The Bible, Creationism, and Prophecy (part 1)

J C

Galvasean wrote: »

You believe a rhino and a dinosaur are of the same 'kind' but not a wolf and a thylacine?

....there you go.....just shows you, how much study Evolutionists now have to do.....to catch up!!!!!:pac::):D:eek:

Galvasean

J C wrote: »

....there you go.....just shows you, how much study Evolutionists now have to do.....to catch up!!!!!:pac::):D:eek:

Please enlighten us by defining 'kind' and we may be able to have a decent discussion about it.

AtomicHorror

J C wrote: »

....never said it was.....but I think you will find that the so-called 'Evolutionary Tree' WAS central to Evolutionary Theory.....
......and it has just come crashing down....and 'the sky has just fallen in' for Evolution!!!!:pac::D

DNA studies are overturning the traditional evolutionary assumption that organisms with similar features are related!!!!

....the following EXTRAORDINARY quotes are from New Scientist 194 (2608):48-51 16 June 2007:-

"These are turbulent times in the world of phylogeny, yet there has been one rule that evolutionary biologists felt they could cling to: the amount of complexity in the living world has always been on the increase. Now even that is in doubt."
....they should have listened to the ID Proponents when the told them that Specified Complexity cannot increase without an input of Intelligence!!!!:D

The New Scientist Article also contains the following amazing statements:-
"The whole concept of a gradualist tree ... is wrong."
"Some evolutionary biologists now suggest that loss ... is the key to understanding evolution."
......but loss isn't much use in understanding how Pondslme supposedly evolved into Man!!!!!

The article makes the following amazing pronouncement about the import of these discoveries:-
"(We) need to rethink the process of evolution itself".
....yes indeed they DO.....and they need to talk to their local friendly ID Proponent....and get 'up to speed' on Intelligent Design.....before doing their 'Post Grad'......in Creation Science!!!!:pac::):D:eek:

.......MBEEP!!!!.................MBEEP!!:)

New Scientist is a mainstream publication. A worthy one, but still quite sensationalist and utterly lacking in data. Will you quote the Daily Mail next? Try a bit harder please. Maybe some evidence rather than sound bites?

So, what parts of of this are you having difficulty understanding? Please quote them so that I can elaborate and you can then offer a rebuttal:

AtomicHorror wrote:

J C:
.........organic systems were irreducibly complex BOTH before and after the Fall......with massive levels of 'redundancy' built in at Creation to cope with all future 'shocks'......including the Fall.

In that case then, humans were created imperfect. They lacked some much-needed (in the future) redundancies at the moment of creation. The creator built redundancies into some systems and not into others but did so with no regard to their relative importance. The heart is as important as the lungs (and two hearts is no challenge to an omnipotent being). The clotting cascade is as important as the chemokine system (perhaps more so) yet one is multiply redundant and the other has several critical/non-redundant points just waiting for a mutation. And underlying all of this is a brittle, error-prone inheritance system (DNA) that according to you cannot confer any advantages but which allows critical systems to fail at random. Unless the creator did not have proper fore-knowledge of the conditions after the fall, the above points constitute serious design flaws.

You did suggest previously that redundancy was lost in some cases due to The Fall, but now you seem to have realised that this is in fact equivalent to admitting that any example of "irreducible complexity" may simply be a previously-redundant system that lost its redundancy by some means. You might also suggest that redundancy might be gained post Fall, but of course this would contravene your claims that mutation can give "no new information".

So you must admit to a fallible Designer, abandon irreducible complexity as evidence of Design, or admit that mutation may confer function.

AtomicHorror

Galvasean wrote: »

Please enlighten us by defining 'kind' and we may be able to have a decent discussion about it.

I would second this.

1. Please define "kinds" in biological terms.

2. Since you contend that evolution is impossible as it cannot create new kinds, please suggest a means by which we could test for the emergence of a new kind.

J C

......and here are some pleasant thoughts from Evolutionists for Evolutionists:-
Niles Eldredge (b. 1943) Chief Curator at The American Museum Of Natural History

"Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record. " The Myths of Human Evolution (1982) p.45-46

....and Prof Eldredge gives some very good advice in relation to debating Creation Scientists......that might be profitably adopted by the Evolutionists on this thread:-
"Creationists travel all over the United States, visiting college campuses and staging `debates' with biologists, geologists, and anthropologists. The creationists nearly always win. The audience is frequently loaded with the already converted and the faithful. And scientists, until recently, have been showing up at the debates ill-prepared for what awaits them. Thinking the creationists are uneducated, Bible-thumping clods, they are soon routed by a steady onslaught of: direct attacks on a wide variety of scientific topics. No scientist has an expert's grasp of all the relevant points of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and anthropology. Creationists today -- at least the majority of their spokesmen -- are highly educated, intelligent people. Skilled debaters, they have always done their homework. And they nearly always seem better informed than their opponents, who are reduced too often to a bewildered state of incoherence. ":eek::cool:

AtomicHorror

Opinions are not science.

