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Author Topic:   There are easy creationist answers to problems evolutionists pose
mike the wiz
Member
Posts: 4752
From: u.k
Joined: 05-24-2003


Message 1 of 111 (885215)
03-28-2021 8:14 AM


Online, I have known many evolutionists, even some of them for years yet they still don't know some of the basic answers creationists have to the, "problems" they put forward. It indicates floccinaucinihilipilification. (Hope I spelled that right)
I am not so much talking about complicated or difficult matters but rather SIMPLE matters, where there are actually very simple, straight forward solutions to the "problems" evolutionists pose.
And this might sometimes be reflected by the popular atheists such as Attenborough or Dawkins.
You see you may equate us as creationists, with flat-earthers but unlike flat-earthers there are provably easy answers to a lot of the, "problems" you pose.
These, "problems" are repeated ad-nauseam, endlessly, when all it would do to solve them is to read a creationist source FOR BEGINNERS. (example; "where did Cain get his wife?")
For example, such poor arguments as, "why did God create this worm for the human eyeball?" Or, "why did God create this disease?"
In fact disease and defect arise in time, not at creation week. Or do you think God invented covid for humans?
Symbiotic hosts can become extinct for example. When you think about it it doesn't really take much thinking to solve some of the "simple" level problems you pose then endlessly repeat as though there are no answers to them. (mendacious)
The wiring of the retina for example. But it's been answered now for years on end, eye-specialists have said there isn't any wrong wiring of the eye nor any defect caused by the wiring.
Also a lot of the whining from atheists isn't usually scientific but theological because their complaints usually start with, "why would God do thus and so?"
That isn't a scientific motive in asking such questions and reveals your bias. If you were objective and open to the truth you wouldn't reveal your true motive which is to attack God, you would simply and honestly WONDER if there really are answers to why God does things beyond a limited human perspective. After all it doesn't take any brain power to surmise that an omniscient mind might have omniscient reasons a human mind can't grasp.
What better demonstration of this is found in how humans make errors and jump to conclusions when they are plainly in the wrong? This behaviour is ubiqitous and we all do it. You can't tell us humans are full of bias and ineptitude and are fallible on the one hand then tell us your judgement is perfectly objective and righteous on the other.
You bore people with talk of things such as confirmation bias, post-hoc reasoning, memory bias, pareidolia, and all the other human foibles yet when you ask child-level questions about God you think your first thought is going to be accurate and then a flippant dismissal of the issue.
Another one;
"You can't define kind."
MOOT. And you should know that by now. Because not being able to define the original kinds as a classification wouldn't mean it would follow they don't exist. If one type of creature has more genomic or morphological plasticity than another and members of the kind have gone extinct it may not be possible to class them in such a way, in essence the "define kind" argument from evolutionists is just a bit of a red-herring now. "score through this hoop we know you can't score through....hehe, impressed?"
Answer; No.
The kinds arguments is evolutionists being OPPORTUNISTIC. They see there is a legitimate struggle to nail a classification simply because of a lack of data and they use this to pretend that any amount of macro change is therefore justified. But it isn't because there is generally an absence of any macro in the fossil record.
The fact is we can define kind generally by defining them as the creatures God made. As long as there was a polyphyletic special creation then it's tautological they will exist even if we can't class them accurately in the modern world because of a lack of data. But suffice to say all bats would have started out as something, "batlike". So then since we don't make any macro-scale uphill claims such as, "this bat evolved a wing", then why does it matter?
Answer; it doesn't. And all it took was some basic thought.
Next one;
"Geologists back in the day dismissed a flood."
This is the silliest one for me personally. Why? The, "geologists" back then didn't know anything. LOL. It was Berthault in the 1970s that discovered how facies can be laid down by hydraulic action, in flume experiments. It was creation-geologists POST 1970 that discovered a lot of the now-argued evidence for a flood. The geologists back in the day didn't have a clue about any of the models they put out there now such as the B.E.D.S model and it's likely evolutionist geologists themselves don't know the science-arguments for a flood and couldn't tell you what that acronym means.
It's the genetic fallacy.
You forget nobody bothered to study a flood and what evidence it might create if it was way more complicated than the "bath-tub" model of the Victorian age. LOL.
OVERALL CONCLUSION; In their eagerness to spread propaganda about us creationists it would seem evolutionists have never actually read anything we say despite them being the ones that call us ignorant. (think about it, we at least read your position, but you simply dismiss ours and therefore have a poor understanding of us generally speaking.)
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.” — Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You
(1894).
Edited by mike the wiz, : No reason given.

Edited by mike the wiz, : No reason given.


