The Lords of Evolution do not deign the peasantry shall opine!
Commenters in italics, me in plain text:
You demonstrated that IF the world was mostly flat and IF there was only one continent and IF water came up from underground THEN the world could have been covered. But where is the evidence that any of these things DID happen in the last four thousand years.
You mean besides water-catastrophic fossil rock layers all over the entire planet and a narrative involving an ark and a flood found in most cultures in the world? How about the Genesis account of the flood, which fits available evidence.
I still see no place where this 16,000 number came from. The link you mentioned simply says "I then figured out how many animals were on the Ark, arriving at approximately 16,000." There is no mention of how that number was reached.
Using the Genus as an equivalent generally to the kind, he assigns 7428 mammals, 4602 birds and 3724 reptiles to the ark. 15,754 is then rounded up to 16,000
The claim that dinosaurs simply grew larger because they lived longer than lizards now has two problems with it:
First, where is the evidence that any organism will continue to grow the longer it lives (it seems to me that this is obviously not the case.)
I quote from this site, something that is common knowledge to those familiar with zoology:
Which is true when it comes to animal growth? Animals:
A. Reach a particular size and then stop growing
B. Keep growing indefinitely
C. All of the above
If you guessed C, congratulations! The skeletons of most mammals reach a certain size and then stop growing. But many animals, including some mammals, keep growing throughout their lives. Kangaroos, for example, just keep growing and growing until they die. Most fish, amphibians, lizards, and snakes are also indeterminate growers. Until something--disease, a predator, or old age-takes them down, these animals know no bounds when it comes to size.
Dinosaurs, being most akin to snakes/amphibians/lizards could have been expected to keep growing throughout their lives. In antediluvial conditions, they grew to often enormous sizes, as the fossil record shows.
Second, this contradicts your other claims that dinosaurs lived after the flood. If their size was due to different atmospheric conditions, they would not have been around post flood, would they?
The documentation of man encountering dinosaur after the Flood usually presents dinosaurs as being big, but not Patagonia-huge as they were before the flood. It appears that post-Flood dinos tended not to grow any larger than half of their antediluvian limits. This is also true of most of the paintings and carvings and drawings of dinosaurs from the past.
What is insulting (not to me personally but I'm sure a great number of respected scientists would feel so) is that because you "have taken courses in Biology, Physics, Chemistry and Anthropology as well as Geology" you seem to think that you have the knowledge to overturn a couple hundred years worth of some of the most important scientific discoveries made.
You gotta be kiddin' me!!!!! Do I have to be a chef to determine whether a strip steak is tasty? Must I be a musician to decide whether or not I like an album by Muse? Should football fans be banned from cheering or booing unless they can prove that they are coaches? 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???!!! Not in this lifetime and not this blogger, dude! You can take that elitist attitude back to Berkeley or wherever it was first input into you and...well, leave it there. (I am a gentleman). Insulting, to disagree with you? To disagree with Richard Dawkins? Hmm, what if you guys are WRONG?
On the topic of world view and science, if it were all about world view, Francis Collins would not be a proponent of evolution. Plain and simple. He is a firm believer in god and a devoutly religious man. However, he also has a knowledge of DNA and genetics which I would say surpasses most people alive, as well as a firm understanding of evolutionary theory. If DNA and genetics poses such a barrier to evolution as you suggest, and worldview is responsible for belief in evolution, as you have asserted multiple times, Francis Collins would not be be a proponent of evolution. Period. The same can be said for many many other scientists with similar credentials and beliefs. I gave you a few names previously but I'm sure if you really want I can find hundreds more just to demonstrate that this is not an anomaly.
I can find hundreds of creation scientists, too. So what? 40 years ago, I would have found that the majority of geologists were uniformitarians. 50 years ago the majority of adults in the Soviet Union would have claimed to be communist, and 70 years ago most Germans claimed to be Nazis. 700 years ago the vast majority of mankind thought the earth was flat.
Francis Crick, one of the "discovers" of DNA is an atheist, and yet do you know he didn't believe life happened by chance? He knew that DNA was too complex and there were too many factors involved that precluded its evolution...but since he hated the idea of God, he was a panspermia advocate. Yeah, unknown spacemen seeded the earth with life, that's science!
