Why did God create dinosaurs

[StAnastasia]

I No, they give it as a taken. It’s what they say and how they say it. Every time they talk about an animal, for example, the cheetah, the following phrase will be together with cheetah, “which has been evolving for the last (fill in the number) millions of years…” … you believe evolution is a fact, no problem. But I think it is still a “THEORY”.

Well, Prieldedi,

(1) Cheetahs have been evolving for X number of years. I don’t know of any cheetah specialists would argue for specificity down to months.

(2) You are right – evolution is a theory, and always will be. Gravity is a theory too, as are plate tectonics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics.

(3) Like other theories, evolution is tested, refined, revised, and – if the evidence warrants – rejected. So far it has only been strengthened since 1859 as an explanatory framework. We’ll see what the future holds. So far there is no evidence to warrant rejecting common descent in favor of the six-day creation story of one particular tribe.

StAnastasia

 

[StAnastasia]

Scientists want us to believe in evolution, but when we ask them to believe in God (who has the same characteristics as I mentioned) they say we are superstitious!

Scientists don’t “want us to believe in evolution.” Those of us who are Catholic believe in God, and some of us Catholics accept the explanatory cogency of the theory of evolution. I believe in God; I accept the evolutionary explanation for species diversity.

StAnastasia

 

[Poco]

As an earlier poster said, “Because they’re cool!”

Now, as to the evolution question… If one rigorously examines “Darwinian Evolution”, it’s not hard to show that it is highly unlikely. A couple of sources you may want to look at are:

1. “Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome” by Dr. John Sanford
2. “What Darwin Didn’t Know: A Doctor Dissects the Theory of Evolution” by Geoffrey Simmons, M.D.

 

[Schn]

Disproving evolution would mean a Nobel prize at the very least. If neither Sanford or Simmons have a Nobel prize, I must conclude that their works are worthless. The alternative is a scientific conspiracy theory, but science is set up so that evidence trumps authority, so I find this unlikely.

 

[Prieldedi]

Well, Prieldedi,

(1) Cheetahs have been evolving for X number of years. I don’t know of any cheetah specialists would argue for specificity down to months.

(2) You are right – evolution is a theory, and always will be. Gravity is a theory too, as are plate tectonics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics.

(3) Like other theories, evolution is tested, refined, revised, and – if the evidence warrants – rejected. So far it has only been strengthened since 1859 as an explanatory framework. We’ll see what the future holds. So far there is no evidence to warrant rejecting common descent in favor of the six-day creation story of one particular tribe.

Scientists don’t “want us to believe in evolution.” Those of us who are Catholic believe in God, and some of us Catholics accept the explanatory cogency of the theory of evolution. I believe in God; I accept the evolutionary explanation for species diversity.

StAnastasia

By what you say, the bottom line is that of all this is a matter of “belief”. You either “BELIEVE” in it or not. Unfortunately, little by little (give it a generation or two) belief in evolution will be greater than belief in God.

So, let’s see… evolution: You can “believe” in it or you can reject it. It’s been revised, refined, tested, but still yet to be proven. Rejected? Not yet.

Gravity? Jump out of an airplane without a parachute and you’ll prove it’s not a theory. The impact will convince you.

Plate tectonics? I live in Central America. We just had an earthquake at 10:15pm Eastern Time due to the Cocos and Caribe tectonic plates movement. No need to try hard to convince me to “believe” in the tectonics plates, the earth moved for 15 seconds. It was 4.5 in the Richter scale off the Pacific coast of Nicaragua.

General relativity and quantum mechanics? Not too familiar with them, will comment on them in another occasion.

Every time that non evolutionist scientists tell evolutionists scientists that the time required for all the changes needed to “evolve” is not enough, the evolutionists keep adding 000’s to the age of the Earth. It surely is a nice and very scientific way to “refine” the theory. I can picture the refining process: “100,000 years is not enough for a rat to change to a rabbit? What about 1,000,000? Will that be enough? If not, then we can try 10,000,000 or even better, 100,000,000. It’s a blessing for science that we can borrow more 000’s!”

I would like to know, what’s the next step/animal after the cheetah in evolution terms? What was the prior step/animal? What about the elephant? What were they before? What will they be next? Mammoths again? They better start migrating north so the hair starts to grow on them. What about man? What’s next for us in evolution? Were do we go from here?

This is another gem from evolutionists: I remember this from a program about the howling monkeys in Costa Rica. In the dry season, one day the monkeys start to migrate. They travel many miles and come to this valley just in time when the tree’s flowers are blossoming. There are many different trees, and all of them except one produce flowers for up to 10 days almost at the same time. The exception does it for just 3 days. The monkeys stay there and have plenty of food for those days. What did the narrator say? That evolution taught the exception tree that it was better to have the flowers blossom for less days because in that way the monkeys could be “late” one year so more offsprings would result from this change. That’s the way (to the best of my recollection) the narrator said it. Thinking trees! Besides, how do they know this particular tree’s flowers blossomed for 10 days before? They didn’t explain it. How did the trees came to the conclusion of the advantage of this change and the what started the change? They didn’t explain it either.

