The Bible, Creationism, and Prophecy (part 1)

robindch

> Indeed what actually DOES stand in the way of this reinterpretation of
> the Genesis account of Direct Divine Creation as allegory?

Familiarity with pre-existing legends of region?

J C

Posted by Bluewolf
Originally Posted by J C
The odds that we are dealing with in the TIGHTLY SPECIFIED living systems that we observe are analagous to dealing millions of Poker Hands one after the other and getting 'Royal Flushes' every time!!

If it happens it happens

Anyway I think we should all worry about how things are than as they were

Do you think that dealing millions of Poker Hands one after another and getting ‘Royal Flushes’ every time IS LIKELY to happen – could I suggest that rationally-speaking it is IMPOSSIBLE!!

It is indeed very important to be concerned about things as they ARE.

However, it is not an ‘either or’ situation and finding out about how things WERE is of interest to most Human Beings – and that is what this debate is all about.

J C

J C wrote:

Posted by Bluewolf

Do you think that dealing millions of Poker Hands one after another and getting ‘Royal Flushes’ every time IS LIKELY to happen – could I suggest that rationally-speaking it is IMPOSSIBLE!!

Well, it doesn't matter how likely or not it is if it's happened.

Son Goku

JC may I make an outrageous suggestion?
How about instead of exposing what you see as foundational problems in evolution, you give me a single predictive framework in Creation Science, along with one prediction. (And do not give a hypothesis.)

robindch

JC - just to repeat one of my unanswered questions from earlier today:

I wonder if you could be so kind as to name some IDr's who are not creationists?

And it would be nice also to hear your answer to Son Goku's question, which he's had to ask at least twice too.

Scofflaw

And I'm still waiting for Creationist explanations of my original points (whales etc).


patiently,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

J C wrote:

Posted by Bluewolf
Originally Posted by J C
The odds that we are dealing with in the TIGHTLY SPECIFIED living systems that we observe are analagous to dealing millions of Poker Hands one after the other and getting 'Royal Flushes' every time!!

And this is exactly the kind of statistical situation we are not dealing with in protein evolution. This statistical calculation only works if the addition of each amino acid is independent of the previous amino acid, which is not the case.

By way of clarification: when you start dealing a well-shuffled deck of cards, the odds of the first card being, say, the King of Spades, are 1 in 52. What are the odds the next card is the King of Spades? 1 in 51. And so on - these possibilities are dependent, not independent.

If I start off with a chain of 20 amino acids (peptide A), the possibilities for the next amino acid being something that yields a useful but different peptide are? Well, they're 1 in 20 (being conservative). If that peptide (peptide is useful, and we ad another amino acid, the same chance applies. Etc.

Proteins do not evolve by randomly mixing together the amino acids and shaking. You continue to completely misunderstand evolution, which perhaps explains your opposition?

cordially,
Scofflaw

bmoferrall

*returns from holidays*
So...what are the scores on the doors

Answer my question, answer my question!

...sorry

Scofflaw

If I start off with a chain of 20 amino acids (peptide A), the possibilities for the next amino acid being something that yields a useful but different peptide are? Well, they're 1 in 20 (being conservative). If that peptide (peptide is useful, and we ad another amino acid, the same chance applies. Etc.

Just to further develop this point - we need to get to our 20-acid peptide (and for comparison, the smallest biologically active peptide is 14 amino acids long), using non-biological processes - which means that we should use JC's random shake'n'bake method:

1. the chance of randomly generating a given 20-amino acid chain is 2.78E+026 (1 in 278,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), which looks like a decently large number.

2. However, assuming we use some tiny fraction (say a thousandth) of the ocean volume as primordial soup, and say that amino acids are present at 1 per million water molecules.

3. That gives us 4.51E+034 amino acids to work with. Assuming there is a reaction every millisecond (reactions actually take nanoseconds, but there's travel time), we find that there are 4.51E+037 reactions per second.

4. At this rate it takes 6.17E-012 (0.00000000000617) seconds to form our 20-acid peptide by purely random processes. To form any given 30-acid peptide takes a little over a minute and a half.

5. Bear in mind that there are really quite a lot of biologically active peptides that are this short, and that primitive life may not have bothered to use longer proteins at all.

6. Once you have a useful 20-acid biological molecule, the chance of producing any particular 21-acid molecule from it by adding one amino acid is 1 in 21. Again, it is possible that several of these may be useful. You are now leaving the realm of abiotic biogenesis, and entering the realm of evolution (the two are quite different).

regards,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

Son Goku wrote:

JC may I make an outrageous suggestion?
How about instead of exposing what you see as foundational problems in evolution, you give me a single predictive framework in Creation Science, along with one prediction. (And do not give a hypothesis.)

I would also like to see this done. Stripped of technical language, I assume that what Son Goku is asking for is a single testable prediction, and the reason for making that prediction, so that:

If God made the world according to Genesis, x is true (your prediction), because it says y in Genesis (your framework).