Replies to this message:
 Message 3 by PaulK, posted 03-28-2021 1:37 PM mike the wiz has replied
 Message 4 by AZPaul3, posted 03-28-2021 2:04 PM mike the wiz has replied
 Message 12 by Sarah Bellum, posted 03-29-2021 10:49 AM mike the wiz has not replied
 Message 13 by JonF, posted 03-29-2021 11:17 AM mike the wiz has not replied
 Message 22 by AZPaul3, posted 03-29-2021 2:02 PM mike the wiz has not replied
 Message 25 by Dogmafood, posted 03-29-2021 11:21 PM mike the wiz has not replied
 Message 35 by FLRW, posted 03-30-2021 4:23 PM mike the wiz has not replied
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AdminPhat
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Message 2 of 111 (885217)
03-28-2021 12:27 PM


Thread Copied from Proposed New Topics Forum

  
PaulK
Member
Posts: 17822
Joined: 01-10-2003
Member Rating: 2.3


(2)
Message 3 of 111 (885220)
03-28-2021 1:37 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by mike the wiz
03-28-2021 8:14 AM


Another low-quality post.
The fact that you can answer weak versions of cherry-picked arguments does nothing to help your case. Indeed, it suggests that you lack good answers to more serious arguments.
For instance:
There is a very real problem that Kind boundaries are not identifiable. Linnaean taxonomy shows a single tree of life, not a collection of bushes or shrubs. The evidence used to identify relationships is the same whether it crosses the presumed Kind boundaries are not. If the boundaries are there, why are they not seen?
It is also a real problem that the Flood was rejected by geologists. Flood belief was dominant in that time. The idea that the Flood would have produced results that look like the product of long ages instead is obviously dubious. The very fact that geologists could come up with successful models based on old-Earth ideas, but not on Young Earth Flood geology ideas is a real issue.
Berthault’s work hasn’t exactly done much to change the situation either - unless you are going to assume that the Flood was guided by flumes.
Simply asserting that there is some model that is supposed to explain the data is “easy” but it certainly isn’t a good answer.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by mike the wiz, posted 03-28-2021 8:14 AM mike the wiz has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 5 by mike the wiz, posted 03-28-2021 7:12 PM PaulK has replied

  
AZPaul3
Member
Posts: 8513
From: Phoenix
Joined: 11-06-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


(2)
Message 4 of 111 (885221)
03-28-2021 2:04 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by mike the wiz
03-28-2021 8:14 AM


In their eagerness to spread propaganda about us creationists it would seem evolutionists have never actually read anything we say despite them being the ones that call us ignorant.
Oh good gawd. The historical revisionism is strong with this one. There is nothing in your screed that is new, that is factual, that hasn't already been tossed in the dustbin by reality.
It's been, what, almost 5 generations now and you folk just keep bringing up the same old arguments that were, not just dismissed, but refuted, decades ago as if we'd never seen them before. I know. I was there. As we argue on into my second century I grow weary of the repetition.
Ok, I'm not that old but, Mikie, this crap is. This crap is way old and already dead.
This is a waste of electrons. But, it's hard to ignore an ignorant religious automaton trying to burn the world down.
Except for the opportunity to slap you around insulting you, which is actually quite fun, there is nothing here worth responding to.

Eschew obfuscation. Habituate elucidation.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by mike the wiz, posted 03-28-2021 8:14 AM mike the wiz has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 6 by mike the wiz, posted 03-28-2021 7:27 PM AZPaul3 has not replied
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mike the wiz
Member
Posts: 4752
From: u.k
Joined: 05-24-2003


Message 5 of 111 (885228)
03-28-2021 7:12 PM
Reply to: Message 3 by PaulK
03-28-2021 1:37 PM


