s Flood.
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benjamin1973
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Yes, no doubt. And I think there is some truth to the idea that an ID proponent might not be taken seriously even if he’s done work under the proper protocol.
The solution to this is really superior-quality work. Work in QM, for example, was strongly resisted even by Einstein. However, in the end, good experimentation won out, and science moved on.
I haven’t read ID papers. I have only this forum, pretty much, to explain ID to me. To me, it smacks of religious dogma of the lay variety, and seems both unlikely to be true, and unnecessary to Catholic doctrine. Since I’m open to the idea of God, I’m perfectly willing to change my mind in the future, but so far, I haven’t seen arguments that are strong enough to persuade me.
The solution to this is really superior-quality work. Work in QM, for example, was strongly resisted even by Einstein. However, in the end, good experimentation won out, and science moved on.
I haven’t read ID papers. I have only this forum, pretty much, to explain ID to me. To me, it smacks of religious dogma of the lay variety, and seems both unlikely to be true, and unnecessary to Catholic doctrine. Since I’m open to the idea of God, I’m perfectly willing to change my mind in the future, but so far, I haven’t seen arguments that are strong enough to persuade me.
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Techno2000
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I’m going to try to make myself clearer. The organism would have to experience the environmental change first hand, in real life, and be affected by it for… (evolution /DNA) to know what to do, that’s what I mean by trigger or cause.
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Hugh_Farey
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Yes. In environments which remain almost static, a species can remain almost unchanged for a very long time.
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rossum
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The initial trigger is a random mutation. Mutations are random, so some will cause thicker scales, some thinner scales, some purple scales and so on. Random effects from random mutations.
Natural selection causes the advantageous variant to be preferentially passed on. If thicker scales are advantageous, then that mutation will be preferred by natural selection and it will increase in the population by compound interest. Deleterious mutations, thinner scales say, will tend to disappear as they suffer from negative compound interest: fewer offspring are born with that mutation. Neutral mutations, purple scales say, are not affected by natural selection, but instead follow a statistical process called neutral drift, which is chance-based.
The basic rule of natural selection is: “If your parents didn’t have any children then the chances are that you won’t have any either.” Deleterious mutations reduce the average number of offspring; beneficial mutations increase the number of offspring.
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rossum
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Your problem is that “and hence creationism” means “and hence creation by Vishnu” or “and hence creation by Amaterasu” or “and hence creation by …[fill in name of god/dess here]”. Your particular version of creationism is no further forward. Some Hindus will tell you that creation took place hundreds of billions of years ago, well before the scientific date of the Big Bang. Other creationists will tell you that creation took place 6,000 years ago.
Just saying “and hence creationism” does not get you anywhere.
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rossum
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Reproductive advantage is over the average for the species as a whole. No individual will ever reach 100% advantage over the rest of their species because the species averages changes to take account of improved reproduction in some members. As the advantageous gene spreads the average will increase, so reducing the advantage. When the new gene has spread to all members of the species (has become ‘fixed’) then that gene has exactly 0% advantage, because everyone has it.
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Hugh_Farey
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Almost 1000 words, surely this constitutes the longest evasion of a question outside a government debating chamber. There is literally nothing here except the word ‘creation’ = ‘God’s direct and supernatural creative activity’. Everything else is either inconsistent, or simply an admission of ignorance. It’s a huge wriggle to try to get off the hook. And it hasn’t fooled me.
Do you remember how this started?
buffalo: If you really want to conquer intelligent design advocates, you’ll have to understand what they actually think, and remedy it with better ideas, better observations, and better science.
Me: So why can’t anybody tell us what it is “they actually think”?
You answer fails to enumerate anything upon which I could base “better ideas, better observations, and better science.”
First you distinguish Creation from “the appearance or emergence of the various kinds or distinction of beings, such as animal or plants species or stars and planets, from created secondary agents or causes and natural processes including ‘laws of nature”. This must mean that you think the sun, Mercury, Earth, Jupiter and the rest of the planets, and each of the hundreds of millions of living species. were each created spontaneously, from nothing, without any secondary cause. I don’t believe any creationist on this thread believes this to be true. However you then start talking about providence, which appears to be the effect of secondary causes, without and distinguishing what events are primary and what are secondary.
Much of your discussion six about what evolution is not, rather than what creationism is.
And then, at last, one single actual answer.
Q: How long were the six days?
A: “How ever long it took.”
It could be anything.
Right, fine. Just a big: “I don’t know” would have been sufficient.
Still, at least you had a go. Come on, you others! Man up! What do you actually think? If I want to produce “better ideas”, there’s got to be something more than “Goddidit”. If I want to produce “better observations”, I’ll have to have some knowledge of what observations I’ve got to improve on. If I want to produce “better science”, I’ll have to have some knowledge of what “science” you think you have.
- How long did were the six days?
- How many kinds of animals were there?
- Were fruit trees created before marine life?