I would be delighted to see you post pages and pages of data supporting your claims, but these quotes are just a nuisance that bring nothing to the discussion.

Please stop with the spam.

J C

AtomicHorror wrote: »

So, what parts of of this are you having difficulty understanding? Please quote them so that I can elaborate and you can then offer a rebuttal:

Originally Posted by AtomicHorror

In that case then, humans were created imperfect. They lacked some much-needed (in the future) redundancies at the moment of creation. The creator built redundancies into some systems and not into others but did so with no regard to their relative importance. The heart is as important as the lungs (and two hearts is no challenge to an omnipotent being). The clotting cascade is as important as the chemokine system (perhaps more so) yet one is multiply redundant and the other has several critical/non-redundant points just waiting for a mutation. And underlying all of this is a brittle, error-prone inheritance system (DNA) that according to you cannot confer any advantages but which allows critical systems to fail at random. Unless the creator did not have proper fore-knowledge of the conditions after the fall, the above points constitute serious design flaws.

You did suggest previously that redundancy was lost in some cases due to The Fall, but now you seem to have realised that this is in fact equivalent to admitting that any example of "irreducible complexity" may simply be a previously-redundant system that lost its redundancy by some means. You might also suggest that redundancy might be gained post Fall, but of course this would contravene your claims that mutation can give "no new information".

So you must admit to a fallible Designer, abandon irreducible complexity as evidence of Design, or admit that mutation may confer function.

....as I have said your turgid prose has a 'fog index' approaching thick green pea soup!!!!

.....tell us what you mean, man!!!!:):D

J C

AtomicHorror wrote: »

I would second this.

1. Please define "kinds" in biological terms.

2. Since you contend that evolution is impossible as it cannot create new kinds, please suggest a means by which we could test for the emergence of a new kind.

1. A Kind is a group of organisms that are directly descended from a Created Pair of organisms.:cool:
2. New Kinds DON'T emerge....they were ALL Created during Creation Week.:):D

Galvasean

J C wrote: »

1. A Kind is a group of organisms that are directly descended from a Created Pair of organisms.:cool:

Okay now we're making a bit of progress. Let us elaborate.
Why would say a giraffe and a Brachiosaurus be of the same kind despite their great superficial differences and yet the wolf and the thylacine which are very similar on a superficial be of different kinds? It just doesn't seem logical.

J C

......and here are some pleasant thoughts from Evolutionists for Evolutionists:-
Niles Eldredge (b. 1943) Chief Curator at The American Museum Of Natural History
"As Ernst Mayr, one of the founders of the modern synthetic theory of evolution, pointed out in his Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) Darwin never really did discuss the origin of species in his The Origin of Species." Time Frames (1985) p.33

"There seems to have been almost no change in any part we can compare between the living organism and its fossilized progenitors of the remote geological past. Living fossils embody the theme of evolutionary stability to an extreme degree...We have not completely solved the riddle of living fossils." Fossils (1991) p.101, 108

J C

....and here are some more uplifting quotes confirming how stubbornly the fossil record refuses to yield up the missing links predicted by Darwin:-
Niles Eldredge (b. 1943) Chief Curator at The American Museum Of Natural History

"As a paleontologist, I readily concede that my long dead fossils, lacking any traces of their soft anatomies or behaviors, are totally mute on the subject of reproduction and transmission of genetic information. And this is, I acknowledge, a major limitation to our data. " Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.2

"Simple extrapolation does not work. I found that out back in the 1960s as I tried in vain to document examples of the kind of slow, steady directional change we all thought ought to be there, ever since Darwin told us that natural selection should leave precisely such a telltale signal as we collect our fossils up cliff faces. I found instead, that once species appear in the fossil record, they tend not to change much at all . Species remain imperturbably, implacably resistant to chance as a matter of course. " Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.3

"Stasis is now abundantly well documented as the preeminent paleontological pattern in the evolutionary history of species." Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.77

Galvasean

Just answer the question J C.
or are you simply hiding from what you don't understand?

