Define "Kind"

Faith There are even found on the continent of Antartica both plant and meat eating dinosaur fossils. One must ask how this continent was able to support such animals since it is obvious that the plant eaters must also consume plants and there is an {iaverage[/i] thickness of ice of 7000 feet.How did plant life grow at the extreme cold of Antarctic's climate to support such massive creatures as these?So please explain this. From the time of Noah until now the Antarctic continent had to lay down an average thickness of ice nearly 1.5 miles thick. We find fossils of dinosaurs there of both plant eating and meat eating variety, yet after the flood none of them returned to this land to live. In fact,there are no dinosaurs alive today,so what happened to the ones that Noah brought aboard?This message has been edited by sidelined, Sat, 2006-03-04 12:35 AM

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I don't understand your question. Why should there be a problem for the idea of the flood in any of that?

Faith Antarctica was a lush plant producing supplier of food to dinosaurs. How can this have occured when it is in the location it is with an ice covering of 1.5 miles? After the flood where would the ice have come from since after a year beneath the ocean it would have melted away? Oops, it cannot have melted away since it was not ice before the flood because the fossils there indicate that the land was rich in plant material to support plant eating dinosaurs.
But if there were no ice after the flood where did all the ice today come from?
Also, it is weird to think of how plant life could manage to eek out an existence enough to supply large warm blooded animals with a food supply if 5 months of the year there were not enough sunlight to drive photosynthesis.Do you begin to see the difficulties here? These are not the only ones.This message has been edited by sidelined, Sat, 2006-03-04 02:07 AM

Faith,This is getting OT, I've proposed a new thread here.Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

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If it were really just a matter of not being able to engage with the premises we could agree at least on that much, but the evos continue to berate us for our inability to define the Kinds better than the Bible does.

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How would it be, Faith, if I said that I wanted to join a baseball team that played by the official rulebook, but I insisted playing with a softball instead of a regulation baseball?Would you agree that we wouldn't be playing by the official rules of baseball anymore?Or, what if said that I wanted to play official rules football, but I insisted that when MY team came sort of in the general vicinity of the end zone, it would count as a touchdown?Would you agree that we wouldn't be playing by official football rules anymore?

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There's Schraf up there now as usual demanding that I submit to her criteria. Ho hum. No discussion is possible that way.

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You are demanding that your ideas be entertained by science as scientifically valid.Why should they be unless you are willing to play by the same rules as everybody else?I agree that no discussion is possible, but that is only because Creationists seeking scientific validation of their ideas refuse to submit them to the rigors of scientific investigation.Sorry, but you are asking for special treatment.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-04-2006 07:08 AM

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The MEANING is the point, not the words.

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So, you arent't a literalist at all.Can "kind" mean "species" or maybe "genus" or "order"?This message has been edited by schrafinator, 03-04-2006 07:10 AM

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the similarities in the genomes do not prove descent.

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Do you agree that DNA is the basis of all heredity?Do you agree that your DNA is more similar to your parents' than to your great, great, great grandparents'?

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I'm not interested in being included in the "brotherhood of science"

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Of course you are.Otherwise, you wouldn't complain that you feel you aren't getting fair treatment from science when your meaningless term isn't given the attention and consideration you believe it warrants.You wouldn't complain about "the deck being stacked against you."

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I'm just interested in exploring the implications of these different models of the world. I don't even think the scientific creationists care all that much. They understand what they are up against and just keep working at their work.

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Who is doing this work, by the way, and how long has it been ongoing?What new understanding of nature has sprung from this work, and what technologies or treatments do we use today that have arisen from these discoveries?

Faith, can grasses run to higher ground when a flood approaches?This message has been edited by AdminJar, 03-04-2006 06:33 AM

Within a scheme (and Darwin had referred to this term in his earlier writings Mayr moves beyond) perhaps of Kant's intention, there are THOUGHTS of a not possible highest genus but a limit on the species of thought. The Bible kind would be contained in this thought as some kind of meaning, where there is no highest religious genus of the thought being a discrete genus extension (to family etc, who knows depends on the particulars) but THAT bound, is within the geographic details of a lowest species (or trinomial+- macromutation). Chomsky however in an analysis of this species specific homogeneity (this homogeneity of the structure of language as investigated by Chomsky might be a heterogeneity in the space-time monophlya of other organisms) failed to note well, that the scheme needs to be FULL, and he apparently took "invariants of language" of all languages in substitution, of a sum of a series in the sequence.So I would say if the religious unconditioned were removed, mentally, then the kind could be contained within a highest genus and lowest species. Exactly how high and how low depends on two things: the actual naming conventions of prior taxonomy and the place where the unconditioned can no longer be approximated in a limit. The key is to contain the relation of the lowest species to maximal separation in space and the highest genus of the kind below the approach to the unconditioned in time unless (and here it goes) the ostensive definitions so developed are overshadowed by the verbal occurrence of its first actual enunciation and thus subsequent memories of participants in that creative use of science and language. That is all.This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 03-04-2006 08:35 AM

The reason why creationists aren't more upfront about what a kind is is that kind has to mean something other than species, otherwise you have millions of animals to fit on Noah's Ark. However, the biblical passages that refer to kinds ("after their kind"), seem to be referring to the ability of given animals to reproduce. In science this principle is known as the biological species concept, and this is used to define what a species is.Note that the biological species concept has so many exceptions to it with the ability of animals to hybridize and the fact that it only works for sexual reproduction which can't be used to distinguish bacteria that in the next decade or two this rule of thumb will likely be replaced by a genetic standard. It is these exceptions that creationists use to argue that they aren't talking about a species, but they really are. All but the rarest of hybrids are sterile and cannot reproduce, so most of these exceptions end at the first generation.

