First lol - and greetings,
I was amazed by your smugness and that of the article. For the writer to have read a whole 30 pages! And from that to have found faults in Sanford’s book when he answered many of those faults in later chapters was very humorous. ”Could it be that Sanford twisted everything’ just because he is a Bible thumper? - or so suggested the great Averendo. But he did not even begin to answer Sanford and I doubt many institutions of learning will use this Blog for their answer to Sanford. Though I have noted that many silly net musings on various forums have. I have seen Dawkins use many of the same types of arguments to make the case for evolution as Sanford used to make against it. As for men having preconceived notions - such as your own self - or certainly Averendo, who felt so worked up he had to fire off attacks on a book he had barely started, (and in his reading he certainly was not open minded but was looking for any tiny flaw to pounce upon). Averendo tried to insinuate that Sanford’s right to a religious belief has forever compromised his scientific abilities, when in fact it is obvious that Averendo has his own preconceived religion - of a type - that forever bars him from truly judgingSanford fairly.
The truth is - once I tossed out the Bible I was completely open to evolution - and in fact I was even open to it as a preacher - since one can twist the Bible to fit a symbolical shroud to fit over modern science. Since I personally HAD used the Book of Enoch in my own Bible, using manuscript A - I understood the earth and universe to be a minimum of 10,000,000 years old, with a likely upper limit equal to what geology and astronomy calculates. And even now I was hoping or have been hoping, that a real scientific rebuttal of Sanford would be already on the net - and in fact it was the search for this that brought me here by mere chance.
Having finished Sanford’s book I found Averendo’s pathetic attacks - some filled with personal innuendos - greatly lacking any merit. I still look forward to a SERIOUS rebuttal of Sanford, and not just one build around half facts, dates, and attacks on the merits of religion in general. I found Averendo’s page to be a cartoon. Certainly in my own field of geology such a rebuttal would have been considered a joke.
No doubt you read my sentence: “Just because the Primary Axiom may fail is no reason to suddenly jump into another farfetched scheme.” And you assumed that I completely sided with his thesis. Actually I was speaking as what should have been HIS (Sanford's) point of view and my main point concerned his silly sally into Bibledom. I found many things in Sanford’s work lacking - and have questions I intend to have answered SERIOUSLY. For example his whole thesis for humans revolved around monogamous mating - something that was rather recently introduced by civilization into the world of man, first by the Greeks/Romans (though in name only), then by the ancient German tribes (again name only), and then by the Church (again in name only). The truth is many men, if not most, through out mankind’s long history really were not monogamous - while women generally were forced into polygamy.
Secondly Sanford no where even mentions what civilization is doing to human selection - sadly most scientists always fail to realize the full impact of civilization (as for example believing that humans are incredibly smart, when in fact it is the force-multiplier of civilization that leads to this illusion). Thus, Sanford totally fails to include what the chemical pollution and body burden of toxic substances has on the speed of the break down of modern human DNA. Nor does he go into the full impact of the data noise civilization is creating in human selection. (By the way all this also impacts the animal kingdom as well as the microscopic world.)
If one reads the first half of his book one could almost come away believing in the evolution of bacteria and especially virus’. He nowhere deals with the DNA alteration humans pick up from virus’.
In any event I do hope science does finally quit shying away from the credible assault Sanford made, especially since it is mainly a series of quotes from dyed in the wool evolutionists - some quite recent by the way. I hope they don’t do what men like Dawkins loves to do - just fall into personality attacks and mud slinging. I do tire of science’s paranoia of the stupid Bible!! Certainly geology suffered massively because of this silly paranoia - resisting things like plate tectonics or asteroid created astroblems - simply because they were afraid of the terms ”large change’ or ”catastrophe’, and that because they feared the silly Bible. Always looking in fear behind one is NO WAY TO DRIVE A CAR, or guide science forward. Forget the silly Christians and such like and pursue TRUTH. I advised Dawkins to stop wasting his time trying to argue Christian polemics like a half-educated theologian, and to deal the Bible a deathblow to the jugular by simply using science - as in archaeology - which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Bible is false. Just kill it and move on. But he persists in his silly anti-religious tirades, which in my opinion actually gives religions strength and ammunition to argue with.
So personally I care less if evolution is as science says it is, or is not as Sanford says, or MORE LIKELY is something that neither side has yet discovered. Truth to tell I believe it possible that atomic physics will likely come through to biologist’s rescue - as my daughter works with a professor at CU that has discovered something in plants that totally defies the laws of thermodynamics and has caused a small stir with physicists she knows. Sanford was right about this - nothing in science truly has AXIOMS or should. Everything should be questioned and continually. Had I not be of that mind I would still be a Christian.
Based on the total lack of material or mechanical causation for how tree cells arrange themselves and alter their character - I personally believe there will be discovered a universal substrate - no doubt built of other dimensions that will show that what we call intelligence is really just another force waiting to be discovered. We admit that our particles could be energy in another universe. Perhaps our entropy - information destruction - is an upward evolution in another universe as well, while the entropy in the other universe is upward evolution - ”information creation’ - in ours. Such a condition could appear in waves or in periodic surges. I am still hoping to learn more about what my daughter’s biology professor discovered.
Edited by kartasik, : No reason given.
Edited by kartasik, : No reason given.
Edited by kartasik, : clearing up a point