Barbarian on Ricmat’s demand to know every mutation from the first organism to humans:
Isn’t this pretty much like saying “when you show me a flow chart, or pert chart with all the dependencies, and a verifiable timeline for each step (ship across the channel) of the progress from a few raiders to the settlement of England by Anglo-Saxons, I’ll believe it.”
Isn’t it just a sort of intellectual immunization to prevent evidence from seeping in?
No. It’s called evidence.
No, it’s the assertion that because we can’t count the number of boats that carried the Anglo-Saxons to Britain, and we can’t count the number of people in each boat, we can’t accept that the Anglo-Saxons migrated to Britain.
And it is the opposite of evidence. It depends on what we don’t know, rather than the evidence we do know.
Doesn’t it bother you that no one can seem to come up with it?
The evidence, as the last two Popes have acknowledged, is both voluminous and growing.
We have, for example, the huge and growing number of transitional fossils that fill in the gaps between taxa. We have the sorting of fossils, showing that living things varied over time.
We have DNA itself, which shows the same phylogenies as obtained by other lines of evidence, including the first one, prepared by the creationist, Linnaeus.
We have directly-observed evolution, including speciation and evolution of irreducible complexity.
And we have all sorts of “errors” introns, damaged genes, and fusions that show common descent by natural means.
At some point, shouldn’t it be time to make peace with the facts? Nature is God’s tool in this world; why wouldn’t He use it?
Or must we assume that God miraculously moved the Anglo-Saxons to Britain, because we don’t know how many boats did it, and how many people were aboard?
