Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part 4.1

[Hugh_Farey]

An interesting collection of self-congratulations followed by a photo of an arrant fake. And this is meant to substantiate Creationism?

Firstly, buffalo having finally grasped the meaning of empirical, he’s found the word abductive. At least he’s got the right word here, but he seems to think there’s something wrong with it. Evolution, like most science, is an explanation of observed phenomena. That’s all it is, and that’s what abductive reasoning is. If any phenomena can be observed that contradict the explanation, then, like most science, the explanation is rejected or modified.

Edwest throws up the “absolutely unguided” Aunt Sally yet again, in the face of continuous and consistent explanation that this is a misreading of evolution’s use of the word ‘random’. This is dishonest.

He follows this with bald statements of belief (“Intelligent Design is the only way”, “Evolution is useless”) which he does from time to time entirely as a security blanket for insecure Creationists. They have has no supporting evidence, and are clearly not put out as a way of countering Evolution. They are a kind of verbal Teddy Bear.

Then we have the preposterous notion that Creationism is deductively reasoned. This suggests to me that neither buffalo nor Edwest understand what reasoning is at all, let alone the difference between abductive, deductive and inferential reasoning.

Then we mention Darwin’s House of Cards. At least this is not a cynical attempt to prove that an evolutionist doesn’t believe in evolution. It is the usual creationist farrago of half-truths and misrepresentations that pass for science in the creationist world. As usual, these books are put forward as if the very mention of a book itself is sufficient authority to demonstrate a case. Scientists reject such argumenta ad auctoritatem.

I wonder how many posters here will answer these two questions?

Pick me! Pick me! Evolution is a single, coherent, comprehensive explanation for millions of empirical observations. It is abductive reasoning at its best.
Creationism isn’t any kind of reasoning at all.

And finally, a clearly and obviously carved rock from the Creation Institute Museum. An arrant, deliberate, sinful, dishonest lie.

Come on, you Creationists! You must be able to do better than this gallimauphry of absurdity surely?

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Great we are finally getting somewhere. A little further down the road what would we be seeing next in this progression?

At least you appear to be asking for assistance now, instead of bleating insanities like your fellow creationists.

If “a little further down the road” means several generations later, we might observe that the average fur length of the creatures was slightly longer or shorter than was before, or the average colour was slightly different, or the average leg length was slightly longer of shorter, and so on. What exactly would be observed would depend on what DNA alterations we noticed first, and what kind of environmental pressures there were. You’re reply to this may be that this is not “morphing into a completely different species”, but you’d be wrong. This is exactly what happens as one species morphs into another.

 

[rossum]

Ussher was not Catholic.

If Ussher is wrong in his Biblical interpretation, then what mistakes did he make?

You do realise that Jesus was not Catholic as well, He was crucified before the Catholic Church was founded.

rossum

 

[PickyPicky]

Ussher was, of course, Anglican of the Church of Ireland variety. He came to an inaccurate conclusion because he based his research on the basis that the Bible was a factually inerrant literal account. That was the nature of the common worldview of the time, but it should not lead us to think he was anything but a very distinguished and knowledgeable scholar.

 

[rossum]

Living Fossils

Not quite. Modern Coelacanths are very different from their fossil ancestors, they are much larger and live in much deeper water than their fossil ancestors.

They are in the same Order (Coelacanthiformes), but are from a different Family and Genus. They are not the same species as we see in old rocks.

For comparison, in mammals, an Order is the level of rodents (Order Rodentia) or bats (Order Chiroptera).

rossum

 

[rossum]

The “Delk Print” is a forgery. Here is Glen Kuban:

Although Baugh seems to regard the “human” footprint on the Delk slab as an ideal specimen, a number of its features are so unrealistic that some have described it as cartoon-like. To be more specific, the hallux (big toe) of the “human” print is exceedingly deep compared to the rest of the print. The lesser toe depressions are on a plane considerably higher than the rest of the print, and jut out at an unnatural angle. The middle three toe marks are also unusually long (or overly separated from the ball area). Although elongated toe marks are sometimes seen in real prints, usually there is some indication of sliding or dragging that accounts for this, whereas indicators of such movement appear absent in the Delk print. The division between the toes and ball also seems unusually angular and sharp. There are some harsh angular features between the ball and heel. The instep (left) side of the print appears unnaturally straight. The heel appears overly square on the left side, insufficiently depressed compared to the rest of the print (the heel is normally one of the deepest areas). Also, the margin of the print lacks the “mud up-push” and other evidence of deformation usually seen on distinct prints.