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There is so much evidence for a global flood it's staggering. It has to be a very strange blindness that keeps people from acknowledging it. Not even agreeing with it, just acknowledging that the amount of evidence is enormous. Just another case of flat out denial.

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What evidence is this? Excuse me, but I am new here and maybe I haven't seen any previous posts where you have presented or linked to this "evidence". Perhaps a nudge in that direction?

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The existence of fossils all over the earth in the great abundance they are found, everywhere, is fantastic evidence for a worldwide flood. Anyone in their right mind ought to concede this point. The conditions caused by such a flood well explain the fossilization of bazillions of dead things.

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The existence of fossils all over the Earth in the great abundance they are found everywhere is fantastic evidence of millions upon millions of years of life upon this Earth and the evolution of life when put up against other areas of science for independent testing and verification. If said flood occured and all the fossils we find were indeed killed in this flood, all forms of dating would put every single fossil within the same time frame. This does not happen and no matter how hard you would like to ignore the validity of the various methods of dating, the dates we get are evidence for millions of years of evolution, not some mythical global flood.

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Sure you can figure out how to explain this some other way if you have a mind to. But so what? The flood explanation is obviously adequate.

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The flood myth is obviously adequate to you and that is no harm done to me or anyone else unless, of course, you want to propagate this myth as fact.

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The existence of marine fossils in mountains and deserts is also great evidence for a worldwide flood.

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The existence of marine fossils in mountains actually supports an old earth scenario since the mountains we see today were not always mountains and were indeed once under water (at least that is my understanding of geological history). The organisms were marine animals living in a marine environment and the sediments/rocks/what have you where their fossils were laid down became, over many many eons, mountains as the earth was pushed up. As for marine fossils found in deserts, the same, or similar, can be said. Do you really think deserts are static environments? Have you noticed the recent, rapid desertification of much of Africa? Land that was once lush jungle or grassland is now an arid desert. The whole area that is now the desert you find marine fossils in could have been a lake at one time (or a river or inland sea or an ocean). Ever heard of riverbeds and lakes drying up? It happens all the time. Your flood explanation may be good enough for you, but it has no basis in science and should not be touted as such.

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And again, sure you can find other explanations, but the Flood is a far more "elegant" and obvious explanation.

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The purpose of science is not to be "elegant." I'm sorry if that is one of your conditions for something being true, but the majority of thinking people just won't buy that. As for obvious, it seems "obvious" at first glance that the night sky is a black canopy draped over the sky by god with little holes to let in specks of light that is pushed away by the sun in the morning, but that is not true. There are a myriad of seemingly obvious and simple explanations to everything we observe on this Earth, but once delved into to find out the truth, those explanations fall apart.

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The existence of the stratifications called the geological column, also found all over the world, is terrific evidence for a worldwide flood. The alternation of different kinds of sediments with different fossil contents is just not at all compatible with the notion of deposition over millions of years, but water certainly can explain it, as some of the scenarios evos concoct even end up conceding. It's laughable. Maybe someday you'll all wake up and see it.

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I'm not sure what you mean here by "alternation" and why finding certain fossils in certain strata is incompatible with "deposition over millions of years, so I can't really comment on that bit, but could you give an example of evos conceding that a global flood (I'm assuming that is what you mean by "water" but feel free to tell me that that is an incorrect assumption) explains it and could you please tell me why local floods or volcanic eruptions or any other localized catastrophe could not explain any perceived anomalies in geological strata?

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The amount of disturbance of the surface of the planet that occurs in a few years is a strong clue that given millions of years not one of those strata could have survived intact.

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Why not?

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The presence of extinct forms of life in the fossil record is a clue to the enormous variety of life that inhabited the pre-Flood world.

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Why should any animals have become extinct if Noah was instructed to take "...two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. 20 Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive." Gen 6:19-20 NIV. See this is where you would have to define kinds, but as a lay reader I would have to define kind in this context to mean the same as when I say "I like every kind of pasta," meaning I like every single type of pasta there is. Now why would fossils of long extinct creatures explain a flood and the fact that we don't see these creatures today if two of every single creature were aboard the ark? And even if the definition of kind is found to be broader, do you have a reason why certain creatures were left behind, especially when we read that both "clean and unclean" animals were aboard?

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It's all consistent with the Flood story.

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No, you want it to be consistent so you are ignoring all the evidence to the contrary.

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But people seem to prefer the evo fantasy, which has no evidence whatever to support it. It's all a made-up fiction.

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Do you even know the definition of evidence or the process for identifying something as evidence?Admins - sorry for straying off-topic, but I did address the OP issue of defining "kinds" somewhere back there

Oops, I guess this topic was abandoned awhile ago...didn't read far enough to notice and upon digging I found the thread where this issue was relocated, but it is closed Can anyone point me to a relevant thread where Faith would be able to or willing to answer?

lol no we can't. but feel free to try anyways.

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I really don't want to go back over all this contentious stuff. Most of what you are bringing up I've answered many times over and I don't care to be subjected to the typical rudeness you obviously bring to the questions. As I said the fact that you can come up with an alternative explanation for certain phenomena does not in itself make your explanation correct. I don't like the tone of your question about the kinds and it's pretty muddled anyway so I will ignore it. I believe the fossils are not ancient and were all laid down in the Flood. I see no reason to say anything else, and if you ask another rude question you can be sure I will ignore you.