If God did not make the world according to Genesis, x is not true.

All we need is an 'x', and you have at least a start on falsifiability. We would like a Creationist to supply an example of x. The framework is necessary to avoid predictions like 'God would make oranges orange', which are tautological, and have no justification in Genesis.


cordially,
Scofflaw

Morbert

J C wrote:

How then do you explain the vast differences in stalactite sizes in the same (undisturbed i.e. previously sealed) cave.

Calcite formation rates DO vary ENORMOUSLY – with large stalactites often several million times larger than smaller ones – yet they are all in the same cave and therefore the same 'age'.

Calcium Hydroxide is also available in caves where previously-heated Limestone is present anywhere within the formation.

The only way you can claim the rates vary enormously enough is if you assume they were all formed in 5,000 years. Yet you have no basis for such an assumption. I, on the other hand, am talking about observed growth (I.e comparison between size measurement after a number of years). And how, pray tell, would such limestone have been heated, especially considering it had to be both deposited *and* eroded by the flood, which makes no sense at all (You still haven't answered my question as to where all the carbonic acid needed to erode such caves comes from, nor have you answered my questions as to where all the heat after such sediments were formed has gone to.) No geological study I know of suggests calcium hydroxide as a possible culprit for the vast number of stalactites we see in caves.

And you also have to explain why observed growth rates, when extraoplated, give excellent correlation to radiometric dating results?

J C wrote:

There was only one large-scale ice age – and it’s glaciers did retreat and advance a few times in localised areas. Indeed such retreats and advances are still observable in ‘permanent Glaciers’ in mountainous regions today.

Even if you don’t believe me, that there was only one large-scale Ice Age – please consider how structures as delicate as stalactites (and their oxygen isotope levels) would survive the onslaught of repeated massive quantities of melt-waters (filling/flowing through these caves) during repeated ice ages, if you belief in multiple Ice Ages is correct. Please note that there is little if any damage to stalactites noted in sealed caves that are opened for the first time.

Oxygen isotopes may correlate with PREDICTED ice-ages. However, they DON’T obviously correlate with the ACTUAL ice-age itself.

I see, so the glaciers all advanced and retreated in perfect sync all over the world (and all over the ocean floor too). And not only this, but these glaciers left oxygen isotope patterns that exactly correlate to predicted climatic changes that occur due to the earth's orbital cycle. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of years. And we can't forget that these superfast superintelligent glaciers also allowed remains of temperate forests local animal populations to thrive between such periods of advancing and retreating.

So your theory need intelligent, fast moving, HUGE, benevolent icebergs that can warp local spacetime.

And meltwater streams etc. aren't a problem at all. I don't see how they would be.

JC wrote:

Quote Morbert
Let's go back to peptides and self-replicating polymers, which can have chains as little as 32 amino acids long.

Now, the probability of such a chain forming in one fell swoop is still incredibly low (Though nowhere near as low as the first primitve organisms in your above example).[/B]

Again ‘Show me the Money’ – science is evidentially based and all of this is conjecture.

Is it?

An article on a self replicating peptide

Studies on a Sun Y self replicating intron

A study on RNA formation

Studies on regeneration through catalyst hypercycles

J C wrote:

Quote Morbert
With conservative figures, self replicating peptides can form quite rapidly (in the space of tens of years). And from these, in about 1 million years, various primitive sequences and a large chunk of complex self-replicating peptides can form, many of which would be considered primitive proteins. So, already we know that the formation of basic self-replicators is quite plausible, and I haven't even touched on the fact that the number of possible self-replicators is huge, reducing the probability even further. These basic replicators then provide the "scaffolding" for chemical hypercycles and probionts and, inevitably, primitive organisms.

’Show me the Money’ as Eddie Hobbes might say. Where are these putative structures today?

They should all still be here ‘banging away’ – or why did all of this frantic ‘auto-creation’ suddenly (and conveniently) stop?

Template directed synthesis supporting such possibilities of short periods of time.

Why aren't the forming today? Conditions aren't the same as they were on the early earth.

Keep in mind that I am not saying this IS what happended. I am saying the chemical behaviour of basic archaic self-replicators do not need the vast amounts of time to "randomly form" that would be needed for a modern organism to randomly form. And that from these archaic self-replicators, it is possible for DNA to evolve, thereby removing the objections to abiogenesis based on probability calculations, such as Fred Hoyle's calculations you mention further down.

Morbert

J C wrote:

Quote Morbert
These basic replicators then provide the "scaffolding" for chemical hypercycles and probionts and, inevitably, primitive organisms.

Once the basic functioning templates are there, the structures you refer to as irreducible, can form via gradual steps as various amino acids are substituted and functions are changed.

Once again ‘Show me the Money’ – science is evidentially based and all of this is conjecture.

The emergence of life (i.e. A universal ancestor) based on genetic nature.

