UK bans teaching of creationism in any school which receives public funding

[Monkey1976]

Darwinists come across like third world dictators who must eliminate all competition. We were talking about this very same subject at work as it relates to public education. The stranglehold atheistic Darwinism has on public education and all that. Here is my question. If Homo Sapiens have been around for 200,000 years then why did it take them approx. 194,000 years to write anything down or to develop the wheel?

Evolutionary biology isn’t atheistic. Nor is it Catholic, Muslim, Hindi, or pagan. As has been pointed out several times in this thread, science makes no claim on the supernatural. Is astrophysics atheistic because it makes no mention of God? How about Newtonian mechanics? The rules of baseball are silent on the question of the divine - should that game be shunned?

What you’re arguing against is an abuse of the science to make theological claims. It is true that - from a scientific standpoint - we have no idea why humans suddenly began producing cultural artifacts. As a Catholic, I believe that we received our minds when God breathed a rational soul into Adam, whose body He had formed through the process of evolution. Such a scenario also solves the “Cain’s wife” problem: He took as mate an H. sapiens (or - given recent discoveries - a Neanderthal or Denisovan) woman who had not been granted a rational soul, and their descendants gained their souls through him. Such a woman would have been physically human, but without the mind that we have.

 

[Kelt]

Evolutionary biology isn’t atheistic. Nor is it Catholic, Muslim, Hindi, or pagan. As has been pointed out several times in this thread, science makes no claim on the supernatural. Is astrophysics atheistic because it makes no mention of God? How about Newtonian mechanics? The rules of baseball are silent on the question of the divine - should that game be shunned?

What you’re arguing against is an abuse of the science to make theological claims. It is true that - from a scientific standpoint - we have no idea why humans suddenly began producing cultural artifacts. As a Catholic, I believe that we received our minds when God breathed a rational soul into Adam, whose body He had formed through the process of evolution. Such a scenario also solves the “Cain’s wife” problem: He took as mate an H. sapiens (or - given recent discoveries - a Neanderthal or Denisovan) woman who had not been granted a rational soul, and their descendants gained their souls through him. Such a woman would have been physically human, but without the mind that we have.

I was with you right up to that last bit about the ‘Cain’s wife problem’…minds didn’t just get popped into our heads…they evolved too!!
Perhaps everything has a soul? Inconceivable? Well, everything on the supernatural level is, isn’t it? Just because we want to have it neatly boxed up on our human level, doesn’t mean we ever will!!

 

[Hans_W]

I was with you right up to that last bit about the ‘Cain’s wife problem’…minds didn’t just get popped into our heads…they evolved too!!
Perhaps everything has a soul? Inconceivable? Well, everything on the supernatural level is, isn’t it? Just because we want to have it neatly boxed up on our human level, doesn’t mean we ever will!!

Yes, I think that every living thing has some sort of “soul”.
I cannot imagine a Homo Erectus couple looking down on their Homo Sapiens baby which suddenly got a soul.

 

[Estevao]

If your finding out that the earth is not flat upsets you, will you call for the teaching of the earth being round to be scrapped too? Or what about Galileo? It’s a bit upsetting to find that we’re not at the centre of the universe isn’t it? If it upsets our sense of importance or our religious understanding, it had better be scrapped as untrue! Never mind the evidence, I don’t think that comes into it does it?

My issue is whether or not we apply natural selection to humans. As Christianity says, all humans have intrinsic value being created in the image and likeness of God, and each human is special because God sacrificed his only Son to save us, and God loves us despite our imperfections. As some people would have us believe Darwinism says, humans are an accidental byproduct of blind forces and matter, and we have no more value than an ant, and there are some people who are more valuable than others because of their having won the genetic lottery. This is exactly as Hitler thought:

Hitler’s hostility to Christianity reached new heights, or depths, during the war. It was a frequent theme of his mealtime monologues. After the war was over and victory assured, he said in 1942, the Concordat he had signed with the Catholic Church in 1933 would be formally abrogated and the Church would be dealt with like any other non-Nazi voluntary association. The Third Reich ‘would not tolerate the intervention of any foreign influence’ such as the Pope, and the Papal Nuncio would eventually have to go back to Rome. Priests, he said, were ‘black bugs’, ‘abortions in cassocks’. Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. ‘Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.’ ‘The best thing,’ he declared on 14 October 1941, ‘is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science.’ He was particularly critical of what he saw as its violation of the law of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. ‘Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure.’ It was indelibly Jewish in origin and character. ‘Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilization by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society.’ Christianity was a drug, a kind of sickness: ‘Let’s be the only people who are immunized against the disease.’ ‘In the long run,’ he concluded, ‘National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together.’ He would not persecute the Churches: they would simply wither away. ‘But in that case we must not replace the Church by something equivalent. That would be terrifying!’ The future was Nazi, and the future would be secular.