See StAnastasia, this are the things that make me shake my head in disbelief. I forgot to mention… of course the narrator explained that this change happened many, many, but many, many millions of years ago!

If evolution scientists “don’t want us to believe in evolution”, why do schools are being told not to allow the teachings of a God Creator? This is happening not just in the USA, now the trend is reaching more countries. Why do teachers, both from universities and schools, who openly have said they don’t believe in evolution have been fired? Coincidence?

 

[geoformeo]

Ah I see. Okay, here’s another one.
Do you believe that Triceratops actually used its horns to fight or were they really all for display?

Puts teacher’s hat on again

They were all for display about as much as T-Rex’s teeth were all for chewing. The predominant reason Triceratops had horns was for protection. Dinosaur history shows a classic example of an “evolutionary arms race,” whereby as predators became larger, faster, and more dangerous, the much of their prey became more highly ornamented to stave off their opponents.

By the Cretaceous Period, dinosaur anatomy had become extremely specialized. Triceratops’ horns would have been the defense necessary to ward off an attacking T-Rex. That the horns could also have been used for display would have been only an advantageous by-product.

Keep 'em coming

 

[StAnastasia]

Gravity? Jump out of an airplane without a parachute and you’ll prove it’s not a theory. The impact will convince you.

You don’t understand what a theory is. I assume you are not familiar with science or how it works.

 

[StAnastasia]

Why do teachers, both from universities and schools, who openly have said they don’t believe in evolution have been fired? Coincidence?

Can you offer examples, or are you making this up as well?

 

[Prieldedi]

I’m sorry, but this is so ridiculous it is not even funny any more. This guy is saying that there have been negative numbers in radiometric age dates. This is not possible. If you understood how scientists date rocks, then you’d know that negative numbers in a radiometric age date are a mathematical impossibility.

I’ll try to be brief in explaining it here. Age dates are based upon half-lives, the time it takes for one half of one element to decay into another. Decay rates are known and have been documented repeatedly in the lab. They do not change, even with external changes in temperature, pressure, or chemistry. If you can measure the ratio between a parent element and a daughter product in a rock, and you know the half-life, you can calculate the age of the rock.

For instance: if a known half-life for element A to decay into element B was 50 million years, and if I found a rock that contained 25% element A and 75% element B, then I know 2 half-lives have past (1/4 (25%) is 1/2 of 1/2). Thus, the rock in question is 100 million years old. It is a simple concept. But based upon these calculations, even if you had a barely traceable parent element, that ratio is still multiplied by the half-life, always resulting in a positive value.

The wide range of radiometric ages is due to things being of drastically different ages! And there is not just one radiometric dating technique, there are dozens, all with different capabilities for dating. And the different techniques verify the dates of the others.

Finally, the precision of radiometric dating is actually quite astonishing. Most techniques give an accuracy of +/- 1 or 2 million years. Meaning that in my example above, the rock in question would be between 98 and 102 million years old. Given that that is a lot of years to account for, I’d say that is quite good. And do note that it does not leave room for an Earth that is 6,000 years old.

Have you visited this website?

tasc-creationscience.org/other/plaisted/www.cs.unc.edu/_plaisted/ce/index.html

It has some articles on Radiometric Dating:

* The Radiometric Dating Game (Basic)
* More Bad News for Radiometric Dating (Technical)
* The Radiometric Dating Deception (An easy to read sermon)
* A Response to "The Radiometric Dating Deception" (April 15, 2004)
* Comments on "A Geological Time Scale 1989" by Harland et al
* A Reply to Dr. Henke and Others about Radiometric Dating
  (Contains material from Dalrymple, Dickin, and Faure)
* A Further Reply to Dr. Henke
* Another Reply to Dr. Henke
* Reply Number 4 to Dr. Henke
* Magma Opus Tells a Tale on Radiometric Dating (Basic)
* Problems with Isochrons (Technical)

Are you familiar with “Climategate”? Scientists disregarded data that didn’t correspond with their preconceived notion of Global Warming, that is, they destroyed evidence. Perhaps negative numbers in radiometric dating are a possibility. I read that Carbon 14 has dated a cow to have die in the future! The trend I see is that eventually all these methods always find some sort of problem, either with the method itself or with the interpretation of the data collected. But if negative numbers is an impossibility as you say, what about the data that shows that the Earth is older than 4.5 billion years? Why a rock has been dated to be 10 billion years old if the Earth is just 4.5 billion years old? This is not my field of knowledge, but there are scientists that are not as sure as you are about radiometric dating being that accurate.

