Defence of Intelligent Design

AdminAsgara, When I first started posting alway responded to the question by posting a new post, I was trying to answer a lot of questions with one post, but its doesn't register that I responded to the questions, There are a lot of times people don't respond to my questions, like the chromosome bundles, but they don't say they don't know the answer, some people seem to ask too many questions, and want to control the debate by forcing a point by point response, I try to give them a simple response that addresses all their questions, just lately I've just been hitting the reply button, so it registers that I responded, etc...

Whatever,It seems, from the frustration level of other posters, that you are the only one who seems to think you have responded with answers to direct questions. Many times it seems that though you hit the reply button to a particular post, you don't address any issue raised in the post. You continue to post assertions that others have questioned or even refuted, yet you don't acknowledge this. Simply hitting the reply button to a particular post doesnt' mean that you have actually replied to anything, if all you do is repeat yourself.My alter-ego started a new thread on the Meert/Brown debate, with links to both sides of the issue. You continue to assert that Joe refuses to debate yet you give absolutely no indication that you have read anything in those links.In this very thread, my alter-ego has linked, twice, to an entire thread on chromosome count. I suggest that any questions concerning this issue be taken to that thread. I won't link again, as it SHOULD be easily found.PLEASE take a little more time to actively address issues brought up in replies to your posts.

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AdminAsgara
Queen of the Universe

No not at all. What I am saying is that micro-evolution can occur many times w/o becoming macro-evolution. I most likely do not look anything like you (unless something really sick is going on) and our parents do not look alike, ect.. we all look different but are humans, billions of micro-evolutionary events, rather than calling it micro-evolution i prefer "purposed variation", again a true ID term, but I believe that the creator, who ever it may be, purposed that variation within a species might occur, but not eventually creating a new species.BRAN

Crash,
You brought up that you or I have never seen an irreducibly complex organism created, but also i have never seen anything macro-evolve either, could you please direct me to were i can read up and find out what macro-evolutionary events I am missing out on.BRAN

I am still continuing to work on my paper and it is coming along, I really appreciate all of this forums help, in reading defenses and being forced to defend I have learned a lot and have been helped more through disagreement than through being fed defenses of ID. I also thank you all for overlooking and not annexing me for my foolish anger earlier on and I hope to continue to work and learn. I wanted you all to know that I really appreciate your help and advise.BRAN

Why not? What prevents it?The only difference between one species and another is genetics. If mutation can change genetics, as we know it can, what prevents enough changes from giving rise to new species?

mark24, I don't have all the answers, but I gave you some answers, I don't believe in your millions of years for the different fossil layers(in this we agree to disagree), but assuming that the cambrian explosion was the genesis event, then were talking thousands of years, and not millions of years, for the fossils to be fossilizing, if no massive sediment fossil burials happen pre-flood, then you wouldn't have massive evidence pre-flood, think the only massive fossils evidences pre-flood might be the coral reefs that formed, pre-flood, that would have a lot of sediment from the tidal sediments burying and allowing the reef to grow upward, but these reefs are likely under up to a mile of flood sediments, but it would be interesting what kind of fossils are in the sediment layers above the coral reefs, etc...1/ Why doesn't a single species in the modern day exist in the Cambrian?things decomposed pre-flood (didn't fossilize), or they micro-evolved, or went extinct!2/ Why doesn't a single species in the Cambrian exist today?micro-evolution, or extinction3/ Given that terrestrial plants were created on an earlier day than marine organisms, we should expect them to appear in the flood unaffected Cambrian sediments. They aren't. Not one. Not even pollen. Why?liquefication, and short amounts of time since the creation event, and no massive pre-flood sediment burials preservation of pre-flood fossils.4/ All fish are created on the same day as trilobites, yet where are the teleosts, placoderms, sarcopterygians etc? Completely & utterly absent. Why?Fish should of survived the flood, however, some species went extinct, who knows why, breeding grounds, etc...5/ Bryozoans are an entire phyla, & are completely absent from the Cambrian record. They should be there, where are they?Are they present in coral reefs buried by the flood sediments?6/ Why is 5/6ths of the fossil record in pre-flood sediments? How did those sediments get there?Because the flood sediments buried the life pre-flood,(liquefication) unless they were carried away in the debris, or floated upward excessively, other 1/6th, etc...7/ There are unicellular & multicellular fossils predating the Cambrian explosion. They exist in sediments that are unaffected by the flood. How did they get there?I'm leaning God created the herbs, trees on day 3, so the algae, bacteria, that break down decaying matter, would of grown into the soil matrix, earth worms, etc...