-Sir Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War, p. 547.

Note the similarity between Hitler’s thought and certain pro-science public intellectuals these days.

 

[Estevao]

I don’t think you’ll find that church attendance in Germany dropped during the war? I don’t think there was a disproportionate number of atheists in the Third Reich as opposed to the general population?
(Although Hitler sought to reduce the influence of churches, he wasn’t rabidly anti - church, for mostly political reasons. He did speak of a belief in an ‘almighty creator’.)
It’s interesting to look at the position of the Catholic Church in Germany. They were in a difficult position…could they have done more??

Uh the claims you’ve made about the relationship between Christians and the Third Reich and the Holocaust are way off. I know there is a lot of bigotry on the internet against Christianity/Catholicism that makes up a bunch of false assertions like many of the camp guards at the concentration camps camps were Catholics (something a certain protestant named James White has asserted before, so it’s not just atheists), but the Nazis were clearly anti-Christian and especially anti-Catholic, and so was the government that they created. Here, let me quote a professional historian again.

Once it became clear that there was no real possibility of fulfilling the
Nazis’ early ambition of creating a unified state Church along German
Christian lines for the whole of the Third Reich, leading Nazis began to
encourage Party members to declare their formal renunciation of
Church membership. Rosenberg, predictably, had already left the
Church in 1933; Himmler and Heydrich resigned in 1936, and a
growing number of Regional Leaders now followed suit. The Interior
Ministry ruled that people leaving their Church could declare
themselves to be ‘Deists’ (gottgläubig), and the Party decreed that
office-holders could not simul taneously hold any office in the Catholic
or Protestant Church. In 1936, stormtroopers were forbidden to wear
uniforms at Church services, and early in 1939 the ban was extended
to all Party members. By 1939, over 10 per cent of the population in
Berlin, 7.5 per cent in Hamburg, and between 5 and 6 per cent in
some other major cities were registered as Deists, a term which could
encompass a variety of religious beliefs including paganism. The great
majority of these are likely to have been Party members; the proportion
of Deists in the SS had reached over 25 per cent by 1938, for
instance. This process was accelerated by an escalating series of
measures pushed by the energetic and strongly anti-Christian head of
Rudolf Hess’s office, Martin Bormann, banning priests and pastors
from playing a part in Party affairs, or even, after May 1939, from
belonging to it altogether. Still, there was a long way to go before the
population as a whole took part in this movement. ‘We won’t let
ourselves be turned into heathens,’ one woman in Hesse was heard to
say by a Gestapo agent.107 The German Faith Movement, which
propagated a new, racial religion based on a mishmash of Nordic and
Indian rites, symbols and texts, never won more than about 40,000
adherents, and other neopagan groups, like Ludendorff’s esoteric
Tannenberg League, were even smaller. 108 Nevertheless, for all the
general unpopularity of the movement, it remained the case that the
Nazi Party was on the way to severing all its ties with organized
Christianity by the end of the 1930s.109

Sir Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, pp 252-253

 

[RACJ]

Not necessarily. Several species of jellyfish have light-sensing organs and react to sound in the water, yet have no brain or anything that we could call a “conventional” nervous system.

I appreciate your cordial responses. But I am afraid that you will never get my point. You and I both know that jellyfish aren’t going anywhere. If earth survives another million years, jellyfish will still be jellyfish. Yet, evolutionists claim that SOME protozoa (clearly, existing protozoa didn’t choose this ascent) are presumed to have made a Great Leap Forward, evolving a dozen maddeningly intricate systems which constitute our human bodies today. To say that there is evidence that the protozoa to man Great Leap actually happened is simply not true. I would call this theory bizarre, in fact. Rob

 

[RACJ]

You would be better served by asserting that you believe God created the universe, and evolution looks to be a theory well supported by the evidence. You don’t need to figure out how God creates.