Autocatalytic networks giving rise to molecular "ecosystems"

RNA self replication

J C wrote:

Quote Morbert
But we must remember that, although we are dealing with a chance of 1/Some inconceivably high number, the number of 'trials' is far far higher.

NOT SO.

Sir Fred Hoyle, former Astronomer Royal, calculated the probability of the amino acid sequences of the bio-molecules in an Amoeba being produced by undirected chemical processes to be 10^-40,000.

<snipped talk of illustrating of such a small number>-Morbert

I agree completely. So we can conclude that modern protein chains did not form in one great leap. The numbers I'm talking about are along the lines of 10^-40. Which although still inconceivably small, would not be difficult statistically speaking if we take into account the number of simultaneous trials that could occur.

J C wrote:

Equally, it is observed that there are 20 common amino acids used in protein synthesis. If such synthesis was achieved using undirected processes then such a ‘blind’ system would have to ‘try’ every possible combination of amino acid to produce a useful protein eventually. It is also observed that you cannot ‘work up’ to a critical amino acid sequence – the exact sequence works, and any other sequence doesn’t work. In addition, there are very limited numbers of useful proteins observed in nature (of the order of tens of thousands).

Critical amino acid sequence? Even modern organisms can exchange and substitute up to 50% of their amino acids. And non-identical protein structures can be exchanged in organisms quite happily. There is no such thing as a critical amino acid sequence (Note: I do realise that certain amino acids are necessary, and not any will do, but to claim such observed sequences are irreducible isn't established at all, so no) And again, you aren't considering mechanisms such as RNA self replication. Up to 2.5 x 10^112 sequences could be possible for RNA sequences which are 220 nucleotides long.

J C wrote:

Chemistry Laws cannot assist in the process either, because it is observed that many of the bonds in protein chains can only be achieved by the use of amazingly specialised enzymes whose use is synchronised in nano-seconds with exact sequential cascades of reactions by other equally complex and specific enzymes. That is why protein molecules that are split into short chains of amino acids are NEVER observed to spontaneously re-form into useful proteins using the (supposedly) "well known attraction of Carbon” as a previous participant on another thread has characterised it. It is also one of the reasons why death is an irreversible physical process and why the spontaneous generation of life is never observed.

Obviously they are never observed to spontaneously reform. If that were the case, then there'd be a hell of a lot more genetic "languages" floating around. And once again, you're observing modern sequences. Early replicators would have been refined by natural selection (And as I said to wolfsbane, by sacrificing independence for efficiency, systems gradually become irreducibly complex). So what you call useless proteins are only useless in the context of modern biological systems.

J C wrote:

They are irreducibly complex forwards and backwards.

Even if, by some miracle, a 20 chain amino acid peptide were to be formed, it would be useless on it’s own and the ‘useless combinational space’ between this molecule and any other useful molecule is so vast that defeat every atom in the entire Universe to make enough combinations to ‘cross’ it.

"Useless combinational space"? Not at all, as there are huge amounts of useful combinations regarding self replicators I've already that 2.5 x 10^112 sequences could be possible for RNA sequences which self-replicate. So while it is true that modern replicators use finely tuned templates which do not allow for much versatility regarding combinations, this is because they have gradually evolved from less fine (though still functioning) replicators which allow for a larger number of combinations.

J C wrote:

It is now known that there are sections of the amino acid chain that are ‘critical’. These are the sections of the amino acid chain where even one ‘incorrect’ amino acid will fundamentally change the three dimensional shape of the protein thereby rendering it biologically useless. Because the exact amino acid sequence works and all other sequences don’t work at all, you cannot ‘work up’ to the correct sequence using Natural Selection – you either hit the jackpot or it is functionally useless.

Again, if you want to claim this, then you must establish it for primitive replicators. There are plenty of sequences that can work.

J C wrote:

The latest research into how DNA actually works shows massively complex and little understood interactions between different DNA strands as well as frame shifting abilities of mind numbing complexity. In addition, the exact same DNA sequence can specify completely different structures in different organisms. It is as if we ‘climbed Mount Everest’ when we decoded the Human Genome only to find an even higher ‘mountain’ of complex DNA interactions awaiting us when we got there.

I agree completely, and the continued study of abiogenesis will unearth even more mysteries I'm sure, as long as we have the capacity for scientific study, we won't stop investigating the various mechanisms and properties found within DNA.

It must be made clear that I am *not* claiming a complete theory of abiogenesis is in our possession, I'm merely stating the fact that concepts of irreducibly complexity have not been established in the slightest, as many wondrous properties of organic molecules continue to be uncovered day after day, leading to deeper and deeper insight into the nature of abiogenesis. And also that the repeated failure to supply a predictive framework (To borrow Son Goku's term) for intelligent design, renders it useless as an explanation for any biological construct.

Morbert

Wolfsbane... Your handwaving is nice to read but I'm not interested in conversing with someone who isn't willing to learn about the subject he's supposed to be defending.