PaulK writes:
The fact that you can answer weak versions of cherry-picked arguments does nothing to help your case. Indeed, it suggests that you lack good answers to more serious arguments.
It doesn't suggest that. It suggests you don't know easy answers to the complaints you repeat on boards like this ad-nauseam. That I don't deal with more serious answers because I focus on these simple ones wouldn't be appropriate if the whole point of the topic is that any adult with normal intelligence over many years should know the answers to basic objections, should know and inform themselves of their opponents position.
So the absence of more "serious" arguments not being mentioned here is not a conspicuous absence of evidence it is an expected absence of evidence which means the conclusion that I lack good answers would be an implied argumentum ad ignorantiam because clearly the aim wasn't to deal with the more complex arguments so it doesn't imply what you suggest it does.
Of course I don't expect you to know you are making these mistakes given they require a subtle and acute thinker to spot and you are coarse, crude and personal in your poor standard of debate where you focus on character-assassination instead of a fruitful discussion.
PaulK writes:
Another low-quality post.
"Another" is a question-begged epithet because it ASSERTS there were previously poor posts without proving it, also just barely asserting it is a low quality post then giving poor arguments as to why it is, doesn't prove anything. Is the reader really going to be so dumb they would be tricked into thinking, "another" would prove there were other examples of low quality when you haven't proven so much as one as of yet?
So your cleverest argument here is the use of a word, "another".
Wow, what an Einstein!
Paulk writes:
. Linnaean taxonomy shows a single tree of life, not a collection of bushes or shrubs
You always barely state your case. That is, "poor quality". You state something as though it is true if you state it. I don't accept there is any tree of life, for the reasons I give in my short book, I explained that there. I believe I put my book here at EvC forum, so I guess you haven't read the part about the tree of life.
In fact if this hypothetical tree of life existed then it's roots are missing. The transitionals that would have had to precede the main phyla in the Cambrian would be conspicuously absent because of the Cambrian explosion.
I explained that the prediction for a tree of life is that diversity would precede disparity because it takes a lot of hypothetical evolutionary time to get to the phyla level of change. But what we actually see is that disparity precedes diversity. That's a problem because in evolutionary time the explosion is relatively quick. After all they say something as, "close" as primates, with chimps and humans, would take say 5-10 million years of divergence, so how many millions of years of divergence would it take to get all of the phyla we find in the Cambrian?
So then the tree has to be inferred where it actually is not found, for all of the key elements are conspicuously absent, as expected if there wasn't any evolution-tree to begin with.
PaulK writes:
Berthault’s work hasn’t exactly done much to change the situation either - unless you are going to assume that the Flood was guided by flumes.
This is a naive comment. It's like saying, "unless you assume abiogenesis occurred in an experimental apparatus" if we were to find an example of abiogenesis in the lab.
Seriously?
PaulK writes:
The fact that you can answer weak versions of cherry-picked arguments does nothing to help your case
I can and have answered the more complex arguments here and at other places so the term, "cherry picked" only counts as rhetorical spin by trying to paint me as someone only mentioning the simple problems because he can't deal with the more sophisticated ones.
You tend to IMPLY things about the person FAR TOO MUCH, Paul, most likely because you haven't the intelligence to win in a toe-to-toe debate so you have to fall back on the use of flimsy rhetoric instead.
Your post was about as difficult to deal with as eating cake.
Keep stating false and evil things about the Lord's servant, for your time grows ever shorter, so as they say, "enjoy it while it lasts".

This message is a reply to:
 Message 3 by PaulK, posted 03-28-2021 1:37 PM PaulK has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 10 by PaulK, posted 03-29-2021 2:20 AM mike the wiz has not replied
 Message 54 by Phat, posted 04-10-2021 12:06 PM mike the wiz has not replied

  
mike the wiz
Member
Posts: 4752
From: u.k
Joined: 05-24-2003


Message 6 of 111 (885229)
03-28-2021 7:27 PM
Reply to: Message 4 by AZPaul3
03-28-2021 2:04 PM


AZPaul writes:
Oh good gawd. The historical revisionism is strong with this one. There is nothing in your screed that is new, that is factual, that hasn't already been tossed in the dustbin by reality.
It's been, what, almost 5 generations now and you folk just keep bringing up the same old arguments that were, not just dismissed, but refuted, decades ago as if we'd never seen them before. I know. I was there. As we argue on into my second century I grow weary of the repetition.
At least present a case. I am going from things I have actually heard from people. You are just saying things about creationists that are only true from your own TWISTED and highly limited thinking.
So what. So you get a kick out of insulting people when you can't win against them in debate because it makes you feel big?
"Then perhaps you should have made me a mechanic, so I could work on little tin gods like you." - Dr McCoy - Star Trek.
So if you're going to insult, at least come up with an impressive, brainy insult.
AZPaul writes:
Ok, I'm not that old but, Mikie, this crap is. This crap is way old and already dead.
This is a waste of electrons. But, it's hard to ignore an ignorant religious automaton trying to burn the world down.
No this is, "crap", and I will be frank, I don't even know what you're on about or how this addresses anything I have said.
AZPaul writes:
Except for the opportunity to slap you around insulting you, which is actually quite fun, there is nothing here worth responding to.
Well you admit you have evil motives then don't you. You admit all you can offer is insults and you derive fun from them. And we both know the real reason you won't respond is because you can't respond because I am correct in the opening message, these are oft touted PRATTS repeated even by "knowledgeable" evolutionists even though there are basic answers to the silly "problems" they pose.
Like I said to the other Paul, enjoy your sin, WHILE IT LASTS.
The joy I get is seeing that none of you have any answers. When you do insult and admit it like this you might as well hang a sign saying, "WE CAN'T WIN AGAINST YOU IN A TOE TO TOE DEBATE SO WE'RE GOING TO PROVE YOU ARE RIGHT BY ACTING DISGRACEFULLY."
In other words, you confirm my faith more and more in that you behave just like the bible says you will.
I mean what do you think would impress me, a bunch of insults a three year old can make or some powerful arguments for evolution?
But then there aren't any such powerful arguments for evolution which is why you rely and just ASSERTING things pretty much 100%.
Gee, that's really up there with Einstein, SAYING THINGS at me.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4 by AZPaul3, posted 03-28-2021 2:04 PM AZPaul3 has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 17 by AdminPhat, posted 03-29-2021 1:21 PM mike the wiz has not replied

  
mike the wiz
Member
Posts: 4752
From: u.k
Joined: 05-24-2003


Message 7 of 111 (885230)
03-28-2021 7:34 PM


There really should be a "report" button for message 4 like on EFF. It was an all out personal attack of the crudest type where someone just offers false insults and admits they are getting joy from the insults.
And you guys wonder why creationists don't come here?
Is the admin going to admit message 4 shouldn't be allowed or do the admin have no moral standards whatsoever?