Whatever, There are no coral reefs in the Precambrian, blowing that entire paragraph out of the water. That's interesting. You reject the notion that not many things fossilise & thus it is difficult to find transitionals (despite them being found all over the place), yet you invoke exactly the same argument here! Absolute & utter hypocrisy.The problem for you is much, much worse, however. You have to explain why there is absolutely no evidence of any modern species, & not just species, but genus', families, etc.. in the Cambrian explosion. It takes MACROEVOLUTION to go from anything in the Cambrian to the modern day, not microevolution.So if you aren't going to be a hypocrite you have to drop the non-fossilisation argument, or withdraw the objection of "fully formed fossils" appearing in the GC. Which is it? Again, it would take MACROEVOLUTION to get from Pikaia to the most basal fish, let alone everything else. Extinction is no answer since they existed in the Cambrian (allegedly) & so should be represented in the Cambrian fossil record.And I redraw your attention to your missing fossil inconsistency. No, no, NO!!!! Liquefaction is an artifact of the flood, it never affected the Cambrian strata, it therefore couldn't affect anything below the Cambrian. Why is this so hard for you to understand? According to the creation account the trees & plants were created before the marine fauna, so where are they? They should be in what conventional geology calls the Precambrian. Not so much as a pollen grain! No, no, NO!!! Fish were created AT THE SAME TIME AS THE TRILOBITES et al, & their fossils should be contemporary with them. The Cambrian is pre-flood & is unaffected by it & the alleged liquefaction. So where are the major fish clades in the Cambrian explosion? No. The earliest Bryozoans appear in the Ordovician. Where are the Bryozoans in the Cambrian explosion? You really do have a comprehension problem, don't you?The basal Cambrian has 5/6th of the fossiliferous strata BELOW IT. This means that liquefaction & the flood couldn't have affected it. You accept the Cambrian explosion as a stratigraphically significant event, remember? That is, it records an event, & not flood jumbling up. That means it isn't affected by the flood, & nor is anything below it.So, why is 5/6ths of the fossil record in pre-flood sediments? How did those sediments get there? Well the trees aren't there, either. And algae & bacteria aren't herbs, they belong to completely different Kingdoms to Plantae. A complete non-answer.There are unicellular & multicellular fossils predating the Cambrian explosion. They exist in sediments that are unaffected by the flood. How did they get there?Mark

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"Physical Reality of Matchette’s EVOLUTIONARY zero-atom-unit in a transcendental c/e illusion" - Brad McFall

Thanks. For some reason I missed that thread, and it is interesting. I wonder if someone on this thread will see your link and go there and read it and bother to try and understand? Oh well... whatever.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

I am curious why you have not responded to my post #151. It was addressed to you and contained points you later ignored while responding to others. You even managed to respond to a person who was defending my post... but not mine.In addition, if you are from that school Flies mentioned, then one of your classmates' threads are still open and you can see the material I laid out both for and against ID.You may not come around to evo, but it is important to understand ID as it really exists. You cannot make claims that "the pieces are there and it takes an intelligence to put them together". That is not ID theory. That is simple creationism.In order to make ID theory work, you need to come up with concrete scientific arguments (just like all the rest of us use to support any other theory) which show that an organism, or a feature of an organism, MUST have been designed.Dembski will argue that MUST is too strong of a word, but then use whatever other term you can come up with which describes a case where an evolutionary mechanism is so improbable that design is the best alternative. I do not like semantic games, so I say MUST.You cannot use pure logic, as that is a full return to Paley and Plato and ultimately creationism, and so counter to ID theory (as is set out in there literature). While they would love to return to Paley and Plato, and use many of their arguments, the key difference is that they claim the same knowledge is available through evidence.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Crash,
Crashfrog writes:
"The only difference between one species and another is genetics"Not Exactly, chromosome count is the major factor, humans have a chromosome count of 46 while an ameba has a chromosome count of 50, I have never seen or read of any creature chromosome count increasing or decreasing to create a new species. Yes I have heard about the domestic and wild horses but they were still horses.BRAN

