Ho Ho Ho....I read recent comments stemming from the rapid speciation post
Commenters in italics
Me in text
Over the weekend I did some research and was preparing to present what I found, but in the process I came to realize some unfortunate truths:
1. Radar will dismiss any evidence that he does not like. This includes things such as radiometric dating of the earth, the prediction and finding of Tiktaalik, the distribution of fossils in layers of rock, and so on.
No, Radar will present evidence to refute things he disagrees with, and when he does commenters just shut up, fail to understand or pretend to not understand. Remember this later on, when I will demonstrate this.
2. Radar will reinterperate the evidence that he can in order to make it say what he wants. The recent article on rapid speciation readily comes to mind in this category.
Remember what I just stated? The article on speciation was straightforward and based on concrete evidence. The commenter is helpless to refute it, so he claims that I am "reinterpreting" evidence. It is to laugh!
3. Radar will form false analogies in order to trivialize opposing views. Mazement touched on this above. It is one thing for me to say that, because I have used both Mac and PC, I find that PCs work better for my purposes. It would be something completely other to say that, because I have had a computer since I was eight years old, I can conclusively tell you that everything Radar thinks he knows about computers is wrong.
Huh? Care to give an example, or are you just making charges without evidence?
4. After having his pet arguments thoroughly refuted and left behind (we thought) Radar will continue to bring them back as though he had proven them to us. The probability bound he continues to spout is one such case that simply put is "complete excrement of bull."
That rapid speciation article must have really hit the target, the above is more ad hominem attack without content.
There can be no rational discussion where there is this kind of intellectual dishonesty. Radar's mind has clearly been made up and no amount of evidence will change it when, in his mind, his salvation depends upon it not being changed. I do find it interesting that of all people on earth, the only ones who believe in a young earth are those with a religious reason for doing so.
Congratulations, commenter! You have presented an entire comment filled with completely empty and unsubstantiated charges! Lets hope the next one is better...
~~~~~~~
Are you really saying that only scientists can understand science and the rest of us peasants should just shut up and blindly believe what we are told???!!!
I think you're over-reading the bit you were replying to.
Let's move the argument to another field. Suppose you were trying to convert someone to Christianity, and all he had to say was, "Christianity makes no sense! Sometimes they say there's one God, and other times they say there's three. Why won't they make up their minds? And if the Ark of the Covenant was only four feet long, then how did Noah fit all of those animals into it?"
And suppose you patiently corrected him, and then five minutes late he was making the same flawed arguments as if he hadn't heard you?
I often feel that way when presenting arguments on this blog, as a matter of fact. Glad you can feel my pain!
Scientists feel the same way. Modern biology isn't something that was thrown together in an afternoon, it's the product of years of full-time research by thousands of scientists. If you've found a "common-sense" objection to their theories, then there's a good chance that some scientist has already thought about it and can explain why it isn't a problem.
Oh, let's stay with the analogy. This is the situation that existed in the church back in the Middle Ages. I will explain in a moment.
So, no one's claiming that non-scientists can't do science. The claim is that it's arrogant and insulting to say that you understand science better than the vast majority of professionals working in the field.
NO, it isn't. One man's opinion is not inherently better than another man's simply because he has a degree on his wall. The majority opinion can become the bully that pushes the other opinions around because it is the majority but not necessarily because it is right. The minute we decide that the majority opinion must be right, we put an end to scientific research and critical thinking and we might as well shut down science.
Back to the Middle Ages. The average man was not encouraged to receive education nor was he to even own a Bible. The clergy learned to read and they owned the Bibles and they told the peasants what to do and how to think. The prevailing thought was that only the clergy could really understand the Bible and only they could tell the rest of mankind what it contained.
Fortunately, there were some learned individuals that believed that all men should be allowed to own a Bible and be able to read it, and that each man should have his own relationship with the Bible and with God. Men like Nuremberg and Martin Luther, during the Reformation, led the way of revolution in Western Civilization that ultimately led to the establishment of the United States.