Source: The Alvis Delk Print.

rossum

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Definitely not. How much uranium was in the earth after cooling? Let’s look at half-lives:

"The half-life of uranium-238 is about 4.5 billion years, uranium-235 about 700 million years, and uranium-234 about 25 thousand years. Uranium atoms decay into other atoms, or radionuclides, that are also radioactive and commonly called “decay products.”

The age of the earth is just over 4.5 billion years, supposedly. Yet we still have an unknown quantity of starting uranium compared to what we have today. No answer to this question is available.

How about thorium. It has a half-life that about equals the age of the universe. Really?

“All known thorium isotopes are unstable. The most stable isotope, 232Th, has a half-life of 14.05 billion years, or about the age of the universe; it decays very slowly via alpha decay, starting a decay chain named the thorium series that ends at stable 208Pb.”

Not credible.

You have included most of this in quotation marks, as if it is a quotation from something. What specifically do you find not credible? Do you query the half-life data?

Oh, no, don’t tell me. You’ve found something you have no idea about and hope it supports creationism?
Oh, dear.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Except for the modern sci-fi twist, I think a strong case could be made that the evolution of human beings from space rock and stars, rodents morphing into whales and giraffes and dinosaurs into birds, and other fables in the children’s Big Book of Modern Science and Evolution Theories have an erie resemblance in appearance and thought to the children’s Big Book of Ancient People Mythologies and even a certain commonality with the children’s Big Book of Fairy Tales.

That’s quite a good try, but you clearly haven’t shopped for books for children recently. All the books I have mentioned (and your ‘big Book of Evolution’ as well) actually exist, in similar form, if not with exactly the same titles. The big difference between children’s science and story books is in the way stories are always presented as happening to people (or anthropomorphised creatures). God appears looking like Zeus or Wotan, chatting to Abraham and Noah just as it could be Prometheus or Pandora. The pictures look the same, the people look the same, and the stories read the same. Big beards, personal control of the weather, disobeying commands, etc. etc. Science books may have a similar style of illustration, but the science is not presented as the story of an individual’s actions.

 

[Aloysium]

Faith should not be synonymous with willful ignorance.

So too, science should not be synonymous with willful ignorance, as it is when it proposes, contrary to common sense that the desctructive process that is the random activity of matter, freed from adherence to an ordering principle, can bring order to its chaos. It is not in the nature of the level of being that we call matter to bring about higher levels of being. What you are experiencing now is infinitely orchestrated, and not by chance. To disregard this, is willful ignorance.

 

[Aloysium]

if evolutionary theory predicted something that obviously false, do you think scientists would still take it seriously and devote their careers to exploring it?

People took the ideas like that of a flat earth seriously, never really questioning it, and if anything simply tried to justify their beliefs. I’m not sure anyone explores evolution. Many do seek out the history of the world, and it’s a pity that they ultimately casting it into an evolutionary mould.

 

[Aloysium]

This is exactly what happens as one species morphs into another.

What we call species is usually not the same as what actually makes the organism what it truly is in itself. Being does not morph; matter does not morph. Species do not morph unless we define them as subjctive events, classifications perhaps. What morphs are images. The reality of an organism obviously transcends its visual representation. What we have in the form of different species are expressions of the same “soul”, expressing its particluar attributes and physical morphologies in different ways. We, as the creature we know from the inside, are not defined by our DNA, but our common humanity. We were created as a new form of being, a unity of the material and psychological woven together, each of us with our gifts and crosses, a spiritual soul, in the image of God.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

So too, science should not be synonymous with willful ignorance, as it is when it proposes, contrary to common sense that the desctructive process that is the random activity of matter, freed from adherence to an ordering principle, can bring order to its chaos. It is not in the nature of the level of being that we call matter to bring about higher levels of being. What you are experiencing now is infinitely orchestrated, and not by chance. To disregard this, is willful ignorance.

