Why you should think that the Natural-Evolution of species is true

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An admission and then some story telling:

‘Handyman of Proteins’ Got Life on Earth Started

However, proteins pose a problem for scientists who study the beginnings of life. Present-day proteins have had the benefit of billions of years of evolution. They are highly specialized and, compared to most molecules, they are enormous. The odds of such lengthy amino acid chains forming “out of the blue” in life’s primordial soup are beyond astronomical. (what I have been saying right along)

now the story telling

This strange, new protein could do an important job and remain functional despite mutations, and it was small enough that something like it could have plausibly formed on the early Earth without billions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning.

https://www.space.com/39882-handyman-proteins-got-life-started.html
 
I never did answer the OP.

I can see that you have a bit of a delemma. There are not two choices possible, especially the two you propose, to make some intellectual sense of the fathomless mystery that is life.

I am assuming, quite rightly as far as everything within me shouts, that Genesis is truth, revealing the Word of God, that we might come to know Him and participate in the dialogue which allows us to grow in and through Him towards our destiny, from which we turned, which is ultimate communion within the Trinity.

Areas where we may differ in our understanding include the meaning of:
  • kinds of animals or species
  • days
  • the sequence in which created forms appeared
 
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Beginning with the last point above, what I see is an expression of how we saw the world unfold at the time that the message was being transmitted. Looking out onto the Mediterranean Sea, if one can detach oneself from Hubble images, what clearly appears is a vast blue dome separated from the blueness of the sea, and from which on occasion when it clouds up, water falls to the ground. As a volcanic island appears in the midst of the earthly waters, the amorphous glowing matter quiets down into a solitary rock. Within that sea surrounding the ground, from which it has been separated, sea creatures approach, and on the empty dark cone, grasses spring, followed by trees and birds, and lastly animals that crawl upon it. People today are tempted to rewrite Genesis in terms of singularities, atoms and molecules, indulging in a certain hubris, as if what we now discern were any closer to the the actual truth, and missing the point entirely. God brings everything into existence, be it billions of years ago, today, right here and now, or at the end of time. The final word on how the universe is structured is by no means in; the modern version of creation is simply that, suiting our purposes now, but having no more validity when we are speaking about creation, than what we envisioned many thousands of years ago.
 
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The discussion brings us to the idea of days. I am going to suggest that Genesis has its roots, whenever it may have been written as sacred scripture, before the Sumarians, more than 4,000 years ago. At that time, be a person a shepherd, a farmer, a hunter, one who cooked, cleaned and took care of the children, the heart of the family, a day was what one accomplished between waking up and going to sleep, usually the time the sun was up and things were visible. God accomplished what He did in portions, step-wise, the first leading to and being utilized to create the next. He brings everything into existence from eternity, where it is all instantaneous. Where one event follows another, time is created. I’m going to say that the time involved is what it was. How long does anything take when there is no one there to observe it? What are fourteen billion years outside the frame of reference that is derived form our existence that involves a relationship with the universe, looking backwards into its past?
 
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I would say that God created kinds of plants and animals, having created kinds of matter, the earth from which they were brought into existence. What we see is a flourishing of life everywhere, interrelated. Their original perfection included the capacity for diversity, to enable living forms to populate the globe. What would be a true species, or perhaps genus is a better word for kind, is an organizational principle, the soul of the thing that makes it the whole that it is. The “soul” of the atomic include the properties that each event, now a particle, later a wave in a larger material substance, how it interacts with other expressions of itself. Like bricks and mortar are brought together to create a home, it is the reality of the thing, the home which brings the constituent parts into a new unity, a new creation, very different from those parts, the bricks and mortar. We are each of us a new creation, individual unique and ontologically irreplaceable in ourselves, all expressions of one humanity.

Natural-Evolution of species is an illusion.
 
