Simple evidence for ID

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

I thought that organic material (materials that come from plants or animals) help soil develop, and help to protect it from erosion. Is it not the case that the death and decay of plants and animals helps to add organic material to the soil, which in turn helps to support new organisms?How did this occur pre-fall?

Very convenient.Anything that disproves what you believe then you just don't count it.Excellent.Of course, lions and tigers and bears (Oh My!)were vegetarians before the Fall weren't they? Brian.

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.

Brian - You have made me think...what about araneomorph species such as Florinda coccinea(Hentz), Ixeuticus martius(Simon)and others that consuming their own eggs?

They wouldn't have consumed their own eggs before the Fall, they lived on veggie burgers and lentils.Either that or they don't count! To be fair though, I havent met many Christians who believe this particular idea, it isn't a widely held belief.Brian.

Oh my, that's quite amusing! I guess those poor Africans who die of starvation and disease just don't cut the mustard when it comes to being religious! I guess AIDS is a punishment from God after all! Sorry, let's move on... Well, I really HATE to add grist to your mill, but you're quite right. Genomes are increasingly filling up with garbage (google repetitive elements). But there is a good Darwinian explanation for that. And it doesn't seem to hurt us too much.Mick

Doesn't this also mean that everthing must have been pre-ordinated and thus lacking any real free will? Because otherwise - what's to stop an accidental death of an animal or an insect?

The whole suggestion is utterly flawed.I'm no scientist, but i'm sure there are many insects that only live for a very short period of time.You can bet there will be some sort of hilarious excuse.You can't make this stuff up. edited to add, if there was no death before the Fall, how would Adam and Eve understand what Charlton Heston was talking about when he threatened them?This message has been edited by Brian, 05-18-2005 04:56 PM

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

Hi Faith, unfortunately junk DNA doesn't represent that at all. It is largely composed of identical repetitive units that don't represent anything.Mick

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?

Hi Faith,I will only talk about repetitive elements ("junk dna") in mammals here, because that is all I know about. But I think the same principles apply to all eukaryotes (species with nuclei).In mammals there are two types of repetitive elements, SINES and LINES. SINES are "short interspersed elements" and LINES are "long interspersed elements". SINES are stretches of DNA around 300 nucleotide "letters" long, and LINES are stretches of DNA around 5-10,000 nucleotide "letters" long. Just to give you an idea of how small these elements are, the human genome is around 3 billion nucleotides long.When a normal gene gets converted into a protein, it first has to be transcribed. This process involves copying each nucleotide of the gene onto a single stranded RNA. The RNA sequence is the same as the DNA sequence, but it is loose, a separate molecule, and it can leave the nucleus of the cell and travel to the protein manufacturing areas outside. The genes themselves are always trapped inside the nucleus.There are some viruses that carry out this process in reverse. They exist as separate RNA molecules and they "reverse-transcribe" themselves into the genome itself. This just means that they insert copies of themselves into the nucleus. It's exactly the same process as turning a gene into a protein, but in reverse. In order to do so, they use an enzyme called "reverse transcriptase" which carries out the copying. The nucleotide sequence for this enzyme is part of the viral RNA molecule.It appears that some viral sequences have got caught in a loop inside the nucleus. During infection, they reverse-transcribed themselves into the nucleus long ago. Now, they occasionally transcribe themselves from DNA into RNA, but as soon as the process is completed, reverse transcription takes place, and a new copy of their nucleotide sequence is immediately inserted randomly back into the genome. These are the LINEs. They are of viral origin but are not infectious, because they are never able to leave the nucleus. LINEs consist of a bunch of ancient viral DNA, along with a copy of the reverse transcriptase enzyme.SINEs are little chunks of viral DNA that do not have a copy of the reverse transcriptase enzyme. They usually lie right next to a LINE, and when the LINE replicates itself, the SINE gets replicated along with it.SINES and LINES, together, make up about 35% of the human genome. This means that around one billion of your nucleotides, in every single cell, consists of millions of copies of LINEs and SINEs.This "junk DNA" does indeed have a function - all it does it replicate itself and insert copies of itself back into the genome.But it doesn't have a biological function in the cell that is useful for the animal "carrier". And it doesn't contain any old remnant genes. All it contains is millions of copies of old degraded viral DNA that all look more or less identical to each other. These can sometimes cause medical problems, for example if a LINE inserts itself smack in the middle of an important functional gene. This kind of random event is associated with heart disease and developmental abnormalities during pregnancy (and probably lots of other things).Some people consider "pseudogenes" to be junk DNA as well. These are old copies of genes that were randomly duplicated during cell division. They no longer serve any function in the cell, so just degrade over time to the point where they are barely recongisable. The number of pseudogenes is much lower than the number of SINEs and LINEs.Hope this helps!Mick