Why are you comfortable that the progress of two zygotes into an adult human is a natural process? Is that process subject to the continuous intervention of the clockmaker?

The problem, Rau, is that I DON’T believe in macro-evolution. Two zygotes already contain the information to create a person, and a protozoa does not. There is only one possible answer to the question of origins, since we know that billions of bits of information are required for us to have come to this moment when we can converse: An omniscient Creator was necessary. Rob

 

[RACJ]

Jack Chick and I probably agree that the sky is blue, and that’s about it. If this guy is an anti-Catholic creep, he and I have nothing in common, and what Wanderer said is a baseless, irrelevant insult. No big deal. Rob

 

[Rau]

The problem, Rau, is that I DON’T believe in macro-evolution. Two zygotes already contain the information to create a person, and a protozoa does not. There is only one possible answer to the question of origins, since we know that billions of bits of information are required for us to have come to this moment when we can converse: An omniscient Creator was necessary. Rob

No doubt about if. And evolution remains a theory supported by copious evidence. Go figure!

But what about those zygotes. It stretches incredulity to believe they can become a thinking human!

 

[Kelt]

Darwinists come across like third world dictators who must eliminate all competition. We were talking about this very same subject at work as it relates to public education. The stranglehold atheistic Darwinism has on public education and all that. Here is my question. If Homo Sapiens have been around for 200,000 years then why did it take them approx. 194,000 years to write anything down or to develop the wheel?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel

A depiction of an onager-drawn cart on the Sumerian “battle standard of Ur” (c. 2500 BC)
A figurine featuring the New World’s independently invented wheel

Evidence of wheeled vehicles appears from the second half of the 4th millennium BC, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia (Sumerian civilization), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe, so that the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle remains unresolved and under debate.

The oldest securely dated wheel-axle combination, that from Stare Gmajne near Ljubljana in Slovenia (Ljubljana Marshes Wooden Wheel) is now dated in 2σ-limits to 3340-3030 cal BC, the axle to 3360-3045 cal BC [3]

The earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (here a wagon—four wheels, two axles) is on the Bronocice pot, a c. 3500 – 3350 BC clay pot excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland.[4]

It’s not so hard to understand why it took so long to ‘write things down’ if you really think about it! Language had to develop very slowly, in small tribal groups, which eventually merged locally…and then split up again as they became too big to function properly as hunter/gatherer groups. As they split the language would diverge depending on how much overlap and ‘intermarriage’ there was between groups. The groups would eventually spread across the globe, individuals never seeing (or ‘speaking to’) more than, say, a hundred people in their lifetime. They would have developed languages for communication …all unique to their own area…but it’s a leap of sophistication to develop writing! This generally happened in larger, settled, well developed communities where people had learned to build and farm…which took thousands upon thousands of years.Hunter gatherers were preoccupied with survival and wouldn’t have expected to live long…remember, if you couldn’t keep up with the group you’d soon be dead.
There are cave PAINTINGS that date from 40,000 yrs ago …maybe some of the drawings and other marks were conveying more than just decoration…we don’t know. There are a lot of ancient languages that we don’t know about - it was only the chance discovery of the Rosetta stone that unlocked ancient languages we DO now understand.

 

[Kelt]

Uh the claims you’ve made about the relationship between Christians and the Third Reich and the Holocaust are way off. I know there is a lot of bigotry on the internet against Christianity/Catholicism that makes up a bunch of false assertions like many of the camp guards at the concentration camps camps were Catholics (something a certain protestant named James White has asserted before, so it’s not just atheists), but the Nazis were clearly anti-Christian and especially anti-Catholic, and so was the government that they created. Here, let me quote a professional historian again.