Remember my series by Dr. Schaefer? Here are his credentials:
"Professor Henry F. (Fritz) Schaefer is one of the most distinguished physical scientists in the world. The U.S. News and World Report cover story of December 23, 1991 speculated that Professor Schaefer is a “five time nominee for the Nobel Prize.” He has received four of the most prestigious awards of the American Chemical Society, as well as the most highly esteemed award (the Centenary Medal) given to a non-British subject by London’s Royal Society of Chemistry. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Moreover, his general interest lectures on science and religion have riveted large audiences in nearly all the major universities in the U.S.A. and in Beijing, Berlin, Budapest, Calcutta, Cape Town, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, Paris, Prague, Sarajevo, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Sofia, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tokyo, Warsaw, Zagreb, and Zürich.
For 18 years Dr. Schaefer was a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, where he remains Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus. Since 1987 Dr. Schaefer has been Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia."
Dr. Schaefer is a YEC creationist, just as I am. Is he an insult to Isaac Asimov? I will gladly post an article by a credentialed creation-believing scientist every week, if the public demands, and I could keep doing it with a different scientist each week for years and years.
I agree with scientists who say things such as the following:
"Based on probability factors . . any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 4.80 x 10 to the 50th. Such a number, if written out, would read:
480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
"Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 10 to the 50th has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence (and even that gives it the benefit of the doubt!). Any species known to us, including the smallest single-cell bacteria, have enormously larger number of nucleotides than 100 or 1000. In fact, single cell bacteria display about 3,000,000 nucleotides, aligned in a very specific sequence. This means that there is no mathematical probability whatever for any known species to have been the product of a random occurrence—random mutations (to use the evolutionist's favorite expression)."—I.L. Cohen, Darwin was Wrong (1984), p. 205.
Therefore
"The usual answer to this question is that there was plenty of time to try everything. I could never accept this answer. Random shuttling of bricks will never build a castle or a Greek temple, however long the available time. A random process can build meaningful structures only if there is some kind of selection between meaningful and nonsense mutations."—Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, "The Evolutionary Paradox and Biological Stability," in Molecular Evolution, p. 111.
At the very least, evolution remains completely unproven and undemonstrated, certainly not worthy of being the feature of the systematic brainwashing that takes place in our school systems and information media day after day. I stand with those who question these fallacies and contend for the truth!
You demonstrated that IF the world was mostly flat and IF there was only one continent and IF water came up from underground THEN the world could have been covered. But where is the evidence that any of these things DID happen in the last four thousand years.
You mean besides water-catastrophic fossil rock layers all over the entire planet and a narrative involving an ark and a flood found in most cultures in the world? How about the Genesis account of the flood, which fits available evidence.
I still see no place where this 16,000 number came from. The link you mentioned simply says "I then figured out how many animals were on the Ark, arriving at approximately 16,000." There is no mention of how that number was reached.
Using the Genus as an equivalent generally to the kind, he assigns 7428 mammals, 4602 birds and 3724 reptiles to the ark. 15,754 is then rounded up to 16,000
The claim that dinosaurs simply grew larger because they lived longer than lizards now has two problems with it:
First, where is the evidence that any organism will continue to grow the longer it lives (it seems to me that this is obviously not the case.)
I quote from this site, something that is common knowledge to those familiar with zoology:
Which is true when it comes to animal growth? Animals:
A. Reach a particular size and then stop growing
B. Keep growing indefinitely
C. All of the above
If you guessed C, congratulations! The skeletons of most mammals reach a certain size and then stop growing. But many animals, including some mammals, keep growing throughout their lives. Kangaroos, for example, just keep growing and growing until they die. Most fish, amphibians, lizards, and snakes are also indeterminate growers. Until something--disease, a predator, or old age-takes them down, these animals know no bounds when it comes to size.
Dinosaurs, being most akin to snakes/amphibians/lizards could have been expected to keep growing throughout their lives. In antediluvial conditions, they grew to often enormous sizes, as the fossil record shows.
Second, this contradicts your other claims that dinosaurs lived after the flood. If their size was due to different atmospheric conditions, they would not have been around post flood, would they?
The documentation of man encountering dinosaur after the Flood usually presents dinosaurs as being big, but not Patagonia-huge as they were before the flood. It appears that post-Flood dinos tended not to grow any larger than half of their antediluvian limits. This is also true of most of the paintings and carvings and drawings of dinosaurs from the past.