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Aloysium said:
Natural-Evolution of species is an illusion.
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No. Natural evolution makes the best sense of the evidence. What you are doing is making ad-hoc interpretations of genesis to fit the data; just like how young earth creationists try to imagine humans and dinosaurs living together. Otherwise, if you didn’t already have the unjustified belief that genesis represents the literal way that God created things, there would be no good reason to think that new species did not evolve through an accumulation of changes over billions of years.
 
These alleged changes cannot be observed. All that is left is conjecture. Materialist only interpretations are inadequate.
 
IWantGod said:
try to imagine humans and dinosaurs living together.
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We have two new findings to challenge this.
  1. Soft tissue findings in dino bones
  2. Carbon dating that is 28,000 ya.
No doubt you are aware of these.
 
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I’ve listened to Mary Schweitzer talk about her soft tissue findings and she seems not particularly pleased with people twisting her work to suggest a young earth. She’s a self described devout Christian (originally raised Catholic) who finds studying the history of the Earth to bring her closer to God’s creation. Here’s a great article based on an interview she did that tells her story: The Unlikely Paleontologist: An Interview with Mary Schweitzer (Part 1) | Women in the Academy and Professions

Which carbon dating are you referring to? There’s been a lot of instances where known contaminated samples or inappropriate testing methods are used. Carbon dating is one of many radiometric dating methods used, each having a window they cover. When several methods yield overlapping ranges it’s pretty difficult to ignore that mounting evidence.
 
Dan123 said:
I’ve listened to Mary Schweitzer talk about her soft tissue findings and she seems not particularly pleased with people twisting her work to suggest a young earth. She’s a self described devout Christian (originally raised Catholic) who finds studying the history of the Earth to bring her closer to God’s creation. Here’s a great article based on an interview she did that tells her story: The Unlikely Paleontologist: An Interview with Mary Schweitzer (Part 1) | Women in the Academy and Professions

Which carbon dating are you referring to? There’s been a lot of instances where known contaminated samples or inappropriate testing methods are used. Carbon dating is one of many radiometric dating methods used, each having a window they cover. When several methods yield overlapping ranges it’s pretty difficult to ignore that mounting evidence.
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Yes, she was. However, she is not the only one now. Remember, she doesn’t want to lose her job.

If soft tissues are still intact and C14 dating show young ages what does one make of it?

Dino dating

Implications for Radiocarbon (C-14) Ages for Dinosaurs

http://www.dinosaurc14ages.com/carbondating.htm
 
Using Carbon14 to measure samples older than 50,000 years becomes extremely unreliable, which is why multiple dating methods are used. Your entire linked page is based on cherry picking singular opinions and presenting them as the norm. I’m going to let Mary speak for herself in a few quotes from her interview since you’ve recently accused her of being dishonest:

When Christian students come in as young earth creationists and are questioning your work, how do you help them understand what you know?

I try to help them understand that an ancient earth doesn’t negate anything in the Bible. Not at all. God doesn’t tell us how long he views a “day.” And the word “day” in the Bible means all kinds of different things. “A day is as a thousand years. A thousand years is but a day.” God is not under any obligation to meet my expectations. I will not put God in a box.

And you are in a church where not everyone agrees with you.

My pastor doesn’t agree with me. He’s very much a young earth creationist. My small group leader has no problem with the old earth. He has a problem with evolution. The problem is that many scientists and others have said, “Evolution is random.” It is not random, not even remotely random. It is highly constrained by many things: natural selection, non-random gene changes, isolation — some of this is addressed by Francis Collins in his book The Language of God. But, in general, I think we as scientists do a lousy job of communicating because we’re afraid of communicating the limits of our science. We don’t want to be lumped in with creationists if we admit that we don’t know everything. And creationists and a lot of Christians are very, very fearful and suspicious of “godless” science. So there’s this chasm that exists between the two camps that is not necessary at all. If God made this beautiful creation, doesn’t it stand to reason that the God of logic would make it follow rules that he placed? And what is a miracle, except a suspension of those rules? How else would we recognize it if we didn’t have rules to begin with? To me, it’s all part and parcel of the same thing. I think the more I learn about biology and evolution, the bigger God gets.