J C

Galvasean wrote: »

Okay now we're making a bit of progress. Let us elaborate.
Why would say a giraffe and a Brachiosaurus be of the same kind despite their great superficial differences and yet the wolf and the thylacine which are very similar on a superficial be of different kinds? It just doesn't seem logical.

.....I said that the Brachiosaurus and the Giraffe were both MAMMALS.....I didn't say that they were the same Created Kind!!!

J C

Galvasean wrote: »

Just answer the question J C.
or are you simply hiding from what you don't understand?

.....just adding to your Evolutionist education between posts!!!!:pac::D;)
....and speaking of education, here are some more thoughts from the great Niles Eldredge for your delictation:-

"No wonder paleontologists shied away form evolution for so long. It seems never to happen. Assiduous collecting of cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change -- over millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang and often with no firm evidence that the organisms did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on someplace else. Yet that's how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution. " Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.95

"But we saw -- as did several paleontological contemporaries of Darwin -- that if you do collect a series of fossils up through a sequence of sedimentary rock, and if you don't see much evidence of anatomical change through that series, that is indeed evidence that substantial gradual evolutionary change has not occurred within that species lineage, no matter how gappy the record may be. That's why the evidence for stasis now appears so overwhelming. " Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.96

marco_polo

J C wrote: »

:rolleyes:

J C

"The persistent pattern of nonchange within samples, coupled with the abrupt appearance of new species -- organisms marked with anatomical innovations -- had to be telling us something about the way the evolutionary process works. " Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.97 by Niles Eldredge

.....any ideas on WHAT the persistent pattern of nonchange within samples, coupled with the abrupt appearance of new species IS telling us????

.....hint......it will be on your next Creation Science Test Paper.....so you had better study up.....and go for straight 'A's!!!!!:pac::):D

AtomicHorror

J C wrote: »

....as I have said your turgid prose has a 'fog index' approaching thick green pea soup!!!!

.....tell us what you mean, man!!!!:):D

Very well, I will try to clarify in full. Hopefully covering most bases.

You have stated the following:

1. That irreducible complexity (the presence of systems which fail if a critical part is removed) is evidence of intelligent design, and examples of irreducible complexity represent deliberate design decisions made by the Creator.

2. That humans were created with a mixture of irreducibly complex systems as well as redundant systems (systems that contain backups that allow them to continue functioning if a part is removed).

3. That the redundancies created in humans were in place before The Fall and were put in place by the creator in order to protect humans from the effects of The Fall.

4. That redundancies have been lost in some cases as a result of The Fall.

My points are as follows:

1. If irreducible complexity is a deliberate design decision by the creator, it represents a design flaw as in some cases it exists in systems which are critical to the survival of individual humans. This would mean the designer is fallible and/or nor concerned with individual human survival.

2. If redundancies are a deliberate design decision, this represents a design flaw as the redundancies are present in some non-critical systems whilst being absent in some more important ones. This would mean the designer is fallible and/or nor concerned with individual human survival.

3. If humans were created fully redundant, then irreducible complexity in some systems is a result of degeneration of redundant systems due to The Fall. This would mean that irreducible complexity is not evidence of design.

4. If on the other hand humans were designed with full irreducible complexity, this means that redundancies emerged after the fall due to mutation. This would mean that mutations can confer function.

5. If humans were created with both irreducibly complex systems and redundant systems prior to The Fall with the intention of having humans survive the aftermath of that event, the designer is again fallible or negligent. On an individual basis, the design at creation does not reliably allow survival as some redundancies are not essential, whilst others are absent but essential (ie are irreducibly complex). When this is combined with the Creator’s chosen inheritance system, DNA, a system prone to random error, we must conclude that either the Creator was not fully aware of the conditions after the fall, or was not concerned with human survival on an individual basis. This would mean the designer is fallible and/or nor concerned with individual human survival.

I would genuinely be interested in hearing people's opinions on the above. Am I being unclear or confusing?

AtomicHorror

J C wrote: »

1. A Kind is a group of organisms that are directly descended from a Created Pair of organisms.:cool:
2. New Kinds DON'T emerge....they were ALL Created during Creation Week.:):D

1. I asked for a definition in biological terms.

2. In science, we ask "what if" in order to test our hypotheses. Are you now saying that "kinds" are a non-testable concept and thus not part of science?

marco_polo

J C wrote: »

"The persistent pattern of nonchange within samples, coupled with the abrupt appearance of new species -- organisms marked with anatomical innovations -- had to be telling us something about the way the evolutionary process works. " Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.97 by Niles Eldredge

.....any ideas on WHAT the persistent pattern of nonchange within samples, coupled with the abrupt appearance of new species IS telling us????