I will not kowtow to a scientific establishment that wishes to tell me what to think and what to believe! The evidence is there for all to see and we can all use our minds and decide what we believe the evidence actually means. If you think that thinking for yourself is "arrogant and insulting", then perhaps I should just feel sorry for you. Don't bother passing the Kool-Aid.
To build on the analogy before:
Claiming that there's a conflict between unoformitarianism and catastrophism is just as meaningless as claiming that there's a conflict between monotheism and trinitarianism.
Oh, please! Classic uniformitarianism was definitely not catastrophism, catastrophism has been added in to the new, improved not-quite-uniformitarianism that you apparently seek to defend. You don't know your scientific history.
The "10^50th" argument is based on a seriously flawed misunderstanding of the processes involved; it's on a par with misunderstanding the difference between Noah's Ark and the Ark of the Covenant.
I did pursue the statistical thread for awhile until I realized that many evolutionists also believe in multiverses. In other words, if the odds against something evolving are too great, you just bring in the idea that there could have been almost limitless universes and this just happens to be the one where the impossible became possible. Therefore things along the line of 10^50 become absurd to argue. I present the information that others have written but I don't intend to make it a topic of discussion anymore.
I will say, though, that one of the "discoverers" of DNA, Crick, was so certain that DNA could not possibly have evolved by chance that he became a very strong "panspermian". He was an atheist, so he substituted spacemen from an unknown and unobservable location for a creator God.
I'm pretty sure that rebuttals to both of those arguments have been posted here already.
Professor Schaefer taught at Berkeley so I'm inclined to think he's credible. But are we sure he's a Young-Earth Creationist? In this paper (top of page 3) he says that he believes that the Universe is 15-20 billion years old, and warns against "a wooden or unnaturally literalistic understanding of every [Bible] verse".
You got me here. I knew he was a creationist, didn't check to see if he was a YEC. He isn't. I will be sure to research this before I present the next one, sorry.
~~~~~~~
This interaction is funny. There is this fundamental belief splitting the two sides- both sides see the other side as brainwashed, indoctrinated, and just plain wrong- and no amount of evidence will compel either side to flop to the other side. It's interesting to watch.
I think so, too. Of course, I am laboring under the belief that one side is actually right. I am also trying to allow evidence to win the day. It is a long haul. But the very first thing I asserted about this debate was that worldview was king and that the presuppositions that one brings to the table tend to determine which side you will take. My assertion is this - the naturalistic materialist sees anything that is labeled "God" or "supernatural" and immediately says, "It cannot be!" Therefore that side is deliberately blind to possibilities that the rest of us are free to consider and either accept or reject. The blind leading the blind?
To Radar-
I really can't believe that you try and explain the ark thing with "evidence" and reasoning. That to me is where you start to lose cred. If you want to call the gathering, feeding, storing, caring, washing, breeding, disbursement,........, and all the other problems a flood theory presents a miracle, I can buy that. Sure, if God was my thing I could see believing that God can do anything and that he performed this wild miracle and basically did the whole ark thing him/her/itself. Beyond the miracle theory nothing else makes sense to me. I read your other posts about the ark and they just seem absolutely unreasonable-- the only way this could happen is with complete and utter divine intervention.
You misunderstand. God is capable of miracles and much of the Flood story is a story of miracles, absolutely. But what I have done is to look at the evidence left behind. Based on the evidence, is the miraculous Flood story both possible and plausible? I have asserted strongly that the answer is "yes"! I am not saying that the Flood was caused entirely by natural events nor that Noah depended upon his own strength and wisdom in building the Ark, gathering the animals and caring for them.