And how fair would it be if God put us on a changing planet and didn’t build into us the ability to change? If you remember the character of God, I don’t think any of this is a problem. I just don’t. It took me a while to get here. I mean, it was very hard for me.

But very rarely do students ask me about it. Some do. A student came in my office one day and said, “Can I talk to you about something? I was raised a Christian. I was raised to believe in the Bible. But all that I’ve learned in my science classes…I can’t…I can’t do that anymore. But I heard you’re a Christian.” And now she’s getting her PhD! And she’s still a person of faith.
 
Dan123 said:
Using Carbon14 to measure samples older than 50,000 years becomes extremely unreliable, which is why multiple dating methods are used. Your entire linked page is based on cherry picking singular opinions and presenting them as the norm. I’m going to let Mary speak for herself in a few quotes from her interview since you’ve recently accused her of being dishonest:
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Huh? C14 dating is only good to about 50-60 years ago.

That is the entire point. C14 and soft tissue should not be found in these specimens.

If you date a million year old bone carbon dating cannot be used. However, if you decide to date a bone and it yields 28000 ya, there is some explaining to do.

If one assumes the bone to be 70 million years old why would they even think of doing a C14 test. And that is the point. Somebody did, and WOW!

There are comments on Mary at the bottom of the page. Really take some time with this. The usual knee jerk reaction is - It cannot be so.

Why won’t Mary do a C14 test herself? Has she? What did she find?
 
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Question: A sample that is more than fifty thousand years old shouldn’t have any measurable C-14. Coal, oil, and natural gas are supposed to be millions of years old; yet creationists say that some of them contain measurable amounts of C-14, enough to give them C-14 ages in the tens of thousands of years. How do you explain this?

Answer: Very simply. Radiocarbon dating doesn’t work well on objects much older than twenty thousand years, because such objects have so little C-14 left that their beta radiation is swamped out by the background radiation of cosmic rays and potassium-40 (K-40) decay. Younger objects can easily be dated, because they still emit plenty of beta radiation, enough to be measured after the background radiation has been subtracted out of the total beta radiation. However, in either case, the background beta radiation has to be compensated for, and, in the older objects, the amount of C-14 they have left is less than the margin of error in measuring background radiation. As Hurley points out:

ncse.ngo

Answers to Creationist Attacks on Carbon-14 Dating | National Center for Science Education

Radiocarbon dating can easily establish that humans have been on the earth for over twenty thousand years, at least twice as long as creationists are willing to allow.
ncse.ngo ncse.ngo
 
God is not a scientific concept. That chasm will always exist. Change is an idol for some, a substitute for God. Science can tell us nothing about God or the soul. The dating methods used are just not trustworthy. Anomalous dates are discarded. Miracles are not scientific events. They fall under the “we don’t know why this happened” category.

It’s not fear when science does, in fact, not consider God. I know it can’t but the point still stands.
 
Why would that matter, the point is there’s too little signal-to-noise ratio to yield accurate results. If you read the full entry they point out you can use carbon dating incorrectly to date a carbon-free piece of tin at 50,000 years.
 
The thing is God created a natural order of natural cause and effect relationships. I have every reason to think that God intended the natural world to be a part of the creative process and not just a static effect. If you accept the Big bang theory then surely you support the idea of a naturally developing creation. Surely none of us seriously believe that God directly constructed every single star, solar system, and galaxy. Is any Christian here seriously thinking that God directly constructed the planet earth? The idea that we need God’s direct intervention to explain everything that appears difficult to explain really isn’t the best way of looking at things, and if you are gonna look at God’s activity in that way, why not just do away with the whole idea of a natural order? Whats the point of it?

You shouldn’t just be against evolution, you should be against any scientific view of the universe since it employs methodological naturalism…
 
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IWantGod said:
You shouldn’t just be against evolution, you should be against any scientific view of the universe since it employs methodological naturalism…
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Ahhhh, the philosophical question…

You shouldn’t be against any view if a methodological naturalist. One should should understand that it is an incomplete view.
 
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