So from now on, if you want to claim

a) ID is a valid scientific theory with testable hypotheses
b) There is debate within the scientific community
c) There are valid ID arguments that haven't been addressed.
d) Scientists are mean people.
e) etc.

Then I expect to see evidence and established argument along with such assertions.

So far, all you've contributed to the conversation is "There are people who believe in ID." And you've done nothing but repeat that statement.

And theistic evolutionist bretheren? What?!?!

J C

Quote Scofflaw
By way of clarification: when you start dealing a well-shuffled deck of cards, the odds of the first card being, say, the King of Spades, are 1 in 52. What are the odds the next card is the King of Spades? 1 in 51. And so on - these possibilities are dependent, not independent.

If I start off with a chain of 20 amino acids (peptide A), the possibilities for the next amino acid being something that yields a useful but different peptide are? Well, they're 1 in 20 (being conservative). If that peptide (peptide is useful, and we ad another amino acid, the same chance applies. Etc.

If you turn up all 52 cards you will get a King of Spades amongst them eventually and the odds are exactly as you have described as you turn each card.

However, if you start off with a chain of 20 amino acids in Peptide A the probability of adding on a new amino acid and yielding a useful peptide is OBSERVED to be ZERO.
To explain, living systems like Peptides are observed to become USELESS with singular additions, subtractions or substitutions of Amino Acids to their chains.
If you have a 20 amino acid Peptide, you will NOT get a useful 21 amino acid Peptide by merely adding on a new amino acid at the end. Useful 21 Amino Acid Peptides are observed to have TOTALLY DIFFERENT Amino Acid chains at points 1 to 20 as well as at the 21st Amino Acid position.

The probabilities are more akin to cracking open a Safe.

To illustrate, if you have two safes.

Safe A has a 20 digit combination and Safe B has a 21 digit combination – this is similar to the very limited and tightly specified useful 20 and 21 amino acid chain Peptides observed in living systems.

If you did succeed in ‘cracking’ the 20 digit combination of Safe A – then it WOULDN’T be just a simple matter of using the first 20 digits of the combination for safe A on Safe B and trying all 10 digits in the 21st position to ‘crack’ open Safe B. Instead, you would have to potentially try ALL permutations of the 21 digit combination of Safe B to be guaranteed to ‘crack’ IT open.

In other words there is a MASSIVE ‘useless combinatorial space’ between a useful 20 amino acid Peptide and a useful 21 amino acid Peptide and it is of the order of 10^^27 to one.

The chance of producing a useful 20 Amino Acid Peptide is of the order of 10^^-26.
However, once you have a useful 20 Amino Acid Peptide, this has no practical effect on the chances of producing a useful 21 Amino Acid Peptide – you effectively have to ‘start from scratch’ again and it is of an order 10^^-27.

Similarly, there is no amino acid chain linkage observed between different USEFUL 20 Amino Acid Peptides – and therefore you have chances against randomly producing EACH useful 20 Amino Acid Peptide of the order of 10^^-26.


Quote Scofflaw
Just to further develop this point - we need to get to our 20-acid peptide (and for comparison, the smallest biologically active peptide is 14 amino acids long), using non-biological processes - which means that we should use JC's random shake'n'bake method:

1. the chance of randomly generating a given 20-amino acid chain is 2.78E+026 (1 in 278,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), which looks like a decently large number.

2. However, assuming we use some tiny fraction (say a thousandth) of the ocean volume as primordial soup, and say that amino acids are present at 1 per million water molecules.

3. That gives us 4.51E+034 amino acids to work with. Assuming there is a reaction every millisecond (reactions actually take nanoseconds, but there's travel time), we find that there are 4.51E+037 reactions per second.

4. At this rate it takes 6.17E-012 (0.00000000000617) seconds to form our 20-acid peptide by purely random processes. To form any given 30-acid peptide takes a little over a minute and a half.

5. Bear in mind that there are really quite a lot of biologically active peptides that are this short, and that primitive life may not have bothered to use longer proteins at all.

6. Once you have a useful 20-acid biological molecule, the chance of producing any particular 21-acid molecule from it by adding one amino acid is 1 in 21. Again, it is possible that several of these may be useful. You are now leaving the realm of abiotic biogenesis, and entering the realm of evolution (the two are quite different).

I agree with everything you have said up to and including point number 4. You are correct that it is theoretically possible to randomly produce the amino acid sequence for a particular 20 Amino Acid Peptide in less than one second using your assumptions. Even, moving up to a 30 amino acid Peptide, using your assumptions would actually require only about 100 seconds or a little over a minute as you have said.

However, moving up to a 50 amino acid Peptide/Protein (which is not a substantial biological molecule) is a ‘whole new ball game’ and would take 10^^+28 seconds or 10^^+21 years, using your assumptions!!!

This is the enormous cliff that actually surrounds ‘Mount Improbable’ when it comes to producing the sequences for even the simplest proteins that we observe in living systems.