If you read my Ark articles with that in mind, you will understand that I am simply looking at the evidence in that way and presenting to the reader how what is recorded in the Ark could have happened. I also contend that the much of what is recorded in Genesis is recorded in part in cultures all over the world. I further contend that a balanced look at the evidence would concede that, if you allow for the possibility of God, it is more reasonable to believe that God created the world rather than the story of macroevolution.
~~~~~~~
Explain why these are "problems".
Isn't it obvious? Based on Radar's numbers, we've got a minimum of 16,000 animals, and that's assuming that you believe that macroevolution is possible and that one species can evolve into another within the same genus. (I think that's also assuming that the ark didn't carry any dinosaurs, or any other animals that went extinct in prehistoric times.)
Did you read the post???!!! Macroevolution has absolutely nothing to do with this at all! 16,000 animals included dinosaurs in the numbers and the speciation involved took place as a result of natural selection working with the genetic material at hand. This loss of information in the gene pool produces speciation but certainly is, if anything, the opposite of macroevolution. This is what I mean by someone either pretending to not understand or else simply just not understanding at all. Wow.
There were only 8 people on the ark, so figure each person was responsible for 2,000 animals. That's a lot of work! A few large animals can go into hibernation, but most of them need food and water practically every day, and a lot of them don't do well in enclosed spaces and need a chance to move around. They also produce manure and various other wastes that would have to be cleaned up.
John Woodmrappe did sketch out a scenario that would allow for all of this to be done. But the Bible just doesn't go into detail in this regard. Were all the animals juveniles? Did they all hibernate? There are all sorts of possibilities but if all the animals were alive and requiring care, the 8-person crew would be able to handle the job if they worked in shifts. Therefore, that would be possible but not comfortable.
Is there a zoo near where you live? Some of them have special tours where you can go behind-the-scenes and see how much work is involved. It's not as easy as it looks! They need way more than 1 full-time employee per 2,000 animals.
I've gotta agree with Lava. The only way the Ark story works is as a continuous year-long act of divine intervention, with Noah & family just doing a token amount of work so they wouldn't feel completely useless. (And I don't think there's anything in the Bible to contradict that.) There'd also need to be one last miracle afterwards, to erase all the evidence of a world-wide flood by creating the geologic column and so forth.
Hmmm, you were doing pretty good with those two paragraphs until you got to the geologic column. The geologic column is a strong piece of evidence that the Flood actually occurred and it is a problem for evolutionists. As I have said, and they haven't been able to refute it, the column is a story of catastrophism by water all over the world. This fits the world-wide flood. I think the other explanations are stretches that border on, no, actually enter in to the world of the ridiculous. Do you really think that the world was subjected to eleven-twelve world-wide catastrophes that resulted in water-produced sedimentary layers? No? Do you then think the layers are layed down in a uniform fashion? No? How about dozens and dozens of localized disasters that somehow laid down similar layers around the world? No? So you look at the geologic columns and tell me YOUR story...
Okay, back to the evidence. I presented some compelling evidence showing that variation in kind (you may call it speciation) by natural selection is able to make rapid and significant changes to organisms through the selection of and often the loss of genetic material. This supports the rapid changes within types or kinds of animals after the Flood.
On the other hand, over several generations of study and tests and attempts to find evidences of macroevolution, is just isn't happening. It is not being observed to happen at all.
These statements are based on actual observation, not my opinion. The observations back up the idea of a Creator God who made animals with a rich genetic code that would be able to help the organisms adjust to wide varieties of environment and still fulfill their place in the ecosystem of the planet.
Macroevolution, which requires additions to the gene pool, is not observed. Evolutionists will say that macroevolution happens too fast to see in the fossil record, and too slow to be observed in real life. But, darn it, you would expect to see something after a couple of hundred years of trying, wouldn't you?
In any event, let us stay on rapid speciation and the addition or loss of genetic information. I am still waiting for the first post from a macroevolutionist who can bring facts to bear to his side of this issue. Still waiting...
Posts may well be few between now and after Christmas. Peace and blessings on Christmas to all of you!!!!!!!!!!!!