 

[StAnastasia]

Disproving evolution would mean a Nobel prize at the very least. If neither Sanford or Simmons have a Nobel prize, I must conclude that their works are worthless. The alternative is a scientific conspiracy theory, but science is set up so that evidence trumps authority, so I find this unlikely.

Sanford and Simmons have virtually no credibility outside creationist circles.

 

[geoformeo]

No, I don’t mean to say that dinosaurs were at the bottom of the food chain, and the poor things had a rough time. By suffering, I mean the pain inherent in any sentient being, i.e. any creature that has a nervous system.

You are quite right though, living beings today suffer in the same way as did dinosaurs and many other extinct beings. The nature of life on earth is that is “red in tooth and claw”. How does this square with an omnibenevolent God?

Given that homo sapiens sapiens has only been around for some 200,000 yrs, and dinosaurs were around for many millions of years, I could argue that their experience of pain, suffering, and death is greater than ours.

I think there is a categorical difference between pain and suffering. Pain is an advantageous evolutionary phenomenon that enables an organism to know that it is in trouble. It is actually a good thing that we experience pain (think what would happen if you couldn’t feel pain and stuck your hand in a fire). As you rightly stated, sentient beings experience pain. But suffering, on the other hand, is an experience of only conscious organisms. Animals don’t suffer, because they don’t know they’re suffering. All they know is that something is wrong with them, and they respond to their instincts accordingly. Humans recognize their persistent pain and cry, “Why me?”

In SAT terms, pain is to suffering what feeling good is to happiness. Does a mouse experience happiness? It may “feel good” if it is healthy, but is it happy? No, because happiness and suffering are higher-order emotions only found in conscious organisms. And dinos wouldn’t have been worried about death either, so I don’t think you can say that their experience of death is greater than ours.

As far as nature being “red in tooth and claw” being squared with an omnibenevolent God, I can see a number of reasons: 1) Natural selection breeds complexity and variety, culminating in conscious organisms and showing us design and beauty; 2) gives us appreciation of what came before us, and what it took to get us here; 3) provides a process by which God is continually creating new species, while not having to create ex nihilo every time He wanted to make a new species; 4) shows us humans, who are created in God’s image and likeness, how not to behave; what inhumane acts are like, and shows how we are part of, yet “set apart” from nature.

 

[Poco]

Schn!

Are you serious that a scientist needs to win a Nobel prize to be validated?!

Consider the sense of sight. One day one cell in this this creature is able to detect differences in electromagnetic radiation. From then on, every change in the DNA sequence must be positive for the ability of sight, no errors. Then we must have other cells that can understand the signals sent by the light receptors. Also, we need cells that can transmit those signals from the receptors to other cells that can interpret these changes in electromagnetic radiation. And all this occurs due to random changes in a DNA sequence?

I apologize for such a lame attempt at describing “Irreducible Complexity”.

Now, if Schn can give me a reasonable explanation how cells of the iris, lens, optic nerve, brain, et. al. developed simultaneously to give us the sense of sight…

 

[geoformeo]

Have you visited this website?

tasc-creationscience.org/other/plaisted/www.cs.unc.edu/_plaisted/ce/index.html

I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time to spend refuting those silly arguments one by one. I’d rather be bringing faith and encouragement to those here on CAF.

Are you familiar with “Climategate”? Scientists disregarded data that didn’t correspond with their preconceived notion of Global Warming, that is, they destroyed evidence. Perhaps negative numbers in radiometric dating are a possibility. I read that Carbon 14 has dated a cow to have die in the future! The trend I see is that eventually all these methods always find some sort of problem, either with the method itself or with the interpretation of the data collected. But if negative numbers is an impossibility as you say, what about the data that shows that the Earth is older than 4.5 billion years? Why a rock has been dated to be 10 billion years old if the Earth is just 4.5 billion years old? This is not my field of knowledge, but there are scientists that are not as sure as you are about radiometric dating being that accurate.

There isn’t a profession in the world where corruption isn’t present, not even the priesthood. Does one bad priest make the entire priesthood a bunch of liars or hooligans? Of course not. Don’t go throwing the baby out with the bath water when it comes to science and scientists.

I have never heard of a rock having been dated at 10 billion years old. Even if there was one, it wouldn’t necessarily be out of the scope of possibility, if it was a meteorite. In my knowledge, the oldest rocks ever dated were from the hundreds of pounds of moon rock astronauts brought back from the 6 Apollo moon landings (or did that not ever happen?), and have a date of approximately 4.55 billion years of age.

 

[Poco]

I’m sorry I got off the topic of dinosaurs. They are way cool!

 

[Prieldedi]

Can you offer examples, or are you making this up as well?