.....hint......it will be on your next Creation Science Test Paper.....so you had better study up.....and go for straight 'A's!!!!!:pac::):D

Top class quote mining there JC. So close too you were only a paragraph away from answering your own question, if you had kept going.

Here is the rest of it.

Honest mistake I'm sure, no need to apologise.

I simply thought that the time had come to take the fossil record -- the patterns of stability and change -- a bit more literally than had traditionally been the case. George Simpson had begun the process when he insisted that gaps do not explain away the abrupt appearances of large-scale taxa -- meaning, large-scale events of evolutionary change. Simpson was perfectly content to blame the absence of examples of gradual change within and between species on gaps in the record, but found (to his everlasting credit) that the argument could not be stretched to encompass large-scale evolutionary change, such as the derivation of whales or bats from terrestrial mammalian precursors.

I simply extended Simpson's argument to the level of the species. ... The persistent pattern of nonchange within samples, coupled with the abrupt appearance of new species -- organisms marked with anatomical innovations -- had to be telling us something about the way the evolutionary process works. After all, stasis was telling us that the old Darwinian picture couldn't really be entirely right.

But I needed something more than pattern. I needed to explain why evolution leaves an entirely different sort of pattern in the rock record than Darwin and his long string of successors, including many paleontologists -- had supposed. And I found a very ready source of explanation staring me right in the face. I found it in Dobzhansky's and Mayr's work on species and the nature of the speciation process, specifically the derivation of descendant species from ancestral species through geographic isolation. Thus developed the combination of pattern and process that Steve Gould and I called "punctuated equilibria" . . . Speciation, the fragmentation of an ancestral species into two or more descendants, is a component of the evolutionary process. It takes speciation, it seems, to break the stranglehold of stasis, providing the context for lasting evolutionary change. Punctuated equilibria is simply the notion of speciation applied as the explanation for evolutionary change interrupting vastly longer periods of monotonous stasis. It should have been noncontroversial. It wasn't. (pp. 96-97)

AtomicHorror

marco_polo wrote: »

:rolleyes:

On a point of interest, spam (like advertising, personal attacks and harassment) is not allowed on boards.

J C

AtomicHorror wrote: »

Very well, I will try to clarify in full. Hopefully covering most bases.

You have stated the following:

1. That irreducible complexity (the presence of systems which fail if a critical part is removed) is evidence of intelligent design, and examples of irreducible complexity represent deliberate design decisions made by the Creator.

2. That humans were created with a mixture of irreducibly complex systems as well as redundant systems (systems that contain backups that allow them to continue functioning if a part is removed).

3. That the redundancies created in humans were in place before The Fall and were put in place by the creator in order to protect humans from the effects of The Fall.

4. That redundancies have been lost in some cases as a result of The Fall.

My points are as follows:

1. If irreducible complexity is a deliberate design decision by the creator, it represents a design flaw as in some cases it exists in systems which are critical to the survival of individual humans. This would mean the designer is fallible and/or nor concerned with individual human survival.

2. If redundancies are a deliberate design decision, this represents a design flaw as the redundancies are present in some non-critical systems whilst being absent in some more important ones. This would mean the designer is fallible and/or nor concerned with individual human survival.

3. If humans were created fully redundant, then irreducible complexity in some systems is a result of degeneration of redundant systems due to The Fall. This would mean that irreducible complexity is not evidence of design.

4. If on the other hand humans were designed with full irreducible complexity, this means that redundancies emerged after the fall due to mutation. This would mean that mutations can confer function.

5. If humans were created with both irreducibly complex systems and redundant systems prior to The Fall with the intention of having humans survive the aftermath of that event, the designer is again fallible or negligent. On an individual basis, the design at creation does not reliably allow survival as some redundancies are not essential, whilst others are absent but essential (ie are irreducibly complex). When this is combined with the Creator’s chosen inheritance system, DNA, a system prone to random error, we must conclude that either the Creator was not fully aware of the conditions after the fall, or was not concerned with human survival on an individual basis. This would mean the designer is fallible and/or nor concerned with individual human survival.

I would genuinely be interested in hearing people's opinions on the above. Am I being unclear or confusing?

....it is a fair question that you ask.....and the answer is that God Created BOTH redundant systems AND irreducibly complex systems.
The redundant systems were created to cope with the effects of the Fall....as redundancy wasn't an issue for immortal Human Beings before the Fall.
The Irreducibly Complex Systems are there to PROVE to YOU that God Created YOU!!!
....and BTW even the Irreducibly Complex Systems have systems of built in redundancy, such as genetic correction mechanisms and other 'self-healing' mechanisms!!!