Sir Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, pp 252-253

Yes, you’re right that by the time the third reich was in full swing, they had developed their own warped concoction of a philosophy from various sources, so I worded that completely wrongly. My mistake entirely. The point I was I inadequately trying to make is that the Nazis developed from a largely Christian country…how did that happen? Undoubtably, a large number of the regular German army, officers included, must have kept their faith - at least, convinced themselves that God was on their side. They had on their belt buckles ‘God is on our side’.
The general populace was more or less as Christian as other European countries of the time…how did they come to accept seeing people rounded up and taken away? Of course it’s easy to see things and judge with hindsight, but could the churches have done more?
I know you’ll say they were persecuted by Hitler…but it was in his interest to have the churches there and functioning, albeit with a strict eye of control, for he could use them. They had a lot of power over the population…If they didn’t kick up a fuss against him, then they inadvertently condoned what he was doing. Throw in some exaggeration of Christianity despising Jews as ‘Christ killers’ and you have a useful, albeit unwitting, tool.
The Catholic Centre Party was a powerful political group who stood in the way of Hitler’s power before the war. So concerned was pope Pius XII, with the survival of the Catholic Church as an institution in Germany (obviously!) that he signed an agreement (the Reich Concordat) with Hitler, which led to the banning of all political activity of members of the church. Thus, the only viable, democratic opposition to Hitler was lost.
To say that because the Nazi’s concocted an evil philosophy, for which they used a distortion of the theory of evolution, then that somehow disproves the theory of evolution, is bizarre. You could also say that as they distorted religion, then therefore religion is untrue too.

 

[RACJ]

No doubt about if. And evolution remains a theory supported by copious evidence. Go figure!

But what about those zygotes. It stretches incredulity to believe they can become a thinking human!

We know that they do, absolutely! Where we disagree is on the topic of whether God’s way was to create protozoa which had the capacity for enough mutations to become man over hundreds of millions of years.

 

[RACJ]

It’s not so hard to understand why it took so long to ‘write things down’ if you really think about it! Language had to develop very slowly, in small tribal groups, which eventually merged locally…and then split up again as they became too big to function properly as hunter/gatherer groups. As they split the language would diverge depending on how much overlap and ‘intermarriage’ there was between groups. The groups would eventually spread across the globe, individuals never seeing (or ‘speaking to’) more than, say, a hundred people in their lifetime. They would have developed languages for communication …all unique to their own area…but it’s a leap of sophistication to develop writing! This generally happened in larger, settled, well developed communities where people had learned to build and farm…which took thousands upon thousands of years.Hunter gatherers were preoccupied with survival and wouldn’t have expected to live long…remember, if you couldn’t keep up with the group you’d soon be dead.
There are cave PAINTINGS that date from 40,000 yrs ago …maybe some of the drawings and other marks were conveying more than just decoration…we don’t know. There are a lot of ancient languages that we don’t know about - it was only the chance discovery of the Rosetta stone that unlocked ancient languages we DO now understand.

I remember the case of twin girls who as babies developed their own original language while in their cribs. It was about 15 or 20 years ago, if I remember. But what this showed is that language is natural to humans, and that it develops rapidly. Rob

 

[RACJ]

Yes, you’re right that by the time the third reich was in full swing, they had developed their own warped concoction of a philosophy from various sources, so I worded that completely wrongly. My mistake entirely. The point I was I inadequately trying to make is that the Nazis developed from a largely Christian country…how did that happen? Undoubtably, a large number of the regular German army, officers included, must have kept their faith - at least, convinced themselves that God was on their side. They had on their belt buckles ‘God is on our side’.
The general populace was more or less as Christian as other European countries of the time…how did they come to accept seeing people rounded up and taken away? Of course it’s easy to see things and judge with hindsight, but could the churches have done more?
I know you’ll say they were persecuted by Hitler…but it was in his interest to have the churches there and functioning, albeit with a strict eye of control, for he could use them. They had a lot of power over the population…If they didn’t kick up a fuss against him, then they inadvertently condoned what he was doing. Throw in some exaggeration of Christianity despising Jews as ‘Christ killers’ and you have a useful, albeit unwitting, tool.
The Catholic Centre Party was a powerful political group who stood in the way of Hitler’s power before the war. So concerned was pope Pius XII, with the survival of the Catholic Church as an institution in Germany (obviously!) that he signed an agreement (the Reich Concordat) with Hitler, which led to the banning of all political activity of members of the church. Thus, the only viable, democratic opposition to Hitler was lost.
To say that because the Nazi’s concocted an evil philosophy, for which they used a distortion of the theory of evolution, then that somehow disproves the theory of evolution, is bizarre. You could also say that as they distorted religion, then therefore religion is untrue too.

