Answers to comments on DNA and Science

I did not ask how preexisting DNA is read, nor did I ask about mutations."

No, you said information doesn't grow on trees. Jon responded to that by pointing out that it comes from mutations, though it should be added that it comes from mutations filtered through natural selection, leading to information as to which mutations are useful being retained and becoming part of the organism's genetic makeup. Hence an accumulation of genetic information over time.

You have nothing here. Mutations of WHAT? Where does DNA come from? The immense complexity of DNA is a mystery to most of us. A great deal of DNA is information. Information is intentional, a component of design. Anyone who looks at this objectively would say that DNA is a remarkable piece of engineering.

Maybe you can do card tricks, but first you need the cards. Darwinism has no explanation for where the cards came from in the first place and shuffling the deck is not making anything. Taking a couple of cards from the deck changes it but doesn't make it...

"Where in the world did you get the idea a pile of mud would suddenly convert itself into a complex blueprint with complex copying/coding mechanisms that the finest minds do not yet completely understand?"

Ah, I see where you're having a problem with this: "pile of mud" and "suddenly". A pile of mud suddenly turning into a modern human... but wait, that's the story in the Bible. And you're right, it does sound pretty silly... but it's not what the theory of evolution says, so you can direct that complaint at the Bible, not the theory of evolution.

We're talking about something different here, see. Gradual evolution over many, many, many generations, not suddenly. The evidence is strong for evolution having occurred. Witness for example - this has come up on your blog quite a lot in the last few days - the fact that the theory of evolution perfectly matches the location of fossils in the fossil record, for which YEC/global flood thinkers have absolutely no response. You hear incredibly vague mutterings about "specific gravity" or "ability to flee" and such as ways of explaining why fossils are arranged in this way, but none even comes close to matching up with reality and providing a scientific explanation of how such a mechanism "sorted" the fossils as they are currently found.

Point one.

"If you could peer into any one of your body's 50 trillion cells, you'd find a fantastically complex and busy world. At the center of this world you'd find a nucleus containing 46 molecules called chromosomes-23 from your mother and 23 from your father. These chromosomes are basically an instruction set for the construction and maintenance of... you..

These two long stacks of building blocks fit together like two sides of zipper, but there's a rule involved: adenine only pairs with thymine, and cytosine only pairs with guanine. So each rung in the DNA ladder is a pair of nucleotides, and each pair is either an A stuck to a T or a C stuck to a G.

You've got six billion of these pairs of nucleotides in each of your cells, and amongst these six billion nucleotide pairs are roughly 30,000 genes. A gene is a distinct stretch of DNA that determines something about who you are. (More on that later.) Genes vary in size, from just a few thousand pairs of nucleotides (or "base pairs") to over two million base pairs." From Stanford University's tech blog. The DNA in your body would stretch out to the moon and back 130,000 times. Why is this important? Because DNA is very exacting and very complex. It is hilariously ridiculous to believe that any series of accidents could produce this blueprint for life.

Second, hydrologists know that sorting by size and shape and specific gravity happens and that the oft-found ripple marks in the rock record is a clue of fast-moving flood waters.

Third, Darwinists say that the fossils show an evolution of creatures. So why are all these living fossils being found? If Coelecanths and Wollemi Pines are all found deep in the rocks and then disappear as other forms take their place, how is it they still exist? There are many creatures that are found in just one or two "epochs" in the fossil record but are also found now. Did they all get in a time machine or was the layering of the sedimentary rocks a matter of habitat, escapability and size?

I take the fact that you attempt to argue against the theory of evolution by focusing on another subject, abiogenesis, as a tacit admission that you can't actually come up with any solid arguments against the theory of evolution itself. Fine by me. So if your beef is with abiogenesis, why not conclude that God did it? The theory of evolution stands regardless, as it matches the evidence and there is no competing theory that does the same.

I have often pointed out that evolution has been tested and falsified so you have to have intentionally missed that part. Speciation is invariably associated with the loss of information. Mutation is nothing more than a bit player in the game. On rare occasion one mutation may pass on but one mutation in the genetic code that is exceedingly complex is not enough to even begin to make a new system, let alone a new organism. I will say it again, thousands of generations of fruit flies and millions of generations of bacteria have falsified Darwinism.

As for the origin of DNA not being solved yet, did you think that was some kind of secret? You make a fuss about Chaos Engineer "admitting" this, but who ever claimed that this had been 100% solved?

Here's the thing though: if you think you have the answer, and that answer happens to be "God did it", then you don't have any more information at all. And to make it worse, you have less (or no) curiosity. You've given yourself a reason not to investigate further.

But... you don't really have the answer as to how God did it, do you? That answer is "well, God just did it", right?

Right?

Hey, you understand that part, yes. God is the only answer here. Your so-called answer is to replace "God" with "Oops" and have "Oops" just keep on happening in every situation. What a lucky break that everything came from nothing and turned itself into billions of objects in the sky and billions of organisms under the Sun! Boy that Oops it just happened is a great example of science in action!


You see, Radar, if what you believe is true and God did create everything we see around us, he must have done it somehow. And it's that somehow that concerns scientists. How did this happen in nature?

It's at this point that scientists investigate and, little by little, expand human knowledge about the world around them. Creationists say "God did it", mistake that for an answer, and then try to shoot holes in the theory of evolution.

-- creeper

Funny how the terrible cumbersome disadvantage of believing in God did not hinder Newton or Linnaeus or Mendel or Kelvin, huh? In fact, scientists believed that a Logical God made the Universe and therefore a logical reason for how things work and logical systems of operation could be investigated and understood and that is the way most scientists did work and still do work. Operational science depends on a logical Universe and expects logical answers. It only makes sense that a Logical Mind designed everything. Otherwise why would things make sense? Why would random happenings produce non-random processes? Darwinists drive the vehicle God made when they call upon reason and logic.

Do a search on my blog on "rapid speciation" and then we will talk further.

~

Scientists don't claim to have all the answers...and even if they did have all the answers, they wouldn't admit it, because then they'd be out of a job! Anyway, there are other questions that are easy for scientists but hard for Creationists. Like: "How many of the 350,000 known species of beetle were on Noah's Ark, and how many evolved after the Flood? And why do we even need 350,000 species of beetle, anyway?"

No beetles would have been on Noah's Ark, the language of the Bible is specifically limited to land-based veterbrates and birds. All other creatures had the ability to last out a year-long flood by living in vast mats of plant and tree debris that would have floated on the surface during the 150 plus days that the water overflowed everything.

Instead of focusing on questions that science can't answer yet, I think it would be better to focus on the questions that science does a good job of answering, and then shoehorn that information into a Creationist model. (For example, the Flood story makes the most sense when we read it as the story of a memorable local flood, which was part of an oral history and had gotten greatly exaggerated before Moses finally wrote it down.)

Not really. We have rock layers that stretch across continents and are often very thick in places so that we are talking of millions of tons of rock comprising just one layer of an entire series of rock layers that are all typical of flood layering. Only a world-wide flood works in this case.

Besides, the knowledge we have does not have to be shoehorned into Creation. It is the simple solution, the one that does not need all sorts of incredible stretches of the imagination to explain the world in which we live. We will all be better off when science agrees that the Universe was designed and spends more time trying to use it better and safer and no more time on fruitless snipe hunts for the Chance Fairy's invisible tracks.

Let's address the speciation issue soon, perhaps Monday?