Point number 6 is incorrect – see my first answer above on this posting in relation to the 20/21 amino acid Peptide issue. In addition, please note that UNDIRECTED processes don’t differentiate their productive capacities between a 30 amino acid Peptide and a 50 amino acid Protein.


I promise that I will answer Son Goku’s question later – I don’t want to complicate the thread until we deal with the above mathematical probability issues first.

BrianCalgary

After reading and following this discussion I have come to a conclusion.

Evolution has not be proven as there are too many scientists who disagree with the theory. As an example: the Laws of thermodynamics has been proven because no scientist would dispute them.

God can not be proven scientifically, as you would have to be all knowing and everywhere at once to do so, which would make you a God.

Therefore on Christianity you have to deal with the Bible as a reliable source of biography and history. ie. is Jesus who he says He is? If so will you follow Him and gain Heaven or deny Him and lose Heaven?


I will not accept evolution as fact until such time as all scientists accept it as such.

BrianCalgary

BrianCalgary wrote:

After reading and following this discussion I have come to a conclusion.

Evolution has not be proven as there are too many scientists who disagree with the theory. As an example: the Laws of thermodynamics has been proven because no scientist would dispute them.

God can not be proven scientifically, as you would have to be all knowing and everywhere at once to do so, which would make you a God.

Therefore on Christianity you have to deal with the Bible as a reliable source of biography and history. ie. is Jesus who he says He is? If so will you follow Him and gain Heaven or deny Him and lose Heaven?


I will not accept evolution as fact until such time as all scientists accept it as such.

Not everyone accepts the earth is round

Anyway, I don't think that's a very good reason to accept or not accept something. It doesn't make something true, however many people accept it and vice versa.

BrianCalgary

bluewolf wrote:

Not everyone accepts the earth is round

Anyway, I don't think that's a very good reason to accept or not accept something. It doesn't make something true, however many people accept it and vice versa.

I agree that numbers don't make something true. On this topic though the stakes are too high. Peoples eternal existence: as there are many who use evolution as the reason for denying Christianity.

With all the discussion I just have to conclude that the jury is still out.

Thanks for spoiling my flat earth belief too. :eek:

BrianCalgary

BrianCalgary wrote:

I agree that numbers don't make something true. On this topic though the stakes are too high. Peoples eternal existence: as there are many who use evolution as the reason for denying Christianity.

And many who use christianity for denying evolution - so what? If it's true it's true, regardless of people who use it as an anti-religion deal

Thanks for spoiling my flat earth belief too. :eek:

BrianCalgary

bluewolf wrote:

And many who use christianity for denying evolution - so what? If it's true it's true, regardless of people who use it as an anti-religion deal

I would agree that there are those who do that as well. So which side should the layman fall?

On the side of the scientists that claim or those that deny evolution?

Since it is apparent that evolution has not been proven.

robindch

(dang, just missed the 800'th post).

> Evolution has not be proven as there are too many scientists
> who disagree with the theory.

At this stage Brian, I have to say that after this post, there doesn't seem to be much point in discussing evolution with you -- you have been given ample hard evidence, right from your first posts on this board some weeks back, that what you say here is false (Gallup Poll etc), but you stick to your erroneous belief. Just to remind you, the estimated figures in the USA are 99.85% of relevant scientists think that evolution is fine, and 0.15% don't think so (though I'm happy to reduce this 0.15%, based upon the evidence that the top guy in the Discovery I]sic[/I Institute produced on the BBC last week, that only 450 "scientists" supported him, rather than the 700 which the Gallup Poll suggested, meaning that the figures are closer to 99.90% and 0.10%).

I would, however, be interested in hearing *why* it is that you do not accept the word of scientists, when they talk about their own beliefs. Not anybody else's, or about evolution, but just when they are talking about *themselves*.

> As an example: the Laws of thermodynamics has been proven
> because no scientist would dispute them.

Wrong. "laws" have never been "proved", they can only be disproved. Read Karl Popper's work on the Philosophy of Science and the concept of disprovability if you'd like to learn more about this interesting topic.

> God can not be proven scientifically

If something turned up on the White House lawn or Stephen's Green and did something pretty amazing (say go down to the nearest morgue and raise everybody from the dead), then we would have evidence that something close to the traditional notion of god exists. Hasn't happened though and it may be interesting to ponder why it is that this hasn't happened.

> I will not accept evolution as fact until such time as all scientists accept it as such.

Is 99.90% not good enough?

wolfsbane

Scofflaw said:

I repeat - there is no creation/evolution debate within science, there are only a relative handful of scientists who support it, and most of those do not deal directly with evolution, and for you to keep suggesting that there is a large minority of creationists within science is not true.

Your definition of debate is beyond me: when scientists like the Palaeontologist, Dr Joachim Scheven defend creation against evolution, I think any reasonable person would call that a debate.

I am not saying it is a 'large' minority: the relative numbers make the thousands of creationist scientists a small minority.