I don’t think that anyone has posited that Naziism’s love affair with Darwin disproves his theory. What it does show is that if people come to believe that they are accidental animals with no soul, they will behave as animals do. :sad_yes: Rob

 

[Kelt]

I don’t think that anyone has posited that Naziism’s love affair with Darwin disproves his theory. What it does show is that if people come to believe that they are accidental animals with no soul, they will behave as animals do. :sad_yes: Rob

But it sounds like you are saying that if people believe in evolution they will somehow end up acting like animals…ergo evolution can’t be true…?
Anyway, you can’t say that. Atrocities are committed in the name of religion just as they are committed by people with none. I don’t see the atheists around me acting like animals any more than I expect you do.
Voltaire said" people will continue to commit atrocities as long as they believe in absurdities."

 

[RACJ]

But it sounds like you are saying that if people believe in evolution they will somehow end up acting like animals…ergo evolution can’t be true…?
Anyway, you can’t say that. Atrocities are committed in the name of religion just as they are committed by people with none. I don’t see the atheists around me acting like animals any more than I expect you do.
Voltaire said" people will continue to commit atrocities as long as they believe in absurdities."

National Socialists (Nazis) and Communists have slaughtered well over 100 million people, and counting. “Christian” extremists cannot hold a candle to this grim toll. Radical Islamists would like to challenge this number, but I cannot think of another religion in the world that believes in the “convert or be killed” philosophy. Rob
P.S. You know that I am not making a blanket statement about naturalists!

 

[Estevao]

Yes, you’re right that by the time the third reich was in full swing, they had developed their own warped concoction of a philosophy from various sources, so I worded that completely wrongly. My mistake entirely. The point I was I inadequately trying to make is that the Nazis developed from a largely Christian country…how did that happen? Undoubtably, a large number of the regular German army, officers included, must have kept their faith - at least, convinced themselves that God was on their side. They had on their belt buckles ‘God is on our side’.

Belt buckles aside, Germany was pretty much a secular country by the time of the first world war. The USA is kind of the same, it is pretty much a secular country despite being nominally a “largely Christian country” and 1,000,000 babies are aborted every year.

The general populace was more or less as Christian as other European countries of the time…how did they come to accept seeing people rounded up and taken away? Of course it’s easy to see things and judge with hindsight, but could the churches have done more?
I know you’ll say they were persecuted by Hitler…but it was in his interest to have the churches there and functioning, albeit with a strict eye of control, for he could use them. They had a lot of power over the population…If they didn’t kick up a fuss against him, then they inadvertently condoned what he was doing. Throw in some exaggeration of Christianity despising Jews as ‘Christ killers’ and you have a useful, albeit unwitting, tool.
The Catholic Centre Party was a powerful political group who stood in the way of Hitler’s power before the war. So concerned was pope Pius XII, with the survival of the Catholic Church as an institution in Germany (obviously!) that he signed an agreement (the Reich Concordat) with Hitler, which led to the banning of all political activity of members of the church. Thus, the only viable, democratic opposition to Hitler was lost.
To say that because the Nazi’s concocted an evil philosophy, for which they used a distortion of the theory of evolution, then that somehow disproves the theory of evolution, is bizarre. You could also say that as they distorted religion, then therefore religion is untrue too.

1. Asking if the Church could have “done more” seems a little silly since the Church saved more Jews than all other organizations put together. You probably should ask first why the USA didn’t do more by bombing the camps or accepting Jewish refugees.

catholic.com/documents/how-pius-xii-protected-jews

Please read “Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews From the Nazis” by Ronald J. Rychlak for more info.

1. The Concordat was really a necessity to safeguard whatever rights they could, this was how the Church operated, by signing concordats to safeguard operation in the country, with dictator and democracy alike. The idea that if the Concordat had not been signed there would have been democratic opposition in the Centre Party is silly given that the Centre party dissolved itself before it was even signed. Plus every single other party had either already been disbanded or was about to be disbanded in the wake of Nazi terror following the burning of the Reichstag. The continued existence of the Centre Party wasn’t even on the table.
2. I’m not saying what the Nazis did disproves evolution, what I’m saying is that applying natural selection to human beings leads to what the Nazis did, and it is what Darwin did in his book “The Descent of Man”. As RACJ said "I don’t think that anyone has posited that Naziism’s love affair with Darwin disproves his theory. What it does show is that if people come to believe that they are accidental animals with no soul, they will behave as animals do. :sad_yes: Rob "

 

[womanatwell]

You mention a million years…but that’s a blink!! It’s hundreds of millions - BILLIONS of years!
It’s understanding the time that’s the key to understanding evolution. Then look at the evidence.

If you’re afraid of evolution you’ll never understand it.