Check this link:

expelledthemovie.com/

"EXPELLED uncovers the dramatic exposition of the current and often hidden persecution of educators and scientists who are being denied tenure and even fired in some cases, for their belief in the evidence of “design” in nature, challenging the idea that life is a result of random chance or the result of evolution.

Unlike other documentary films, EXPELLED doesn’t just talk to people representing one side of the story. The film confronts scientists such as Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, influential biologist and atheist blogger PZ Myers and Eugenie Scott, head of the National Center for Science Education. The creators of EXPELLED crossed the globe over a two-year period, interviewing scores of scientists, doctors, philosophers and public leaders. The result is a startling revelation that freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-funded high schools, universities and research institutions."

And this one…

healtheland.wordpress.com/2007/12/08/christian-fired-for-not-believing-in-evolution-from-woods-hole-oceanographic-institution-in-massachusetts/

 

[teadough]

http://www.sciencepunk.com/v5/gallery/jesus_on_raptor.jpg



(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

 

[Prieldedi]

I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time to spend refuting those silly arguments one by one. I’d rather be bringing faith and encouragement to those here on CAF.

There isn’t a profession in the world where corruption isn’t present, not even the priesthood. Does one bad priest make the entire priesthood a bunch of liars or hooligans? Of course not. Don’t go throwing the baby out with the bath water when it comes to science and scientists.

I have never heard of a rock having been dated at 10 billion years old. Even if there was one, it wouldn’t necessarily be out of the scope of possibility, if it was a meteorite. In my knowledge, the oldest rocks ever dated were from the hundreds of pounds of moon rock astronauts brought back from the 6 Apollo moon landings (or did that not ever happen?), and have a date of approximately 4.55 billion years of age.

You sound a little like Luther. You can interpret data one way but you don’t accept others interpreting it another way (pun intended).

Not a good comparison, scientists and priests. However, both ask me to believe in something that created the world in the past, at a time when no humans were around; to believe in a creator that we can’t see, that works in mysterious ways… both want me to BELIEVE. Neither can prove scientifically the creator. All they can show me are signs they say are proofs of the existence of that creator. One is called Evolution, the other is called God. One tells me Evolution happened by chance, the other tells me God has a plan in mind. One tells me we are just matter, a lot of water, nitrogen, calcium… the other tells me we are also Spirit. You don’t see one group of priests on this corner with a set of beliefs and another group at that corner with another set. They give the same message over and over. Can’t say the same about scientists.

A priest that is corrupt wont change the truth about God. A corrupt scientist distorts the truth to deny God. Huge difference.

The reason I distrust many scientists is because of other scientists. I have nothing personal against them. I just find many of their conclusions wrong.

Do you believe what NASA said back in 1996 about a rock that came from Mars and fell in Antarctica? Huge press conference. They said it came from Mars… 26,000 years ago. Yes, NASA said it. Did it really happen that way? Do you believe NASA on this?

 

[StAnastasia]

Check this link: expelledthemovie.com/
"EXPELLED uncovers the dramatic exposition of the current and often hidden persecution of educators and scientists who are being denied tenure and even fired in some cases, for their belief in the evidence of “design” in nature, challenging the idea that life is a result of random chance or the result of evolution.]

Expelled is a pathetic fraud that has been thoroughly debunked on “Expelled Exposed”: expelledexposed.com/

It was made by liars and cheats, and has zero credibility with anyone who understands science. The film makers lied to my department when on their request I set up an interview for them with our director. When we found out they were lying and that this was an ID creationist film, we pulled the plug on the interview.

StAnastasia

 

[StAnastasia]

Consider the sense of sight. …Now, if Schn can give me a reasonable explanation how cells of the iris, lens, optic nerve, brain, et. al. developed simultaneously to give us the sense of sight…

That’s easy:

"When evolution skeptics want to attack Darwin’s theory, they often point to the human eye. How could something so complex, they argue, have developed through random mutations and natural selection, even over millions of years?

Through natural selection, different types of eyes have emerged in evolutionary history – and the human eye isn’t even the best one, from some standpoints. Because blood vessels run across the surface of the retina instead of beneath it, it’s easy for the vessels to proliferate or leak and impair vision. So, the evolution theorists say, the anti-evolution argument that life was created by an “intelligent designer” doesn’t hold water: If God or some other omnipotent force was responsible for the human eye, it was something of a botched design."

pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/1/l_011_01.html

 

[StAnastasia]

A priest that is corrupt wont change the truth about God. A corrupt scientist distorts the truth to deny God. Huge difference.

No, there is not a huge difference. A corrupt scientist no more damages the scientific enterprise than a pedophile priest damages the Church. The pedophile priest scandal with the bishops’ cover-up certainly damaged the credibility of the Church as much if note more than the so-called “climategate” damaged the credibility of science.