In any case, as I've said before, if you're right about Creation, it doesn't matter how many are with you, or how many are against you.

I totally agree.

I argue this point because it's one of the few you can't avoid or gloss over,

Why would I gloss over a truth I am glad to state?

and it's important to your claim that there is a 'scientific debate' about creationism.

It has nothing to do with my claim. I merely point out that it is not a couple of crazies who hold to creationism, but thousands of bona fide scientists. That is where the debate exists. It is nothing to do with whether creationism is true or not: it is true even if every scientist swore it wasn't. If that happened, then of course there would be no scientific debate.

There is not, any more than the fact that a handful of anti-Treatyites still don't accept the legitimacy of Dail Eireann mean that Ireland is in a state of Civil War. The war is over.

I take your point. But if Sinn Fein were killing a Garda a week, would that be civil war? What about 10 a week? 100 a week? Where would the debate between FF Republicans and SF ones exist? At the first body? At the one hundreth?

You might liken Creationism to scientific terrorism, as opposed to civil war within it. Maybe this illustrates we are indeed talking at cross-purposes about the 'debate'. I take it to exist when even a relatively small number of scientists oppose the current consensus.

In addition, doesn't it kind of give the lie to your claims of anti-creationist witch-hunting within science that these 'creation scientists' have managed to qualify and get jobs within science?

Thankfully the scientific establishment have not yet obtained absolute powers. Also, many scientists obtained their qualifications before they became convinced of creationism.

BrianCalgary

robindch wrote:

(dang, just missed the 800'th post).

> Evolution has not be proven as there are too many scientists
> who disagree with the theory.

At this stage Brian, I have to say that after this post, there doesn't seem to be much point in discussing evolution with you -- you have been given ample hard evidence, right from your first posts on this board some weeks back, that what you say here is false (Gallup Poll etc), but you stick to your erroneous belief. Just to remind you, the estimated figures in the USA are 99.85% of relevant scientists think that evolution is fine, and 0.15% don't think so (though I'm happy to reduce this 0.15%, based upon the evidence that the top guy in the Discovery I]sic[/I Institute produced on the BBC last week, that only 450 "scientists" supported him, rather than the 700 which the Gallup Poll suggested, meaning that the figures are closer to 99.90% and 0.10%).

I would, however, be interested in hearing *why* it is that you do not accept the word of scientists, when they talk about their own beliefs. Not anybody else's, or about evolution, but just when they are talking about *themselves*.

> As an example: the Laws of thermodynamics has been proven
> because no scientist would dispute them.

Wrong. "laws" have never been "proved", they can only be disproved. Read Karl Popper's work on the Philosophy of Science and the concept of disprovability if you'd like to learn more about this interesting topic.

> God can not be proven scientifically

If something turned up on the White House lawn or Stephen's Green and did something pretty amazing (say go down to the nearest morgue and raise everybody from the dead), then we would have evidence that something close to the traditional notion of god exists. Hasn't happened though and it may be interesting to ponder why it is that this hasn't happened.

> I will not accept evolution as fact until such time as all scientists accept it as such.

Is 99.90% not good enough?

Sorry you missed the 800th. We'll try and reserve the 1000th for you.:p

No 99.9 is not enough. The reason being is that I don't trust science, they are only human, but I trust God.

With your definition of a Law is 'that it can only be disproved' then why not believe in God as He can not be disproved. The laws can be tested again and again with the results being consistent.

It hasn't happened on the White House lawn or Stephen's Green, but it did happen in Jerusalem at Passover @2,000 years ago.

wolfsbane

Morbert said:

So from now on, if you want to claim

a) ID is a valid scientific theory with testable hypotheses
b) There is debate within the scientific community
c) There are valid ID arguments that haven't been addressed.
d) Scientists are mean people.
e) etc.

Then I expect to see evidence and established argument along with such assertions.

So far, all you've contributed to the conversation is "There are people who believe in ID." And you've done nothing but repeat that statement.

a) ID is a valid scientific theory with testable hypotheses is proclaimed by valid scientists. You might not like what they say, but that doesn't mean they haven't said it. I'm not a mathematician nor a biologist, so I can't present the details myself. You have Behe, etc. for that.
b) There is debate within the scientific community is proved by a) above.
Regarding c) There are valid ID arguments that haven't been addressed. They have been addressed, but not refuted.
d) Scientists are mean people. Not all scientists. Mainly those in control of the institutions. The example of the Smithsonian is backed by the testimony of other creationists who tell of the same treatment in lesser institutions.

And theistic evolutionist bretheren? What?!?!

I thought you would have gathered that some genuine Christians have accepted evolution as the mechanism God used to bring us here. So I was addressing them with the points that show how inconsistent with Christianity evolution really is.