A new website is on the Internet called The Third Way. This is a list of mainstream scientists (not Intelligent Design, Creationists, etc.) who are saying Darwin is falsified. When I first looked at it, there were 17 scientists listed. Now there are 29, and several are very prominent biologists, including Scott Gilbert, Denis Noble, and Eugene Koonin. (Unfortunately, they also say that Creationism has been falsified by science, which is interesting since we are told that they are different realms, but I’ll leave that for another day.)

If you go to “People” on the website, you will see Dr. Eugene Koonin is a Senior Investigator and the leader of the Evolutionary Genomics Group in the Computational Biology Branch of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from Department of Biology, Moscow State University in Molecular Biology. He is the author of The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution (2011) and has authored and co-authored over 600 papers.

thethirdwayofevolution.com/people/view/eugene-koonin

Koonin has been on the forefront of comparative genomics at the National Center of Biotechnology Information, a division of NIH. NIH has been the leader of the Human Genome and ENCODE Projects.

Koonin’s Quote:
"The summary of the state of affairs on the 150th anniversary of the Origin is somewhat shocking: in the post-genomic era, all major tenets of the Modern Synthesis are, if not outright overturned, replaced by a new and incomparably more complex vision of the key aspects of evolution. So, not to mince words, the Modern Synthesis is gone. "

(The Origin at 150: is a new evolutionary synthesis in sight? Trends Genet. Nov 2009; 25(11): 473–475)

Do we know how long a billion years is?

When we figure possible number of combinations for DNA needed for a free-living organism, we use the total number of necessary DNA bases as the exponent, one million (see the reference after this paragraph). The number of possible types of DNA bases, the 4 found in living things, is the mathematical base. Therefore the total number of possible combinations is 4^1,000,000. This can be converted to the more familiar base 10 which rounds off to 10^600,000 (these numbers are approximate but close enough to be useful for the concepts).

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18948295
Genomics of bacteria and Archaea: the emerging dynamic view of the prokaryotic world.

The fastest chemical reactions are usually no faster than a picosecond, which means 10^15 reactions per second. All the possible sets of one million (10^6) bases on Earth is 4.4 x 10^48 (available bases) divided by 10^6 = 4.4 x 10^42. Multiply that times the rate of chemical reactions per second (10^15) times the seconds in 500,000 years (1.58 x 10^16), you get, rounded off, 7 x 10^73. This would be a limit to the number of “tries” for all the chemical reactions on Earth in 500 million years to mix bases together in hopes they would come up with a set of one million DNA bases in a specific order.

A “try” is similar to trying to guess numbers between a certain range. If you are asked to guess a number between 1 and 10, you are much more likely to “hit” the right number than if the range was between 1 and 1,000,000. If for some reason you had to keep guessing until you got it right, you would probably be done a lot sooner for the 1 to 10 set.

We started with talking about needing about 1 million base pairs of DNA for a free-living organism. For just one short protein around 100 amino acids long, the DNA would have to be about 300 bases long for just that protein (3 bases of DNA to code for one amino acid of protein.) Even if there
were nothing to interfere with random combinations of the correct bases, it would take on average around 4^300 or about 4 x 10^180 tries to get one specific DNA sequence for one protein. Using figures above, the Earth would allow no more than 10^78 tries (1.5 x 10^46 bases) x (1.58 x 10^16 seconds) x (10^15 chemical reactions per second)] for combinations of 300-base DNA sequences.

To compare these numbers with a few other physical phenomena, the estimated number of particles in the universe is about 10^90. The maximum number of actions possible in a second is 10^49 (some talk about quantum physics allowing for more, but we and DNA exist in Newtonian space). The number of seconds in a 14 billion year old universe is no more than 10^20.

The maximum number of organisms on Earth calculated in relation to water volume is 10^50 in 4 billion years.

womanatwell.blogspot.com/p/creation-biology.html

 

[Kelt]

National Socialists (Nazis) and Communists have slaughtered well over 100 million people, and counting. “Christian” extremists cannot hold a candle to this grim toll. Radical Islamists would like to challenge this number, but I cannot think of another religion in the world that believes in the “convert or be killed” philosophy. Rob
P.S. You know that I am not making a blanket statement about naturalists!

