Simple evidence for ID

So Buz got banned again for something in this thread? I have to say I can't see why. The discussion had gone in this direction and he was right on topic. Buz is absolutely right, after they disobeyed they were subject to death which means that before it they were not. God had said that if they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they WOULD die, showing that death had not occurred before that. Apparently they had the tree of life they could eat from as long as they were in favor with God, but after their sin, eating from that would only have confirmed them in the condition of the devils, forever alienated from God, so God sends them from Eden to prevent that from happening.This definitely has implications for evolutionism/creationism. I don't see how it helps ID a whole lot since they accept great ages, but basically the idea is that we were created immortal and sin brought mortality ("the wages of sin is death"). Death is NOT normal and natural. Sin and death have been working in all life on this planet since the Fall and the effect is cumulative from generation to generation, one Biblical indication of which is the gradual decrease in the length of the human lifespan after Adam, which is chronicled in Genesis 5. Finally God fixed the human lifespan at an average of 70 years, but even through the time of Abraham and the patriarchs and 400 years later, Moses, the span was well over 100 years -- at least for some.There should be plenty of evidence for this gradual deterioration in our physical health from generation to generation. It should be recognizable in the genome. I believe it's certainly recognizable in the increase in diseases -- I understand that the incidence of cancer for instance has increased dramatically over the last hundred years. You seem to prefer the devil's word over God's. It was the devil who said that, not God. God said it would bring death upon them and that's what happened. Eve believed the devil's lie that it would make them like God, but it only brought death.The only connection between the curse and the tree of life, as Buz said, is that God didn't want them eating of that tree which would only make the curse irrevocable. He planned to send a Savior instead, who would take the curse upon Himself and at the final Redemption restore the tree of life to a cleansed humanity.

All this is based on scripture. Scripture says God cursed the whole creation for our sake, and the New Testament speaks of the whole creation "groaning" in waiting for the Redemption of humanity. Some think animals died before the Fall, but I think nothing died before the Fall, that all death entered with the Fall. The first death of animals was God's killing them to make skins to cover Adam and Eve, which is considered by some to be the first animal sacrifice for sin, which was practiced for millennia throughout the world, (as well as human sacrifice, which God condemns, though it shows an intuitive understanding that sin requires a great expiation even though the death of a sinner can't accomplish that) and was formalized in the laws of Israel, ending only with the once-and-for-all sacrifice of Jesus Christ. This is also true, but I think this is illusory overall. Our health has improved mostly by artificial means, through all kinds of medical interventions and drugs, but also improved nutrition, knowledge of healthy practices etc, which we wouldn't have without the luxuries we have here in the wealthy West.I think our medical expertise masks the fact that our natural bodies have deteriorated overall and are subject to many more diseases than ever before and more horrific diseases too. Improved health practices and medical interventions may compensate for this for quite some time, and even outdistance it, but I believe the underlying fact is that our natural life is continuing to deteriorate. Where there used to be more natural vigor there is now medical help. It's a good thing we have it because we need it more and more.

quote:

---

Data from http://www.losangelesalmanac.com/topics/Vitals/vi07a.htm

​

Percent of children who died before first birthday in LA county:
1920: 7.36
2002: 0.55
data from http://www.ssha.org/...ite/presidential_addresses/haines.pdf
Number of deaths per year per 100,000 people from TB, England and Wales:
1861: 249
1964: 2.54
Number of deaths per year per 100,000 people from infectious diseases other than TB in Japan:
1899: 512
1964: 45
To me, it looks like illness and death is perfectly natural, which is why improvements in nutrition, medicine and public health programmes result in these amazing figures.

---

Sure, but again I believe this masks the horrible fact that overall there is an underlying natural deterioration.

That would be a matter to be determined by statistics I suppose, but since there wouldn't be much in the way of statistics before a hundred years ago the question wouldn't be too easy to settle.I think the problem is easily obscured by our medical knowledge and our more supportive living circumstances. Heavier death tolls in the past most likely reflect the lack of knowledge though they might in fact have had much more natural resistance than we have. In our time we may be staving off massive epidemics by our medical knowledge that without it would wipe out far more of us than previous generations, because of having less natural resistance than former generations had. It would be a hard thing to sort out and all the harder if such an underlying pattern isn't taken into account as a possibility.Of course all this fits in with ideas about genetic deterioration which has been debated a lot here, with the evo side insisting it's not happening. I guess that awaits further study.