Scofflaw

wolfsbane wrote:

Your definition of debate is beyond me: when scientists like the Palaeontologist, Dr Joachim Scheven defend creation against evolution, I think any reasonable person would call that a debate.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. That a handful of people believe the Earth is flat does not mean that there is a debate about it.

wolfsbane wrote:

I am not saying it is a 'large' minority: the relative numbers make the thousands of creationist scientists a small minority.

I've disputed your figures (as have others), and you simply repeat them. I now have to consider you flat-out lying on this point.

wolfsbane wrote:

Why would I gloss over a truth I am glad to state?

I don't know. Certainly it suggests that in this debate there has not been any 'truth you are glad to state', since you haven't.

wolfsbane wrote:

It has nothing to do with my claim. I merely point out that it is not a couple of crazies who hold to creationism, but thousands of bona fide scientists. That is where the debate exists. It is nothing to do with whether creationism is true or not: it is true even if every scientist swore it wasn't. If that happened, then of course there would be no scientific debate.

I'll be blunt. In terms of the world-wide numbers of scientists, and the numbers of creationists, 'a couple of crazies' is exactly what it is. And again, it's not thousands, you have provided nothing to back that figure.

wolfsbane wrote:

I take your point. But if Sinn Fein were killing a Garda a week, would that be civil war? What about 10 a week? 100 a week? Where would the debate between FF Republicans and SF ones exist? At the first body? At the one hundreth?

You might liken Creationism to scientific terrorism, as opposed to civil war within it. Maybe this illustrates we are indeed talking at cross-purposes about the 'debate'. I take it to exist when even a relatively small number of scientists oppose the current consensus.

Yes, because you favour the side that wishes there to be a debate. I'm not aware that creationists are currently killing people (as part of the 'debate').

wolfsbane wrote:

Thankfully the scientific establishment have not yet obtained absolute powers. Also, many scientists obtained their qualifications before they became convinced of creationism.

And a very neat cop-out. I'd give you a medal but I doubt I could pin it on you.

coolly,
Scofflaw

J C

robindch wrote:

(dang, just missed the 800'th post).

If something turned up on the White House lawn or Stephen's Green and did something pretty amazing

Robin YOU have turned up in Stephen's Green on occasions, I'm sure - and YOU are pretty amazing!!!

YOU PROVE that God exists and that He created the original man and woman from whom you are ultimately descended.

Scofflaw

J C wrote:

However, if you start off with a chain of 20 amino acids in Peptide A the probability of adding on a new amino acid and yielding a useful peptide is OBSERVED to be ZERO.
To explain, living systems like Peptides are observed to become USELESS with singular additions, subtractions or substitutions of Amino Acids to their chains.
If you have a 20 amino acid Peptide, you will NOT get a useful 21 amino acid Peptide by merely adding on a new amino acid at the end. Useful 21 Amino Acid Peptides are observed to have TOTALLY DIFFERENT Amino Acid chains at points 1 to 20 as well as at the 21st Amino Acid position.

Where do you get this rubbish from?

1. There can be no such "OBSERVATION" - it's absolutely impossible that a 21-acid peptide is not a 20-acid peptide with one more acid!

2. 20 + 1 = 21 therefore 21 - 1 = 20 so a 21-acid peptide minus 1 acid is a 20-acid peptide!

3. If you have a problem with that arithmetic, please stop posting and go back to school.

4. My example shows the probability of producing ANY particular amino acid sequence. Necessarily, that will account for ANY 20 acids in ANY 21-acid sequence. It cannot do otherwise, and you may not pretend that it does (I would say 'cannot', but it's pretty clear you just have), because it is a lie!

J C wrote:

In other words there is a MASSIVE ‘useless combinatorial space’ between a useful 20 amino acid Peptide and a useful 21 amino acid Peptide and it is of the order of 10^^27 to one.

The chance of producing a useful 20 Amino Acid Peptide is of the order of 10^^-26.
However, once you have a useful 20 Amino Acid Peptide, this has no practical effect on the chances of producing a useful 21 Amino Acid Peptide – you effectively have to ‘start from scratch’ again and it is of an order 10^^-27.

Similarly, there is no amino acid chain linkage observed between different USEFUL 20 Amino Acid Peptides – and therefore you have chances against randomly producing EACH useful 20 Amino Acid Peptide of the order of 10^^-26.

This is exactly the complete piffle that I have just shown to be nonsense. We can go over it again and again until you understand that 20+1=21, and that 21 amino acids is therefore 20 amino acids plus one other amino acid.

J C wrote:

I agree with everything you have said up to and including point number 4. You are correct that it is theoretically possible to randomly produce the amino acid sequence for a particular 20 Amino Acid Peptide in less than one second using your assumptions. Even, moving up to a 30 amino acid Peptide, using your assumptions would actually require only about 100 seconds or a little over a minute as you have said.

However, moving up to a 50 amino acid Peptide/Protein (which is not a substantial biological molecule) is a ‘whole new ball game’ and would take 10^^+28 seconds or 10^^+21 years, using your assumptions!!!