  
mike the wiz
Member
Posts: 4752
From: u.k
Joined: 05-24-2003


Message 8 of 111 (885231)
03-28-2021 7:40 PM


I have reported message 4 to adminphat in the hopes that he might be more objective since he isn't an anti-theist admin.
I think if there are any more personal attacks from the Pauls, a good standard would be to ban them for 14 days. Especially AZPaul.
PaulK is slightly more subtle in his character-assassination technique but AZPaul is always a crude person generally.
I suspect most posters are just likely to be trolls that have been given a free pass to just troll any creationist that stops by.

Replies to this message:
 Message 29 by Phat, posted 03-30-2021 10:47 AM mike the wiz has not replied

  
mike the wiz
Member
Posts: 4752
From: u.k
Joined: 05-24-2003


Message 9 of 111 (885232)
03-28-2021 7:48 PM


PaulK writes:
The very fact that geologists could come up with successful models based on old-Earth ideas, but not on Young Earth Flood geology ideas is a real issue.
Generally I don't see how old-earth "uniformity" has born out at all. They constantly need to find new answers.
It's catastrophe that answers for a lot of things these days, and on a big scale. There is so much evidence that fits with the flood scenario that basically evolutionists behave ridiculously when they pretend it doesn't, they basically argue contradiction by saying local catastrophe would create catastrophic signal but a larger catastrophe wouldn't.
Especially so when sediment-volume would be far more explainable in terms of a flood, for the types of evidence found in modern times they didn't know about back then such as massive evidence of erosional remnants and inselburgs. Planations of a massive scale, explainable as the abative phase of the flood.
The fact is what I said was correct, none of this was studied back in Darwin's time and a lot of the new evidence is explained well by the flood but poorly with slow incremental eons.
EXHIBIT A;
link writes:
Using uniformitarian assumptions—to defeat long ages
The oceans present us with another way of ‘dating’, because we can measure the rates of various processes with respect to the oceans. And using the long-ager’s own belief system of uniformitarianism, we get ‘maximum ages’ that do not square with the secular long-age paradigm. They do not, however, present any problem for the biblical timeline of history. Thus, uniformitarianism is self-refuting with respect to the scientific evidence we have available.
Ocean salt
The salinity of our oceans can give us a ‘clock’ of sorts, because we are able to estimate the amount of salt entering our oceans as well as the amount that leaves. It turns out that much more is entering than leaving, so the oceans are getting saltier over time. So let’s use this as a uniformitarian ‘clock’ by assuming the processes have stayed much the same. Starting with fresh water, how long would it take for the oceans to become as salty as they are?
A study by creation scientists Steve Austin and Russell Humphreys, using the most conservative numbers available, gave an absolute upper limit (not actual age!), of 62 million years.1 While this may seem like a long time, it is actually far too low a number to accommodate the secular age for the ocean of 3.8 billion years.2 And note that the oceans would have started out with some salt in them, plus a stupendous amount of salt and other minerals would have been added during the Flood from erosion and volcanism
Just a moment...
and;
link writes:
We can also measure the rate at which nickel enters and leaves Earth’s oceans. If there is too much nickel dissolved in ocean water, it becomes toxic. According to a UK environmental health guideline, concentrations higher than 30 parts per billion are toxic for marine life—yet that concentration would have already been reached in just 1,076,000 years at current rates of input!
However, we also know that mineral ‘nodules’ containing nickel form on the sea floor, so could this explain the low level of nickel for the long-ager? Simply, no—even if all the nickel entering the ocean were being deposited in these nodules, based upon current estimates it would only take 168,000 years to accumulate all the nickel currently found in the nodules. Just as for salt, nickel is also entering our oceans far too quickly for the old-earth timeline of history.4
and;
link writes:
We observe the accumulation of sediment on the ocean floor coming from the erosion of our continents. In some places, like river mouths, our coastlines are gradually growing as the process of erosion dumps sediment from the land into the seas; at the same time, canyons and gorges on land are growing deeper by these same erosional processes. Everything is getting closer to sea level, with the faster changes happening at the highest elevations and steepest areas.
On average, the depth of sediment on the ocean floor is less than 400 metres (about 1,300 feet), with some areas of the ocean floor having no mud at all. We would not expect to find this if the oceans were extremely old. We can also estimate the maximum rate at which subduction (one crustal plate gradually being thrust under another) could be pulling sediment back into the crust. Assuming that this rate has always been the same (again, uniformitarianism against itself), it is far too slow to account for this result; not enough seafloor mud is getting eliminated by this process. In fact, at the present rate, all the sediment would have been accumulated in under 12 million years
So I don't believe evolutionists are willing to do an honest appraisal of eons, they just REPEAT the dating-claims and don't look at exacting extrapolations and rates that don't favour eons.
The fact is more and more they argue punctuated catastrophism as some sort of mixture of uniformity and neo-catastrophism.
Conclusion; the fact is you had to be born post 1880 to know a lot of this stuff and some of the evidence for a flood recently found is only recently found because they dismissed the idea of a flood all those years ago.
There are some great examples of uniformity being overturned by new research in petrology for example, where evolutionists argue outdated old canards.
Edited by mike the wiz, : No reason given.

