God's Place In Evolution

Taq writes:Just as a friendly piece of advice, you need to learn the difference between a well reasoned and logical argument and an assertion. It is not enough to say that an argument is logical and based on reason. You need to actually show the logic and reasoning.For an argument to work people have to agree with the premises. If the premises are under dispute then the argument stops there. Also, the premises have to lead to theconclusion, not be an exact copy of the conclusion. For example, if one of your premises is"If we assume there is a creator . . ." and you are trying to conclude "Therefore, there is acreator" your argument is obviously circular.For this thread in particular, one of the premises seems to be that humans can not invent language without someone first teaching them a language. This premise is under dispute. You must show that humans can not invent a language of their own, otherwise yourargument has failed.

Coyote writes:OK, here's one for you.The global flood, which biblical scholars place ca. 4,350 years ago, has been shown by science to not have happened.It is so easy to disprove the Genesis flood story that even my own archaeological research has done so.Does this give you any doubts, or do you just ignore all of this evidence?

Dr Adequate writes:The Bible says two of every kind (seven of clean kinds).Now the meaning of kind is not explained, true, but it is illustrated.The word "kind" ( מין ) as used in Genesis is also used in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, where the Bible refers to various kinds of black kites, ravens, hawks, herons, "great lizards" (distinct from the gecko, the monitor lizard, the wall lizard, the skink and the chameleon), locusts, bald locusts, beetles, grasshoppers, tortoises and vultures.So, for example, we know that ravens cannot constitute a "kind", since there are distinct "kinds" of ravens.This suggests that "kind" actually slices the animal kingdom fairly thin, since ravens are various species within the genus Corvus.However, this is by-the-by. As I pointed out in my previous post on this subject, kinds can be as big as you like and the species within them would still show a genetic bottleneck. See my previous post on this subject. Why not? That's a complete non sequitur.Would you listen to an attorney who tried that sort of argument in a paternity case? Or in a murder case? "Yes, DNA analysis apparently shows that the skin found under the victim's fingernails came from my client --- but we don't know enough about genes and life to produce even a single cell, so we shouldn't consider our current understanding of DNA as proof".The things we can't do don't even tend to discredit the things that we do know. And, I might add, it isn't lack of knowledge of life or DNA that stops us from building a cell from scratch, it's lack of technology. You can know all about a thing and lack the technology to make one. Would you say that we don't understand why stars shine until we
can make a star?To look at it another way --- suppose scientists did make a cell from scratch.
Suppose they do it tomorrow. Would you then feel obliged to say: "Oh well then, geneticists must be right about the non-occurrence of the Flood"? Or would you be the first to say that the question of whether scientists can make cells and the question of whether the Flood occurred are completely unrelated?