This is the enormous cliff that actually surrounds ‘Mount Improbable’ when it comes to producing the sequences for even the simplest proteins that we observe in living systems.

I promise that I will answer Son Goku’s question later – I don’t want to complicate the thread until we deal with the above mathematical probability issues first.

Sorry, did you just shift my goalposts? I have used 20 amino acids as an example, because there are plenty of biologically active 20-residue peptides, and smaller.

I did it to show how you could actually calculate these sorts of numbers, instead of dragging in the number of electrons in the universe.

But actually, your maths really is irrelevant, because two peptide chains may react as well as two amino acids.

That is to say, once you've stuck any two amino acids together (call them AB for the moment), your possible reactions have to include AB+A/B/C/D etc and AB+AA/AB/AC/AD/BB etc as well as A+A/B/C/D etc.

Given a supply of amino acids, you can simply go:

1+1=2
2+2=4
4+4=8
8+8=16
16+16=32
32+32=64

in 6 probability steps, rather than the 64 you claim are needed.

somewhat resignedly,
Scofflaw

robindch

> No 99.9 is not enough. The reason being is that I don't trust science,
> they are only human, but I trust God.

So, from this, I presume that you also deny the existence of magnetism and electricity, gravity, bacteria (etc, etc, etc) becuase they are not mentioned in the bible?

Would you also deny evolution in the unlikely event that 100% of relevant scientists agreed that it's an undisputable description of the origin of species?

And just out of interest, do you now concur that 99.90% of relevant scientists accept evolution?

> With your definition of a Law is 'that it can only be disproved' then why
> not believe in God as He can not be disproved. The laws can be tested
> again and again with the results being consistent.

At the risk of repeating myself, why not also believe in the invisible pink unicorn, the flying spaghetti monster, or Russell's sun-orbiting teapot -- none of these can be disproved? Or the existence and divinity of Thor, Allah, Ahura Mazda and Zeus (etc), all of whom have had plenty of believers at one time, not to mention plenty of holy books written about them in which they all described their miracles?

Why is your book of miracles true and all the earlier ones false?

> It hasn't happened on the White House lawn or Stephen's Green, but
> it did happen in Jerusalem at Passover @2,000 years ago.

As I pointed out elsewhere recently, the story of the resurrection is common in ancient religions and christianity is no different in this respect from plenty of other ones -- see the page I quoted above:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/virgin_b1.htm

...for further details of the common elements in many religious stories.

Wibbs

wolfsbane wrote:

I thought you would have gathered that some genuine Christians have accepted evolution as the mechanism God used to bring us here. So I was addressing them with the points that show how inconsistent with Christianity evolution really is.

So you reckon that of someone decides to be a Christian and looks to Jesus as their saviour and believes that God used evolution to get us to this point, that they're damned? Oh great. Very Christian of you. That the very evidence that God put here for evolution(or a mechanism very similar to current theories) is somehow a test, that only the blind literalists will pass. So your God puts all sort of evidential traps for the unwary just to test them. So in your eyes ignorance is the byword of God. This kind of guff is what really ticks me off about the so-called "religious". Sorry, figured I'd bring it back to the religious debate for a change.:) Pardon me if I go off to make juice from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Yummy.

J C

J C wrote:

Robin YOU have turned up in Stephen's Green on occasions, I'm sure - and YOU are pretty amazing!!!

YOU PROVE that God exists and that He created the original man and woman from whom you are ultimately descended.

I'm as much proof that a pink unicorn coughed me up than your god.
Doesn't work that way.

bmoferrall

Wibbs wrote:

So you reckon that of someone decides to be a Christian and looks to Jesus as their saviour and believes that God used evolution to get us to this point, that they're damned? Oh great. Very Christian of you. That the very evidence that God put here for evolution(or a mechanism very similar to current theories) is somehow a test, that only the blind literalists will pass. So your God puts all sort of evidential traps for the unwary just to test them. So in your eyes ignorance is the byword of God. This kind of guff is what really ticks me off about the so-called "religious". Sorry, figured I'd bring it back to the religious debate for a change. Pardon me if I go off to make juice from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Yummy.

Why jump to such conclusions? You could just ask.
Or are you just trying to confirm your prejudices about genuine Christians?
Actually, Wolfsbane has already given his thoughts on this.

Wolfsbane wrote:

I agree. But the reason we go with the YEC is that it is what the Bible teaches. We are called to proclaim His truth, so we teach YEC. It is not the most important doctrine of Scripture. In fact it is not fundamental - Christian may err on this and still be saved. But to deny YEC is to leave defenceless many fundamental truths because it alters the very way we interpret Scripture.

For what it's worth, I agree with him. If you question the 'miracle of creation' then, surely, you have to question all other miracles recorded in scripture.
If there are no miracles (and I'm not talking about moving statues and holes in hands :v: ), where's the evidence of divinity?
If there's no evidence of divinity, I'm off to join Tom Cruise and his band of merry scientologists