Me in text
Over the weekend I did some research and was preparing to present what I found, but in the process I came to realize some unfortunate truths:
1. Radar will dismiss any evidence that he does not like. This includes things such as radiometric dating of the earth, the prediction and finding of Tiktaalik, the distribution of fossils in layers of rock, and so on.
No, Radar will present evidence to refute things he disagrees with, and when he does commenters just shut up, fail to understand or pretend to not understand. Remember this later on, when I will demonstrate this.
2. Radar will reinterperate the evidence that he can in order to make it say what he wants. The recent article on rapid speciation readily comes to mind in this category.
Remember what I just stated? The article on speciation was straightforward and based on concrete evidence. The commenter is helpless to refute it, so he claims that I am "reinterpreting" evidence. It is to laugh!
3. Radar will form false analogies in order to trivialize opposing views. Mazement touched on this above. It is one thing for me to say that, because I have used both Mac and PC, I find that PCs work better for my purposes. It would be something completely other to say that, because I have had a computer since I was eight years old, I can conclusively tell you that everything Radar thinks he knows about computers is wrong.
Huh? Care to give an example, or are you just making charges without evidence?
4. After having his pet arguments thoroughly refuted and left behind (we thought) Radar will continue to bring them back as though he had proven them to us. The probability bound he continues to spout is one such case that simply put is "complete excrement of bull."
That rapid speciation article must have really hit the target, the above is more ad hominem attack without content.
There can be no rational discussion where there is this kind of intellectual dishonesty. Radar's mind has clearly been made up and no amount of evidence will change it when, in his mind, his salvation depends upon it not being changed. I do find it interesting that of all people on earth, the only ones who believe in a young earth are those with a religious reason for doing so.
Congratulations, commenter! You have presented an entire comment filled with completely empty and unsubstantiated charges! Lets hope the next one is better...
~~~~~~~
Are you really saying that only scientists can understand science and the rest of us peasants should just shut up and blindly believe what we are told???!!!
I think you're over-reading the bit you were replying to.
Let's move the argument to another field. Suppose you were trying to convert someone to Christianity, and all he had to say was, "Christianity makes no sense! Sometimes they say there's one God, and other times they say there's three. Why won't they make up their minds? And if the Ark of the Covenant was only four feet long, then how did Noah fit all of those animals into it?"
And suppose you patiently corrected him, and then five minutes late he was making the same flawed arguments as if he hadn't heard you?
I often feel that way when presenting arguments on this blog, as a matter of fact. Glad you can feel my pain!
Scientists feel the same way. Modern biology isn't something that was thrown together in an afternoon, it's the product of years of full-time research by thousands of scientists. If you've found a "common-sense" objection to their theories, then there's a good chance that some scientist has already thought about it and can explain why it isn't a problem.
Oh, let's stay with the analogy. This is the situation that existed in the church back in the Middle Ages. I will explain in a moment.
So, no one's claiming that non-scientists can't do science. The claim is that it's arrogant and insulting to say that you understand science better than the vast majority of professionals working in the field.
NO, it isn't. One man's opinion is not inherently better than another man's simply because he has a degree on his wall. The majority opinion can become the bully that pushes the other opinions around because it is the majority but not necessarily because it is right. The minute we decide that the majority opinion must be right, we put an end to scientific research and critical thinking and we might as well shut down science.
Back to the Middle Ages. The average man was not encouraged to receive education nor was he to even own a Bible. The clergy learned to read and they owned the Bibles and they told the peasants what to do and how to think. The prevailing thought was that only the clergy could really understand the Bible and only they could tell the rest of mankind what it contained.
Fortunately, there were some learned individuals that believed that all men should be allowed to own a Bible and be able to read it, and that each man should have his own relationship with the Bible and with God. Men like Nuremberg and Martin Luther, during the Reformation, led the way of revolution in Western Civilization that ultimately led to the establishment of the United States.