Wrong. There are literally many millions, maybe billions, of different species with different genetics, and there are only about 100 diferent chromosome counts. Simple arithmetic will tell you that there are at least hundreds of thousands of different species with the same chromosome count. Therefore chromosome count is pretty useless for distinguishing between species. Different chromosome count usually (but not always) means different species, but same chromosome count means essentially nothing in terms of species classification. You may be right. That's because chromosome count is almost meaningless in species classification and all the speciation events involving chromosome count that I know of are in plants .. do you count those as creatures? However, there are many examples of genetic changes giving rise to new species; E.g. Observed Instances of Speciation and http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html. Ring species (http://www.cs.colorado.edu/...say/creation/ring_species.html) are also interesting, and of course they all have th same number of chromosomes around the ring. And what significance does it have that we call them by the same name?[This message has been edited by JonF, 01-26-2004]

mark24,
I am just asking about your reply to whatever's first point, can you show me were and what these transional fosills are and have been found. At this time i am not questioning whether or not they exist, I truly am just curious were they are "being found all over the place", that's all. If you could please post were you learned of those fossils and were I can learn about them, that would be great.BRAN

Good Morning bran_sept88:We all have bad days and take it out on those around us, so I understand where you're coming from and accept your apology. Perhaps my use of the word "pathetic" was a bit strong, but my main point still stands, which is that ID is a non-scientific endevour. Unless you can present workable, falisifiable hypothesis, design experiments to test these hypotheses and then get results that support the hypotheses (I'm making this simple and ignoring the concept of the null hypotheses), then you are dealing with something other than science. I hope you understand this fact. You did say that you do know what makes something scientific, and if that is indeed the case then you have to admitt that ID does not fit the criteria. If you disagree with what I have said then in your next response simply present an ID hypothesis. Remember, it has to be both testable and therefore, also falsifiable. I have asked this simple task of whatever at least three times so far, and have yet to see him respond. I hope you, bran_sept88, do not follow in his footsteps. After all, remember that it was you who started this thread to defend ID as a viable alternative to the Theory of Evolution, so here's your chance to take all that you have learned and actually defend it. Good luck.You close by saying this: Perhaps others on this site will disagree with this statement, BIMHO, you cannot separate ID from creationism. They are one in the same.As for explaining how the ToE can explain irreducibly complex creatures, I first need to see something in nature that is irreducibly complex. I'm not trying to be a smart-ass. Science cannot show you, for example, exactly how the eye evolved. You know we can't do that. But many times on this site a perfectly plausible explanation has been given for just such an event. The explanation follows the guidelines of the scientific method, does not violtae any laws of nature and gives a scientifically sound "route" by which the eye, a supposedly irreducibly complex structure, could have come into being by the Theory of Evolution. To then say: "yeah, well you can't prove it" is simply a cop-out.

mark24, I don't know enough about your imaginary sediment layers to argue whats in each one, too me, the liquefication layerings of the flood sediments and the fossils stratification within said sediments explain the fossil layerings, perhaps sometime I'll look at this all closer, to understand exactly what your saying, we all know some of the creatures of the flood went extinct, even today we have species that are now facing extinction, and no new kinds of creatures being formed, etc...
P.S. You just don't see creatures in the natural, fossilizing, they need to be buried, why would creatures pre-flood fossilize and not just decompose, meaning the flood sediment preserved only the fossils that were living 4,350 years ago, the ones that died pre-flood would of decomposed, fossilization doesn't happen in the natural, it needs burial, to be pressed into an imprint, mineralized or frozen, so I'm just going to agree to disagree, until such time as I can research, what fossils are being expressed in the natural in what layers, think it will all come down to you believe fossil sediments happened over large periods of time, and I believe it happened because they were buried by the biblical flood sediments which Walt Brown explains the natural physical mechanics of how liquefication stratification explains fossil deposition and stratification of said sediment layers, etc...