Edited by mike the wiz, : No reason given.


Replies to this message:
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 Message 14 by JonF, posted 03-29-2021 11:25 AM mike the wiz has not replied
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PaulK
Member
Posts: 17822
Joined: 01-10-2003
Member Rating: 2.3


(1)
Message 10 of 111 (885233)
03-29-2021 2:20 AM
Reply to: Message 5 by mike the wiz
03-28-2021 7:12 PM


quote:
It doesn't suggest that.
Then why don’t you pick better arguments - or at least better forms of the arguments you do pick?
quote:
It suggests you don't know easy answers to the complaints you repeat on boards like this ad-nauseam.
The answers you choose to give are clearly limited by your knowledge, not mine.
quote:
o the absence of more "serious" arguments not being mentioned here is not a conspicuous absence of evidence it is an expected absence of evidence which means the conclusion that I lack good answers would be an implied argumentum ad ignorantiam because clearly the aim wasn't to deal with the more complex arguments so it doesn't imply what you suggest it does.
So the aim was not to demonstrate that you really had easy answers to even the sorts of objections typically found here.
quote:
Of course I don't expect you to know you are making these mistakes given they require a subtle and acute thinker to spot and you are coarse, crude and personal in your poor standard of debate where you focus on character-assassination instead of a fruitful discussion.
Of course you have to resort to this pretence of superiority because you can’t handle the intellectual level of the debate.
We’ll skip over your foolishness where you try to pretend that my initial comment was an argument.
quote:
You always barely state your case. That is, "poor quality". You state something as though it is true if you state it. I don't accept there is any tree of life, for the reasons I give in my short book, I explained that there. I believe I put my book here at EvC forum, so I guess you haven't read the part about the tree of life.
I would have thought that someone who claims to be as well informed as you would be aware of Linnaean taxonomy. Whether you accept the existence of a single tree of life is irrelevant - indeed my comment clearly implies that creationists do not. The point is taxonomic classification, and its failure to find clear indications of distinct Kinds.
quote:
I explained that the prediction for a tree of life is that diversity would precede disparity because it takes a lot of hypothetical evolutionary time to get to the phyla level of change. But what we actually see is that disparity precedes diversity. That's a problem because in evolutionary time the explosion is relatively quick. After all they say something as, "close" as primates, with chimps and humans, would take say 5-10 million years of divergence, so how many millions of years of divergence would it take to get all of the phyla we find in the Cambrian?
Let us note that this fails to address the point. However it is also based on a major misconception. The taxonomic classifications are based on modern life. The differences between phyla are based on the divergence that has accumulated since the original split. We should expect the early branches to be early - that should be obvious.
quote:
This is a naive comment. It's like saying, "unless you assume abiogenesis occurred in an experimental apparatus" if we were to find an example of abiogenesis in the lab.
Seriously?
Well, no. It’s like saying that to model conditions you have to make the effort to simulate conditions. The fact that the flumes are straight narrow channels makes them a poor simulation of a flood.
quote:
I can and have answered the more complex arguments here and at other places so the term, "cherry picked" only counts as rhetorical spin by trying to paint me as someone only mentioning the simple problems because he can't deal with the more sophisticated ones.
The fact that you are dealing with very weak forms of the arguments you do address (as well as your other failures) suggests that you don’t even have good answers to those.
quote:
You tend to IMPLY things about the person FAR TOO MUCH, Paul, most likely because you haven't the intelligence to win in a toe-to-toe debate so you have to fall back on the use of flimsy rhetoric instead.
One can only imagine how you’d react if I used similar rhetoric.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 5 by mike the wiz, posted 03-28-2021 7:12 PM mike the wiz has not replied

Replies to this message:
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PaulK
Member
Posts: 17822
Joined: 01-10-2003
Member Rating: 2.3