I will not kowtow to a scientific establishment that wishes to tell me what to think and what to believe! The evidence is there for all to see and we can all use our minds and decide what we believe the evidence actually means. If you think that thinking for yourself is "arrogant and insulting", then perhaps I should just feel sorry for you. Don't bother passing the Kool-Aid.
To build on the analogy before:
Claiming that there's a conflict between unoformitarianism and catastrophism is just as meaningless as claiming that there's a conflict between monotheism and trinitarianism.
Oh, please! Classic uniformitarianism was definitely not catastrophism, catastrophism has been added in to the new, improved not-quite-uniformitarianism that you apparently seek to defend. You don't know your scientific history.
The "10^50th" argument is based on a seriously flawed misunderstanding of the processes involved; it's on a par with misunderstanding the difference between Noah's Ark and the Ark of the Covenant.
I did pursue the statistical thread for awhile until I realized that many evolutionists also believe in multiverses. In other words, if the odds against something evolving are too great, you just bring in the idea that there could have been almost limitless universes and this just happens to be the one where the impossible became possible. Therefore things along the line of 10^50 become absurd to argue. I present the information that others have written but I don't intend to make it a topic of discussion anymore.
I will say, though, that one of the "discoverers" of DNA, Crick, was so certain that DNA could not possibly have evolved by chance that he became a very strong "panspermian". He was an atheist, so he substituted spacemen from an unknown and unobservable location for a creator God.
I'm pretty sure that rebuttals to both of those arguments have been posted here already.
Professor Schaefer taught at Berkeley so I'm inclined to think he's credible. But are we sure he's a Young-Earth Creationist? In this paper (top of page 3) he says that he believes that the Universe is 15-20 billion years old, and warns against "a wooden or unnaturally literalistic understanding of every [Bible] verse".
You got me here. I knew he was a creationist, didn't check to see if he was a YEC. He isn't. I will be sure to research this before I present the next one, sorry.
~~~~~~~
This interaction is funny. There is this fundamental belief splitting the two sides- both sides see the other side as brainwashed, indoctrinated, and just plain wrong- and no amount of evidence will compel either side to flop to the other side. It's interesting to watch.
I think so, too. Of course, I am laboring under the belief that one side is actually right. I am also trying to allow evidence to win the day. It is a long haul. But the very first thing I asserted about this debate was that worldview was king and that the presuppositions that one brings to the table tend to determine which side you will take. My assertion is this - the naturalistic materialist sees anything that is labeled "God" or "supernatural" and immediately says, "It cannot be!" Therefore that side is deliberately blind to possibilities that the rest of us are free to consider and either accept or reject. The blind leading the blind?
To Radar-
I really can't believe that you try and explain the ark thing with "evidence" and reasoning. That to me is where you start to lose cred. If you want to call the gathering, feeding, storing, caring, washing, breeding, disbursement,........, and all the other problems a flood theory presents a miracle, I can buy that. Sure, if God was my thing I could see believing that God can do anything and that he performed this wild miracle and basically did the whole ark thing him/her/itself. Beyond the miracle theory nothing else makes sense to me. I read your other posts about the ark and they just seem absolutely unreasonable-- the only way this could happen is with complete and utter divine intervention.
You misunderstand. God is capable of miracles and much of the Flood story is a story of miracles, absolutely. But what I have done is to look at the evidence left behind. Based on the evidence, is the miraculous Flood story both possible and plausible? I have asserted strongly that the answer is "yes"! I am not saying that the Flood was caused entirely by natural events nor that Noah depended upon his own strength and wisdom in building the Ark, gathering the animals and caring for them.
If you read my Ark articles with that in mind, you will understand that I am simply looking at the evidence in that way and presenting to the reader how what is recorded in the Ark could have happened. I also contend that the much of what is recorded in Genesis is recorded in part in cultures all over the world. I further contend that a balanced look at the evidence would concede that, if you allow for the possibility of God, it is more reasonable to believe that God created the world rather than the story of macroevolution.