.....so God loves you and wants to save you eternally......but He will not save you from physical death....unless you are a Christian at the time of the Rapture!!!!!:D

2Scoops

J C wrote: »

....it is a fair question that you ask.....and the answer is that God Created BOTH redundant systems AND irreducibly complex systems.
The redundant systems were created to cope with the effects of the Fall....as redundancy wasn't an issue for immortal Human Beings before the Fall.
The Irreducibly Complex Systems are there to PROVE to YOU that God Created YOU!!!
....and BTW even the Irreducibly Complex Systems have degrees of built in redundancy in genetic correction mechanisms and other 'self-healing' mechanisms!!!

So, you're going for fallible designer then? Good choice.

Now that that's sorted out, where is the SCIENCE you claim you have conducted? Or, indeed ANY creation science?

J C

marco_polo wrote: »

Top class quote mining there JC. So close too you were only a paragraph away from answering your own question, if you had kept going.

Here is the rest of it.

.........Punctuated equilibria is simply the notion of speciation applied as the explanation for evolutionary change interrupting vastly longer periods of monotonous stasis. It should have been noncontroversial. It wasn't. Reinventing Darwin (1995) (pp. 96-97) by Niles Eldredge

.....any ideas on WHY Punctuated equilibria should have been noncontroversial.....but it wasn't????

.....hint......the evidence for "Punctuated Equilibria" is uncomfortably close to the evidence for "Created Equilbria"....... it will be on your next Creation Science Test Paper.....so you had better study up.....and go for straight 'A's!!!!!
:pac::):D

J C

2Scoops wrote: »

So, you're going for fallible designer then? Good choice.

...God is an omnipoent, just and loving God......
He Created us via His omnipotence.....
He saves us via His Love....
and He will condemn us under His Justice if we freely reject Him.:)

Fanny Cradock

OK, let's try to limit quoting large bodies of text without any synthesis in this thread.

Cool?

AtomicHorror

J C wrote: »

....it is a fair question that you ask.....and the answer is that God Created BOTH redundant systems AND irreducibly complex systems.
The redundant systems were created to cope with the effects of the Fall....as redundancy wasn't an issue for immortal Human Beings before the Fall.
The Irreducibly Complex Systems are there to PROVE to YOU that God Created YOU!!!

So you're telling me that the creator deliberately built breaking points into humans- fatal flaws that prevent many humans from living their full lives- just as a signature? That the creator took action to put human lives at risk?

J C wrote: »

....and BTW even the Irreducibly Complex Systems have degrees of built in redundancy in genetic correction mechanisms and other 'self-healing' mechanisms!!!

But these also fail due to design rather than environment. Why choose a coding system that allows critical failures? If the Creator wished, as you suggest, to show us that we were Created, why not build us entirely irreducibly complex but simply make our genetic material non-mutable or even more resistant to mutation? Why the hodge-podge mix of redundancy and criticality without evidence of prioritising?

J C wrote: »

.....so God loves you and wants to save you eternally......but He will not save you from physical death....unless you are a Christian at the time of the Rapture!!!!!:D

Fine and dandy, but that has little to do with our debate. You're still stuck with a choice, but it seems you're leaning towards the fallible or negligent God.

J C

AtomicHorror wrote: »

On a point of interest, spam (like advertising, personal attacks and harassment) is not allowed on boards.

......I thought you would like to hear what leading Evolutionists have to say about Evolution!!!!:D

AtomicHorror

J C wrote: »

.....any ideas on WHY Punctuated equilibria should have been noncontroversial.....but it wasn't????

.....hint......the evidence for "Punctuated Equilibria" is uncomfortably close to the evidence for "Created Equilbria"....... it will be on your next Creation Science Test Paper.....so you had better study up.....and go for straight 'A's!!!!!
:pac::):D

No, because the proposal was a significant overhaul of an established theory. Standard practice in science is to mount resistance to such significant changes in a framework until adequate evidence is demonstrated. There's no great mystery in that. Gould was being rather humble, but his work had very significant implications and thus was bound to generate healthy debate.

J C

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

OK, let's try to limit quoting large bodies of text without any synthesis in this thread.

Cool?

...I've chosen my quotes carefully to be directly relevant within this thread.....and I have been very open-minded about it.....I have MOSTLY quoted Evolutionists...and not fellow Creationists!!!

AtomicHorror

J C wrote: »

......I thought you would like to hear what leading Evolutionists have to say about Evolution!!!!:D

If you genuinely think it important to do so then by all means continue.