(2)
Message 11 of 111 (885234)
03-29-2021 2:59 AM
Reply to: Message 9 by mike the wiz
03-28-2021 7:48 PM


quote:
Generally I don't see how old-earth "uniformity" has born out at all. They constantly need to find new answers.
Which is a characteristic of science.
quote:
It's catastrophe that answers for a lot of things these days, and on a big scale. There is so much evidence that fits with the flood scenario that basically evolutionists behave ridiculously when they pretend it doesn't, they basically argue contradiction by saying local catastrophe would create catastrophic signal but a larger catastrophe wouldn't.
Perhaps you would like to produce an actual example of someone making that claim. So far as I can see the issue is that there is no catastrophic signature that would match the Flood.
quote:
Especially so when sediment-volume would be far more explainable in terms of a flood, for the types of evidence found in modern times they didn't know about back then such as massive evidence of erosional remnants and inselburgs. Planations of a massive scale, explainable as the abative phase of the flood.
I’ll note that this falls far short of making a case for one single catastrophe explaining these examples.
quote:
The fact is what I said was correct, none of this was studied back in Darwin's time and a lot of the new evidence is explained well by the flood but poorly with slow incremental eons
I’ll just note that your salt argument is uniformitarian, assuming that the estimated gains and losses remain constant - and are accurately accounted for. A Christian answers the paper here pointing out that there is no evidence that the total amount of salt in the oceans is increasing, he goes on to point out that large amounts of salt have been removed from the seas, as shown by halite deposits.
The nickel argument seems little better. There doesn’t seem to be much analysis of what happens to the nickel in seawater - it’s assumed that it either remains in the water or is accumulated in nodules. If we did not have solid evidence of long ages it might work - but we do.
And then we have the amateur sedimentation argument. The fact that it ignores uplift - even uplift occurring today - is a warning sign. As is the fact that it relies on strawman uniformitarianism (a view which seems to be followed only by Young Earth Creationists).
quote:
So I don't believe evolutionists are willing to do an honest appraisal of eons, they just REPEAT the dating-claims and don't look at exacting extrapolations and rates that don't favour eons.
An honest assessment isn’t based on rejecting solid arguments for doubtful ones.
quote:
The fact is more and more they argue punctuated catastrophism as some sort of mixture of uniformity and neo-catastrophism.
Geologists are quite willing to accept catastrophes when the evidence supports it. That’s a strength, not a weakness.
quote:
Conclusion; the fact is you had to be born post 1880 to know a lot of this stuff and some of the evidence for a flood recently found is only recently found because they dismissed the idea of a flood all those years ago.
And yet none of your arguments makes any significant case for the Flood. Even considered alone - the wider context matters and is still a major issue.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 9 by mike the wiz, posted 03-28-2021 7:48 PM mike the wiz has not replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 595 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


(2)
Message 12 of 111 (885236)
03-29-2021 10:49 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by mike the wiz
03-28-2021 8:14 AM