~~~~~~~
Explain why these are "problems".
Isn't it obvious? Based on Radar's numbers, we've got a minimum of 16,000 animals, and that's assuming that you believe that macroevolution is possible and that one species can evolve into another within the same genus. (I think that's also assuming that the ark didn't carry any dinosaurs, or any other animals that went extinct in prehistoric times.)
Did you read the post???!!! Macroevolution has absolutely nothing to do with this at all! 16,000 animals included dinosaurs in the numbers and the speciation involved took place as a result of natural selection working with the genetic material at hand. This loss of information in the gene pool produces speciation but certainly is, if anything, the opposite of macroevolution. This is what I mean by someone either pretending to not understand or else simply just not understanding at all. Wow.
There were only 8 people on the ark, so figure each person was responsible for 2,000 animals. That's a lot of work! A few large animals can go into hibernation, but most of them need food and water practically every day, and a lot of them don't do well in enclosed spaces and need a chance to move around. They also produce manure and various other wastes that would have to be cleaned up.
John Woodmrappe did sketch out a scenario that would allow for all of this to be done. But the Bible just doesn't go into detail in this regard. Were all the animals juveniles? Did they all hibernate? There are all sorts of possibilities but if all the animals were alive and requiring care, the 8-person crew would be able to handle the job if they worked in shifts. Therefore, that would be possible but not comfortable.
Is there a zoo near where you live? Some of them have special tours where you can go behind-the-scenes and see how much work is involved. It's not as easy as it looks! They need way more than 1 full-time employee per 2,000 animals.
I've gotta agree with Lava. The only way the Ark story works is as a continuous year-long act of divine intervention, with Noah & family just doing a token amount of work so they wouldn't feel completely useless. (And I don't think there's anything in the Bible to contradict that.) There'd also need to be one last miracle afterwards, to erase all the evidence of a world-wide flood by creating the geologic column and so forth.
Hmmm, you were doing pretty good with those two paragraphs until you got to the geologic column. The geologic column is a strong piece of evidence that the Flood actually occurred and it is a problem for evolutionists. As I have said, and they haven't been able to refute it, the column is a story of catastrophism by water all over the world. This fits the world-wide flood. I think the other explanations are stretches that border on, no, actually enter in to the world of the ridiculous. Do you really think that the world was subjected to eleven-twelve world-wide catastrophes that resulted in water-produced sedimentary layers? No? Do you then think the layers are layed down in a uniform fashion? No? How about dozens and dozens of localized disasters that somehow laid down similar layers around the world? No? So you look at the geologic columns and tell me YOUR story...
Okay, back to the evidence. I presented some compelling evidence showing that variation in kind (you may call it speciation) by natural selection is able to make rapid and significant changes to organisms through the selection of and often the loss of genetic material. This supports the rapid changes within types or kinds of animals after the Flood.
On the other hand, over several generations of study and tests and attempts to find evidences of macroevolution, is just isn't happening. It is not being observed to happen at all.
These statements are based on actual observation, not my opinion. The observations back up the idea of a Creator God who made animals with a rich genetic code that would be able to help the organisms adjust to wide varieties of environment and still fulfill their place in the ecosystem of the planet.
Macroevolution, which requires additions to the gene pool, is not observed. Evolutionists will say that macroevolution happens too fast to see in the fossil record, and too slow to be observed in real life. But, darn it, you would expect to see something after a couple of hundred years of trying, wouldn't you?
In any event, let us stay on rapid speciation and the addition or loss of genetic information. I am still waiting for the first post from a macroevolutionist who can bring facts to bear to his side of this issue. Still waiting...
Posts may well be few between now and after Christmas. Peace and blessings on Christmas to all of you!!!!!!!!!!!!