What is insulting (not to me personally but I'm sure a great number of respected scientists would feel so) is that because you "have taken courses in Biology, Physics, Chemistry and Anthropology as well as Geology" you seem to think that you have the knowledge to overturn a couple hundred years worth of some of the most important scientific discoveries made.
You gotta be kiddin' me!!!!! Do I have to be a chef to determine whether a strip steak is tasty? Must I be a musician to decide whether or not I like an album by Muse? Should football fans be banned from cheering or booing unless they can prove that they are coaches? 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???!!! Not in this lifetime and not this blogger, dude! You can take that elitist attitude back to Berkeley or wherever it was first input into you and...well, leave it there. (I am a gentleman). Insulting, to disagree with you? To disagree with Richard Dawkins? Hmm, what if you guys are WRONG?
On the topic of world view and science, if it were all about world view, Francis Collins would not be a proponent of evolution. Plain and simple. He is a firm believer in god and a devoutly religious man. However, he also has a knowledge of DNA and genetics which I would say surpasses most people alive, as well as a firm understanding of evolutionary theory. If DNA and genetics poses such a barrier to evolution as you suggest, and worldview is responsible for belief in evolution, as you have asserted multiple times, Francis Collins would not be be a proponent of evolution. Period. The same can be said for many many other scientists with similar credentials and beliefs. I gave you a few names previously but I'm sure if you really want I can find hundreds more just to demonstrate that this is not an anomaly.
I can find hundreds of creation scientists, too. So what? 40 years ago, I would have found that the majority of geologists were uniformitarians. 50 years ago the majority of adults in the Soviet Union would have claimed to be communist, and 70 years ago most Germans claimed to be Nazis. 700 years ago the vast majority of mankind thought the earth was flat.
Francis Crick, one of the "discovers" of DNA is an atheist, and yet do you know he didn't believe life happened by chance? He knew that DNA was too complex and there were too many factors involved that precluded its evolution...but since he hated the idea of God, he was a panspermia advocate. Yeah, unknown spacemen seeded the earth with life, that's science!
Remember my series by Dr. Schaefer? Here are his credentials:
"Professor Henry F. (Fritz) Schaefer is one of the most distinguished physical scientists in the world. The U.S. News and World Report cover story of December 23, 1991 speculated that Professor Schaefer is a “five time nominee for the Nobel Prize.” He has received four of the most prestigious awards of the American Chemical Society, as well as the most highly esteemed award (the Centenary Medal) given to a non-British subject by London’s Royal Society of Chemistry. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Moreover, his general interest lectures on science and religion have riveted large audiences in nearly all the major universities in the U.S.A. and in Beijing, Berlin, Budapest, Calcutta, Cape Town, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, Paris, Prague, Sarajevo, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Sofia, St. Petersburg, Sydney, Tokyo, Warsaw, Zagreb, and Zürich.
For 18 years Dr. Schaefer was a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, where he remains Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus. Since 1987 Dr. Schaefer has been Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia."
Dr. Schaefer is a YEC creationist, just as I am. Is he an insult to Isaac Asimov? I will gladly post an article by a credentialed creation-believing scientist every week, if the public demands, and I could keep doing it with a different scientist each week for years and years.
I agree with scientists who say things such as the following:
"Based on probability factors . . any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 4.80 x 10 to the 50th. Such a number, if written out, would read:
480,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
"Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 10 to the 50th has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence (and even that gives it the benefit of the doubt!). Any species known to us, including the smallest single-cell bacteria, have enormously larger number of nucleotides than 100 or 1000. In fact, single cell bacteria display about 3,000,000 nucleotides, aligned in a very specific sequence. This means that there is no mathematical probability whatever for any known species to have been the product of a random occurrence—random mutations (to use the evolutionist's favorite expression)."—I.L. Cohen, Darwin was Wrong (1984), p. 205.
Therefore
"The usual answer to this question is that there was plenty of time to try everything. I could never accept this answer. Random shuttling of bricks will never build a castle or a Greek temple, however long the available time. A random process can build meaningful structures only if there is some kind of selection between meaningful and nonsense mutations."—Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, "The Evolutionary Paradox and Biological Stability," in Molecular Evolution, p. 111.
At the very least, evolution remains completely unproven and undemonstrated, certainly not worthy of being the feature of the systematic brainwashing that takes place in our school systems and information media day after day. I stand with those who question these fallacies and contend for the truth!