The scientific evidence for evolution is a fascinating topic, from Darwin and others' researches in the 19th century to 21st century discoveries. Here's a brief summary:
What is evolution in the first place? When an animal such as a horse, whale, dog, chicken, shark or beetle is born (or hatched, as the case may be) it becomes a member of one more generation in a long sequence of generations reaching back into the far distant past. What did those ancestors of long-ago generations look like? How are the different living things you see around you related?
Take the example of the horse or whale or other mammal. The first fossil evidence of mammals is from the Triassic Period, when the reptiles still ruled. The early mammals were small (often described by paleontologists as "shrew-like" or "mouse-like" animals) and certainly far different from the horses, whales, elephants and other mammals we see today. So we have evolutionary change over many generations. The most important evidence for evolution is the simplest: go from point A, an ancestor, to point B, a creature living today of much different form than that ancestor.
What do Creationists think happened to get from point A to point B? Millions and millions of miracles, over millions and millions of years, creating new forms of life in the precise order that matches the fossil record and the DNA evolutionary tree? Why weren't whales created at the same time as fish? Surely if they were created ex nihilo, it would be strange to create all those land mammals first, then create the forms with vestigial limbs, then finally the fully aquatic forms . . . exactly in the order of their evolution.
There is more evidence for evolution in the simple fact that we see it happening all the time, all around us. It seems unlikely that God would use miracles to create new species in the distant past, but nowadays allow species to evolve naturally, not bothering with miracles anymore. For examples, we have:
- A new species of Buffalo grass evolved that can tolerate soil contaminated with mine tailings.
(go to page 2 of http://education.nationalgeographic.com/...opedia/speciation)
- The worm Nereis acuminata (JSTOR: Access Check)
- Madeira island house mice Speciation: more evidence ignored by intelligent design | Nondiscovery Blog
and Are new species still evolving? › Ask an Expert (ABC Science))
- A flower called the "American goatsbeard" (Evolution: Watching Speciation Occur | Observations - Scientific American Blog Network)
Do a web search on "examples of observed speciation" to find more examples, if you like.
Then there is the distribution of life forms on Earth. Of course, one would expect polar bears and penguins in cold climates, camels and cacti in hot climates. But why do we find penguins only in Antarctica and other regions in the southern hemisphere, but not in the north? Why should there be no camels in the deserts of North America? Alfred Russell Wallace typically gets second billing to Darwin, because of the fame of Origin of Species, but he is justly famous in his own right. Among other things, he studied the geographic ranges that species inhabited. The Creationist idea that different species were created especially for particular climates and environments was shown to be incorrect when Wallace observed that mountains and rivers marked the boundaries of the ranges of many species. He discovered that there were regions that were similar, but inhabited by very different animals.
Then there are the "evolutionary leftovers" that indicate the living creatures we see around us weren't created totally new, but instead bear evidence of change from earlier forms. The "panda's thumb" is a popular example. Notice that these are NOT imperfections (the argument with Creationists - if any - who believe that all of the created life forms are without blemish is a different argument) but traces of ancestry remaining in the body of the organism. The most glaring example, of course, is the eyes of blind cave fish. Why would they have been "created" by God with vestigial eyes? There are many other examples: the laryngeal nerve, the appendix, whale hip bones and vestigial leg bones, goose bumps and human body hair, kiwi bird vestigial wings, vestigial crab tails, vestigial koala caruncles, etc.
Then we have evidence from DNA. Chromosome #2 in humans is the most famous example: fused from two chromosomes that are separate in chimpanzee DNA, showing a common ancestor of humans and chimps.
There are other more subtle DNA traces showing common ancestry. Some of our genetic material is "pseudo-genes," genes that no longer code for a protein because of a mutation, and so are "inactive" bits of the DNA code. Consider DNA as instructions for assembling complex machines, because that's what DNA is: instructions for the chemical reactions of a developing organism. If two similar machines have similar instruction manuals, then they might have just got nearly the same wording because the machines have similar functions. But suppose the instruction manuals have the same typographical or grammar errors? Then we would expect the manuals to come from a common source. In the analogy, this would represent a common ancestor in the case of living creatures. A concrete example is the gene for synthesizing vitamin C. We need to consume vitamin C because our gene is inactive. Mapping such genes shows the common descent of humans and other primates, but demonstrates that other mammals (the guinea pig is one example) are further away on the evolutionary tree. The same pseudogene is present in humans and primates, but the guinea pig has a different pseudogene. "Intelligent Design" might argue for similarities in the active DNA code between humans and chimps, and dissimilarities between human and guinea pigs, but the inactive part of the DNA indicates the branching of the evolutionary tree.
More DNA evidence is provided by endogenous retroviruses:
quote:
Endogenous retroviruses are the remnant DNA of a past viral infection. Retroviruses (like the AIDS virus or HTLV1, which causes a form of leukemia) make a copy of their own viral DNA and insert it into their host's DNA. This is how they take over the cellular machinery of a cell and use it to manufacture new copies of the virus.
Sometimes, the cell that gets infected by such a virus is an immature egg cell in the ovary of a female animal. Such cells can be stored in a state of suspended animation or dormancy for as much as 50 years before they complete meiosis and become mature egg cells ready to be fertilized. Because they are dormant, gene expression is suppressed and the infection cannot take over the cell and kill it. If that egg later matures and is fertilized, the newborn organism will have that endogenous retrovirus in every one of its cells, and so will all of its descendants.
Every viral infection is unique. The complete genome of an animal is so huge, and the insertion point of a virus’s DNA is so random that it is statistically impossible for any two individuals to have the same exact endogenous retrovirus in the same exact spot on the genome unless they both inherited it from a common ancestor who had the original infection. And the infection of a germ cell is so rare that ERVs make up only somewhere between 1% and 8% of the entire human genome.
If two humans have the same identical ERV, it is proof that they are descended from a common ancestor. And if two different species have the identical ERV, it is proof that they too are descended from a common ancestor. In humans, there are about 30,000 different ERVS embedded in each person's DNA. Except for those later duplicated by a duplication mutation, all of them record unique infections of a single ancestral individual. Now here is where it gets really interesting.
There are at least seven different known instances of shared ERVs between chimps and humans... i.e. ERVs which are the identical viral DNA inserted into the identical spot of the genome. 100% of all chimps and 100% of all humans have these same ERVs. This is only possible if 100% of all chimps and all humans are descended from the single individual that had these original infections.
They are proof that humans and chimps share a common ancestor.
In a 2000 paper published in the journal Gene researchers identified ERVS shared by different primates and used them to assemble a family tree of monkeys apes and humans.
Reference: Lebedev, Y. B., Belonovitch, O. S., Zybrova, N. V, Khil, P. P., Kurdyukov, S. G., Vinogradova, T. V., Hunsmann, G., and Sverdlov, E. D. (2000) "Differences in HERV-K LTR insertions in orthologous loci of humans and great apes." Gene 247: 265-277.
Human Evolution: Endogenous Retroviruses prove that humans and chimps share a common ancestor.
Even at the level of single-celled life, there is interesting DNA evidence. Cellular structures such as mitochondria or chloroplasts have their own DNA, distinct from the DNA found in the cell nucleus. This is evidence for the evolution of the first single-celled life, cells with no nucleus or organelles, into more complex forms. Chloroplast DNA, for example, is evidence of a photosynthetic cyanobacterium that was engulfed by an early eukaryotic cell to form a larger symbiotic organism that could photosynthesize.
Then, of course, there are other interesting facts about the genetic material of living organisms, such as the chromosome count. If life were designed from some Divine blueprint, we would expect the more complex organisms to have more DNA and therefore more chromosomes. And Man, of course, at the top of the heap, according to Genesis, and made in God's image, should have the most: toolmaking skills, memory, brain, long life, the immortal soul, and, of course, a body larger and more complex than almost all of the millions of other organisms on the planet. For some organisms, this pattern does indeed hold. Myrmecia pilosula, an ant species, has only one pair of chromosomes and the individual workers, being haploid, have only one chromosome (not even a pair!) each. Small creature, small amount of genetic information. But when we look at even smaller creatures, we find, to our surprise, examples like Amoeba proteus, a microbe with more than 500 chromosomes! And so it goes. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs, one less than chimpanzees (see the example of chromosome #2 above) and a lot less than Ophioglossum reticulatum, whose 630 chromosome pairs make this lowly fern the reigning champion.
Even for structures of living organisms that don't fossilize well, such as the heart or the eye, we can see the pathways of evolutionary change in the organisms that live to day. This is not to say we, with our complex four-chambered heart, are evolved from some modern species of amphibian or fish alive today, of course. Living species are all leaves on the evolutionary tree, with the branches down below showing where different forms of life diverged. But modern forms of reptile, amphibian, fish and others can show us the path evolution took along those branches.
The mammalian four chamber heart is slightly different from the reptilian three-and-a-half chamber heart, which is different from the amphibian three chamber heart, which is different from the lungfish heart, which is different from the agnathan two chamber heart, which is different from the paired contractile aorta of the amphioxis, which is different from the single contractile aorta of the hemichordates. Then there is the earthworm who does not use an actual heart; it has one or more small muscular areas capable of contracting and pushing the blood and then reabsorbing it as it filters back.
Finally, consider the timeline of life on Earth. The simplest living things, the primitive unicellular organisms of billions of years ago, took the longest to develop! Why would that be? If a supernatural force were involved, why would it take so many hundreds of millions of years to develop the earliest single-celled life forms, while far more complex organisms, like Archaeopteryx, Australopithecus, Rhynia gwynne-vaughanii, Miohippus, Ichthyostega, Hylonomus, or cynodonts were "created" in the blink (on the geological time scale) of an eye? Seen as a natural process, however, the timeline of change is easy to understand: it takes a long time for nonliving chemicals to develop into living organisms, and it takes a long time for single-celled organisms to make the great leap to combine into multicellular life, if there is no supernatural intervention prodding them along.
Is the Origin of Species miraculous? In the sense that the birth of a child is miraculous, yes. Complex and marvelous, it is true, but also natural, following natural principles. "Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee."