In our past we haven’t had to have one religion, (or none) pitted against another…simply different denominations of the same faith have done a very efficient job of slaughtering each other. It’s still happening…or a minority are still trying to make it happen, in N Ireland, and the Sunni’s and Shia’s have been having a go at one another on and off since Mohammed died. Religion isn’t always a guarantee that people will behave well towards each other, any more than people who come to the conclusion that they don’t believe in any of the religions on offer, are guaranteed to ‘behave like animals.’

 

[Monkey1976]

A new website is on the Internet called The Third Way. This is a list of mainstream scientists (not Intelligent Design, Creationists, etc.) who are saying Darwin is falsified. When I first looked at it, there were 17 scientists listed. Now there are 29, and several are very prominent biologists, including Scott Gilbert, Denis Noble, and Eugene Koonin. (Unfortunately, they also say that Creationism has been falsified by science, which is interesting since we are told that they are different realms, but I’ll leave that for another day.)

If you go to “People” on the website, you will see Dr. Eugene Koonin is a Senior Investigator and the leader of the Evolutionary Genomics Group in the Computational Biology Branch of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 from Department of Biology, Moscow State University in Molecular Biology. He is the author of The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution (2011) and has authored and co-authored over 600 papers.

thethirdwayofevolution.com/people/view/eugene-koonin

Koonin has been on the forefront of comparative genomics at the National Center of Biotechnology Information, a division of NIH. NIH has been the leader of the Human Genome and ENCODE Projects.

Koonin’s Quote:
"The summary of the state of affairs on the 150th anniversary of the Origin is somewhat shocking: in the post-genomic era, all major tenets of the Modern Synthesis are, if not outright overturned, replaced by a new and incomparably more complex vision of the key aspects of evolution. So, not to mince words, the Modern Synthesis is gone. "

(The Origin at 150: is a new evolutionary synthesis in sight? Trends Genet. Nov 2009; 25(11): 473–475)

Do we know how long a billion years is?

When we figure possible number of combinations for DNA needed for a free-living organism, we use the total number of necessary DNA bases as the exponent, one million (see the reference after this paragraph). The number of possible types of DNA bases, the 4 found in living things, is the mathematical base. Therefore the total number of possible combinations is 4^1,000,000. This can be converted to the more familiar base 10 which rounds off to 10^600,000 (these numbers are approximate but close enough to be useful for the concepts).

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18948295
Genomics of bacteria and Archaea: the emerging dynamic view of the prokaryotic world.

The fastest chemical reactions are usually no faster than a picosecond, which means 10^15 reactions per second. All the possible sets of one million (10^6) bases on Earth is 4.4 x 10^48 (available bases) divided by 10^6 = 4.4 x 10^42. Multiply that times the rate of chemical reactions per second (10^15) times the seconds in 500,000 years (1.58 x 10^16), you get, rounded off, 7 x 10^73. This would be a limit to the number of “tries” for all the chemical reactions on Earth in 500 million years to mix bases together in hopes they would come up with a set of one million DNA bases in a specific order.

A “try” is similar to trying to guess numbers between a certain range. If you are asked to guess a number between 1 and 10, you are much more likely to “hit” the right number than if the range was between 1 and 1,000,000. If for some reason you had to keep guessing until you got it right, you would probably be done a lot sooner for the 1 to 10 set.

We started with talking about needing about 1 million base pairs of DNA for a free-living organism. For just one short protein around 100 amino acids long, the DNA would have to be about 300 bases long for just that protein (3 bases of DNA to code for one amino acid of protein.) Even if there
were nothing to interfere with random combinations of the correct bases, it would take on average around 4^300 or about 4 x 10^180 tries to get one specific DNA sequence for one protein. Using figures above, the Earth would allow no more than 10^78 tries (1.5 x 10^46 bases) x (1.58 x 10^16 seconds) x (10^15 chemical reactions per second)] for combinations of 300-base DNA sequences.

To compare these numbers with a few other physical phenomena, the estimated number of particles in the universe is about 10^90. The maximum number of actions possible in a second is 10^49 (some talk about quantum physics allowing for more, but we and DNA exist in Newtonian space). The number of seconds in a 14 billion year old universe is no more than 10^20.

The maximum number of organisms on Earth calculated in relation to water volume is 10^50 in 4 billion years.

womanatwell.blogspot.com/p/creation-biology.html

Classic argument from incredulity: “Because the probability is low, it must be impossible”

Pepper it with all of the $10 words and random statistics you like, but that’s all it is.