I'm not really clear what this thread was aiming for although I went back and read the first page of posts and skimmed through some of the rest, but I thought I'd venture my own view and hope it's in the ballpark.I think actual observable reality reflects the revelations of Genesis: On the one hand God created all things "good" and made man in His own image, the image of moral/spiritual/intellectual perfection at least. On the other hand man disobeyed and was cut off from communion with his Creator and became subject to disease and death.I think that to judge from nature itself what we have is something that suggests a perfection that has been marred, which fits the picture given in Genesis. We can see a design in all things that is staggering in its minute intricacies and functionality and adaptability and yet somehow broken and diseased, not quite working up to its implicit promise, subject always to deformity and death.Looking at nature we see every degree of physical, moral, spiritual and intellectual perfection AND deformity, beauty AND ugliness, health AND disease etc.We have an apparent implicit perfection and we have the impression that something has twisted and deformed that original perfection.Creation and Fall.

I don't count plants. They are not alive in the same sense.

I'm talking about our built-in natural health as opposed to measures we take to preserve our health. Yes those measures are all natural in a sense, including drugs and medical inventions, but you are only making a semantic point and missing the one I'm trying to make. Not at all. I consideer these things blessings of God, specifically given in great abundance to the West because of our obedience to Biblical principles. To a certain extent the knowledge is self-perpetuating, but I believe that as we are now moving away from our Christian underpinnings we are also going to be losing the blessings. There is always a time lag, of decades, possibly even centuries, in the accumulation of blessings and also the accumulation of destruction. This lag time tends to mask the cause-effect relationship. You are missing the point. I'm talking about our natural condition, health, ability to survive without all the helps. If we lose the helps the deterioration will show itself. We're protected by layers of infrastructure and if that goes, as it could, as under more terrorist attacks for instance, then we'll see what we're made of.HOWEVER, I think this is a question ultimately for the genetics lab. I think eventually this deterioration is going to have to be recognized at that level. Sure, we may have solutions even to some things at that level, even though subject to this basic trend of deterioration. If we were in God's favor I wouldn't worry much as He would continue to supply the knowledge we need to cure ourselves, and if we were REALLY REALLY in God's favor even supernatural or miraculous healings, but I think we're losing God's favor.

Religion doesn't help anybody, but Biblical obedience does. It doesn't make us superior that we achieved scientific knowledge, it should make us humble because it's entirely the gift of God, and it should be used to improve circumstances for the whole human race -- but what they need more than any of that is the gospel of Christ, because with that they can conquer their own problems. ALL disease is a result of the Fall, of original sin and continuing sin, and it's accumulating and getting worse, and AIDS is an expression of it. You can't deny that in the West we've had it better than the rest of the world until quite recently when Asia has been catching up to us. Our blessings are not due to anything special about us, and they are no accident either, they are the result of Biblical obedience, the gospel of Christ, and without it we could easily fall back to the dark primitive heathen tribalism Europe started out from 2 millennia ago. I really want to learn about this if I can. What has been called by some "junk DNA" right?I'm sure there will always be a "Darwinian explanation" until it's too late.The hurt is not obvious, it's insidious, but it is cumulative and it's going to bite humanity very hard eventually.

I'm not trying to answer every conceivable question that arises about this. I'm simply extrapolating from some main Biblical points, and certainly there would be many problems to work out.I believe things were quite different before the Fall in many ways though exactly how I can only guess. After the Fall for instance Adam was told he had to till the soil "in the sweat of his brow" in order to grow his own food, which may imply that before the Fall things "just grew" and didn't require all that labor to grow them. But God said He "cursed the ground for your sake," suggesting that once it brought forth food without labor.After the Fall the principle of death entered, even life feeding on death as in the case of decay feeding the soil and feeding plants as you point out, and plants feeding the animals, not to mention "nature red in tooth and claw" and all that as one animal feeds upon another. Did the lamb lie down with the lion before the Fall as is also promised after the Redemption? Could be.All I know is that it appears to be a certain implication of the Fall that before it Adam and Eve were immortal. As I said, some people think animals died before the Fall, but I doubt it myself, and I don't count plants. These things are speculations, however, guesses. Pre-Fall immortality of the human race, however, is a solid inference from the Genesis description, and so is post-Fall accumulation of death.

Immortality stops it. Immunity to death. Whatever form that takes. Instantaneous healing of wounds? Such vigorous health and strength that harm simply doesn't occur?{EDIT: Or maybe: "accidents" simply don't happen in a perfectly functioning spiritual environment that's in tune with its Creator?If "junk DNA" should turn out to represent all the capacities lost to the human race over the millennia since the Fall, think of the enormous numbers and kinds of adaptations we have lost. I mean that part of the DNA is some huge proportion of it, right?This message has been edited by Faith, 05-18-2005 05:31 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 05-18-2005 05:34 PM

Repetitive units of what? What chemically is going on there? There are some claims that parts of it DO seem to have some kind of function. And how would you know what might or might not once-upon-a-time have been there from the big nothing that is now there? I mean it LOOKS like DNA at first glance but a kind of blasted functionless DNA or something like that, right?