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by mike the wiz, posted 03-28-2021 8:14 AM mike the wiz has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 21 by Tanypteryx, posted 03-29-2021 1:39 PM Sarah Bellum has replied

  
JonF
Member (Idle past 167 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 13 of 111 (885237)
03-29-2021 11:17 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by mike the wiz
03-28-2021 8:14 AM


Berthault wasn't near first in anything.
Flume experiments on the production of stratification and cross-stratification | Journal of Sedimentary Research | GeoScienceWorld
Flume experiments have no relationship to a fludde. Can you figure out why?
ABE Paulk gave it away.
Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by mike the wiz, posted 03-28-2021 8:14 AM mike the wiz has not replied

  
JonF
Member (Idle past 167 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 14 of 111 (885238)
03-29-2021 11:25 AM
Reply to: Message 9 by mike the wiz
03-28-2021 7:48 PM


Generally I don't see how old-earth "uniformity" has born out at all. They constantly need to find new answers.
List six phenomena for which mainstream geology has been forced to find four or more new answers.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 9 by mike the wiz, posted 03-28-2021 7:48 PM mike the wiz has not replied

  
AdminPhat
Inactive Member


Message 15 of 111 (885239)
03-29-2021 1:15 PM
Reply to: Message 4 by AZPaul3
03-28-2021 2:04 PM


Moderator Request
It has been requested that I intervene and moderate this thread.
Lets examine this argument between the Wiz Kid and AZPaul3.
AZPaul3 writes:
k, I'm not that old but, Mikie, this crap is. This crap is way old and already dead.
This is a waste of electrons. But, it's hard to ignore an ignorant religious automaton trying to burn the world down.
Except for the opportunity to slap you around insulting you, which is actually quite fun, there is nothing here worth responding to.
Then why did you respond? If you choose to engage in conversation with MTW, take the time to address his argument, even if you have done it for thirty years. Otherwise don't bother posting in his thread.

  • Please stay on topic for a thread. Open a new thread for new topics.
  • Points should be supported with evidence and reasoned argumentation.
  • The sincerely held beliefs of other members deserve your respect. Please keep discussion civil. Argue the position, not the person.

  • This message is a reply to:
     Message 4 by AZPaul3, posted 03-28-2021 2:04 PM AZPaul3 has not replied

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