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Hugh_Farey
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Hugh_Farey
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How very dishonest. We don’t throw out all the fiction books from our libraries because they aren’t literally true. We don’t throw out Genesis at all. And we don’t “twist” its meaning: Creationists do that, with all their struggling with baramins and the etymology of the Hebrew word for ‘day’ and all that jiggery-pokery. We just say it isn’t literally true, and was never meant to be, and that’s that.
What are you on about? You haven’t read “Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex”, Mary H. Schweitzer et al, Science, 2005, but you should.
I’m not sure who you mean by a “church father”. They are usually identified as ancient or medieval theologians, of whom very few seem to have doubted the possibility of a global flood. The only one I can find is called “Pseudo-Justin”. The Roman Martyrology was written in the sixteenth century. What is your point? Do you think the Catholic Church still teaches what medieval theologians thought about science? If so, then you’re wrong.
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Hugh_Farey
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Not clearer at all. DNA doesn’t know what to do. Try this. A hundred children make simple shapes out of clay. Some are big, some are small, some are round, some are square and so on. This is analogous to random genetic mutation. They place them on a table. Then the teacher lifts one edge of the table. This is analogous to an environmental trigger. All the round shapes roll off. The children who made the ones which stay behind did not know what to do, and they do not know what to do next. The children whose shapes are left are allowed to leave them alone, or change them. Some do, some don’t. But they don’t make them round. Then the teacher drills holes in the table and gives it a shake. All the little shapes fall through the holes, but the bigger ones don’t. And so on.
The children never know what shapes will suit the oncoming environmental changes. But the shape change precedes the environmental change, not the other way round.
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Hugh_Farey
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Just for the clarification of the creationists, that is either a joke or a typo for “many”.
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rossum
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It is the joke version. Maybe I should have added a 
rossum
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benjamin1973
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evolution and DNA do not know things, and they do not do things.
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Techno2000
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How does random mutation know whether to produce thinner scales or thicker scales ?
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Aloysium
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Keeping this short:
Things exist in themselves. An atom exists. You and I exist. From simplest to the most complex, things are what they are - whole or melded into a greater system as attributes of that system.
The physical is merely the simplest form of being. This is a physical event organized in accordance to the principles that determine what is a person. Christians would call this organizing principle the spirit.
Atoms are organized according to the properties that define them. In terms of their electrostatic properties, we understand them as consisting of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If we break these down further, we get bosons, quarks and leptons. All these define what they do and hence what they are. Additionally, in nature we find four basic physical interactions through which matter expresses what it is.
This experience that the reader is having is structured in accordance with the prinicples outlined above. They are manifested in the unity that is the mutual relationship that we as an individual knower and actor, is having with what is other to our being. Physical matter is simply the simplest form of being which can be understood as coalescing to form the person. That new being is shaped utilizing those fundamental physical properties as building blocks, the necessary but not essential features of a home, by a spirit which makes it a home, a rational causal agent with a self-other nature. This is what enables the capacity to know and love what is in the world as well as the Source of its being.
Everything is grounded in Existence itself and reflects its Triune nature. The material is but the tip of an ontological iceberg.
The “soul” of things can be thought of as the unifying prinicple that makes something what it is in relation to what is other to it. That “soul” in the case of the smallest of things is what would form a particle, which can then lose that attribute as it merges into a larger thing, then having the properties of a wave as part of the new system with which it is one. When we are dealing with living forms that soul is far more complex in its simplicity. Everything we do is the activity of the human spirit of which we are all unique and individual expressions.
The focus on morphology rather than what things are has led us astray. The theory of evolution is an illusion that sees a continuity of material structures as branches in a bush of life, where there has been creation. The creation is of a soul which organizes matter into individual expressions of its kind of organism. The philosophical basis of the standard theory of evolution would hold that there are no species in reality; these would be reflections merely of our taxonomy. That is the usual response to why there appear to be distinct species in the fossil record, that they actually don’t exist. What all these words are trying to say, is the opposite, that there are different kinds of animals, that this is what was created utilizing the information from what had previously been brought into being.
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Techno2000
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So your answer is …evolution has cover all the bases.Techno2000:
Not clearer at all. DNA doesn’t know what to do. Try this. A hundred children make simple shapes out of clay. Some are big, some are small, some are round, some are square and so on. This is analogous to random genetic mutation. They place them on a table. Then the teacher lifts one edge of the table. This is analogous to an environmental trigger. All the round shapes roll off. The children who made the ones which stay behind did not know what to do, and they do not know what to do next. The children whose shapes are left are allowed to leave them alone, or change them. Some do, some don’t. But they don’t make them round. Then the teacher drills holes in the table and gives it a shake. All the little shapes fall through the holes, but the bigger ones don’t. And so on.
The children never know what shapes will suit the oncoming environmental changes. But the shape change precedes the environmental change, not the other way round.
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