Thanks. I've read about the processes in a general way before, not that I can say I grasp it clearly. No pictures? There are all these nice diagrams you can find showing how "normal" DNA operates, replicates itself, etc., but nothing for junk DNA that I've found. Certainly seems to be a dysfunctional thing, a destroyed thing, which is more or less benign like a "vestigial organ" though like a vestigial organ it can also cause problems under some circumstances.From the description there's no way to tell how it got that way in the first place however. The tendency is to take as "normal" whatever is observed, but it could conceivably be the result of genetic destruction of some kind over time, no? The "pseudogenes" appear to be that. The following quote says these are very likely the product of the copying of mutations that produce nonfunctioning DNA, obviously a deleterious process. Maybe there is a sequence of degenerative processes from one kind of "Junk DNA" to another over time?The link describes the situation a bit differently than you do. It also claims junk DNA proves evolution. It goes on past the portion I've quoted to discuss how some junk DNA copies the same errors in the same genetic sequences across species and how this demonstrates common descent.I might guess, based of course on my Biblical presupposition, that the replication of the same errors in the same design factors across species doesn't prove common descent but rather perhaps a catastrophic event that annihilated huge numbers of all living things. I admit it's a wild guess and I haven't the foggiest idea how it would get into the DNA but junk DNA looks like it represents death and disease and dysfunction, and the Flood was a biggie. Also of course from a creationist point of view it suggests processes of the progressive deterioration since the Fall in any case. The idea is that Adam and Eve and every living creature at its origin had enormously more genetic potential than we now do, and this is reflected in the huge amounts of garbage DNA.But the replication of similar errors is interesting and does suggest a shared catastrophe somehow. Yes I know you think I'm cracked. That's OK, I'm used to it.Atheism and Agnosticism I guess I'm enjoying the Leniency that I've been told I'm given here, since I haven't been booted off this thread or off the whole forum yet, but have been allowed to ramble on about these things unmolested. Thank you I do appreciate it, Powers that Be. I'm sorry Buz had to take the fall though. What I'm saying is similar to what other creationists have said on this forum who take a lot of flak for it, and they say it with a lot more knowledge of the processes than I have.

I guess I wasn't clear, sorry, I meant to emphasize the "how it operates" part of that sentence, meaning it apparently looks different and acts different from functioning DNA in many ways and I haven't seen a diagram that illustrates these differences. There are diagrams showing the way proteins are produced in functioning DNA, a matter of many possible chemical combinations at a given locus or set of loci, but something in that process is missing in the junk DNA, and I have a problem visualizing it.

OK but tell me what it looks like, what it's made of. It really does absolutely nothing? (But pseudogenes do, sort of fitfully as it were?) Are any of the four bases present at all, any chemical combinations/molecular structures formed from the bases at all? What are introns? I've seen them defined as "interruptions." Do they occur anywhere in the functioning DNA sequences? I really want to see a diagram, like the ones that show the 3D arrangement of the double helix with all the spheres, or the ones with the base combinations illustrated.I'm beginning to grasp that Intelligent Design theory argues that Junk DNA is NOT junk but that its function is so far unknown because the whole science is new, and that evolutionists are the ones who regard it as junk, correct? (Do IDers deny the Fall and its effects, seeing what we have as God's perfect creation as is?) I would think YECs like myself would suspect that it could very well be junk as I do, because it's consistent with the view that life is deteriorating since the Fall, devolving not evolving, exhibits entropy etc etc etc.

I was relying on the mere appearance of things, but of course some do not see this implicit perfection in nature. I was saying I think it's "apparent" -- but not all see it. Also the damage I was saying is also "apparent." This would be a good topic for contrasting the Biblical view with evolutionism, maybe for another thread sometime. Although humane motives prevail, the fact is that they are logically inconsistent with the assumptions of evolution, which logically would propose an ethics of selecting the healthy and strong and depriving the sick and weak of the ability to propagate. This was the philosophy that led to Nazism, but it is rarely acknowledged that it is a direct logical conclusion from evolutionism. In fact it was held quite seriously by much of the intelligentsia of the early part of the 20th century, and not only in Germany.Now we of course apply the principle of compassion to these situations, but the very explanation of the problem in evolutionistic terms makes this compassion an imposition upon the situation rather than an organic or logical conclusion based on it. Evolution and the ethics of compassion are in constant tension therefore.