I think this is wrong on several levels, but ends up on the right lines. Your opening sentence presents science as something that “proposes … that the desctructive process that is the random activity of matter, freed from adherence to an ordering principle, can bring order to its chaos.” (Italics mine). Well, I dare say, but science never claims to be free from an ordering principle, quite the reverse; the ‘laws’ of nature are very strict. The next proclamation is an unsupported statement of belief, not necessarily a fact. Your ideas about “nature of the level of being that we call matter” is a guess. And when you say “What you are experiencing now is infinitely orchestrated, and not by chance,” you do not deny the laws of science, nor subjugate them to a higher providence. All atheist evolutionists agree that our experience follows the complex orchestration of the laws of nature, which are far from random. Even atheists do not deny that the laws of nature order the universe in complex coherence, so they are not being wilfully ignorant in that respect. They may deny that it is not in the nature of matter to bring about ‘higher levels of being’, which is wilful, but since your claim is not knowledge but opinion, they are not wilfully ignorant.

But I agree with your underlying principle, basically that nothing can come of nothing, so in that respect, if the problem has been explored and denied, I would agree that that might be called wilful ignorance.

People took the ideas like that of a flat earth seriously, never really questioning it, and if anything simply tried to justify their beliefs. I’m not sure anyone explores evolution. Many do seek out the history of the world, and it’s a pity that they ultimately casting it into an evolutionary mould.

Some people did, certainly, but those who did question it found fault with it very early on, certainly by about 250 BC. Very few people have tried to justify belief in a flat earth since then.

I’m not sure anyone explores evolution.

I expect you mean something sensible by this, but it is not obvious. Evolution is one of the most explored ideas of the last two hundred years. But I think you had something else in mind.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Being does not morph; matter does not morph.

Quite. And there are no elephants. I was using the term in the same sense as Techno, whose discussion of the process of evolution is less cerebral than yours.

 

[Aloysium]

The point has to do specifically with the presumed cause of the diversity we find in nature, which clearly demonstrates a growing complexity. Micro evolution and macro evolution are considered one and the same process with everything being a “transitional” creature. Grounding themselves arbitrarily in the physical sciences the changes we observe in the morphology of organisms, most evolutionary theories hypothesize the random mutation of genetic and/or supporting biochemical in a parent organism that is passed on to its offspring. This obviously happens, but is universally a destructive process. If we consider the genome as a set of instructions whereby a life form incorporates elements in its environment into the making of itself, it is difficult to imagine how new functional code could be added without some external influence to existing processes. To add a meaningful sentence like this one is not going to happen through any glitch in the system that allows for this communication. It has to be formulated and written down. The point I was trying to make was that ignoring these, among other factors, is an act of willful ignorance, which is necessary to maintain the standard theory of evolution.

 

[Aloysium]

Evolution is one of the most explored ideas of the last two hundred years. But I think you had something else in mind.

We explore genetics, anthropology, comparative anatomy and physiology, the history of life on earth and of of the universe. Evolution is one of the most shared stories that encapsulate the findings of our scientific explorations. I specifically had evolutionary theories in mind as a way in which we frame our understanding of ourselves and the world, the history of which fits better under a “creationist” paradigm.

 

[Techno2000]

If “a little further down the road” means several generations later, we might observe that the average fur length of the creatures was slightly longer or shorter than was before, or the average colour was slightly different, or the average leg length was slightly longer of shorter, and so on.

Ok,so how is this going affect the previous creature ?

 

[benjamin1973]

Nobody has denied any of that. It is not the theological question of God, or even of order, that is under question, it is about whether that intelligence is expressed in underlying rules or in direct intervention.

Evolution is super-clear on this point. I’ve heard just about a different view from every Catholic on this thread: disagreement about what a day means, even.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Ok,so how is this going affect the previous creature ?

Clearly, it will not affect any previous creatures who are now dead. Nor will the fact that some of its peers are slightly differently shaped, or have slightly different behaviour, have much effect on those animals which do not carry the mutation. They will not even notice the difference. However, the slightly changed environment, a couple of degrees hotter, say, means that, under slight stress, the ‘previous’ kind will not reproduce as well as the ‘new’ kind, which will eventually mean that there are none left.

 

[Techno2000]

Clearly, it will not affect any previous creatures who are now dead.

Wait a minute how did they die ?

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Wait a minute how did they die ?

As any animal dies, predation, disease, accident, jus’ plain old age.