Creation-Evolution-Creative Days-Age of the Earth-Humanoid Fossils-Great Flood

[Srecko Sostar]

56 minutes ago, xero said:

So you can read that and say meat was off limits, or you can say it was simply not mentioned, but assumed.

It is a fertile ground for doctrinal interpretations and for spreading the partial interests of interest groups and individuals.

Does this mean that the Bible is written to “hide the truth” from some, and that some others “can see” it, and that third group (others) can abuse it (Bible) to “blur the vision” of those in the first two groups?

Do you see yourself in any of those groups or you belong to "fourth" group? :))

[AlanF]

xero said:

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The design argument is used all the time. It's an inference to the best explanation. It's used in archaeology and it's used in forensics. The arguments against it's use in the case of OOL is that those who exclude it are doing so out out a philosophy, namely philosophic materialism.

You're invoking a fallacy called "false equivalence". Not all "design arguments" are equivalent. We're raised in a culture where people produce all manner of artifacts. We recognize them as artifacts because we've seen people make them, and we buy them from sellers of artifacts. William Paley's "watchmaker design argument" is entirely based on such recognition. Paley argued that the Christian God is the Great Watchmaker, but his argument fails because no one has seen this God produce any life forms.

Because we have never seen anyone construct a life form, we cannot logically regard life forms as artifacts. We have barely a clue how it might be done. However, as biologist Richard Lewontin wrote (Scientific American, "Adaptation", September 1978, p. 213):

<< The manifest fit between organisms and their environment is a major outcome of evolution. >>

In other words, what Paley regarded as "the design of life" is explained by the various mechanisms of evolution as the natural outcome of millions of years of adaptation -- blind adaptation driven by the vagaries of natural selection rather than conscious design.

The blindness of this adaptation is ubiquitous in life forms, as shown by the often goofy or even bad 'design' seen in many organisms. All life forms contain ERVs (endogenous retroviruses) -- fragments of once-complete viruses that at some point in the distant past infected the reproductive cells of a parent and were passed on to offspring and eventually incorporated into entire populations. Today they are literally "junk DNA", being mere fragments of a virus. Something like 5%-8% of human DNA is comprised of such (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus#:~:text=Endogenous%20retroviruses%20(ERVs)%20are%20endogenous,lower%20estimates%20of%20~1%25).) . These ERVs can often be traced back through genes to some original ancestor, and thence to various descendents, thus proving genetic ancestry.

Now, it might be possible that a Creator used ERVs to help organisms to evolve, but that's pushing the limits of believability. Any computer scientist would regard sticking junk into a DNA sequence as just plain stupid, and bad design. But random mutations followed by natural selection explain it perfectly. And of course, whether some Creator or Evolution inserted ERVs into the DNA, they're irrefutable evidence for Evolution, whether guided by God or as the result of normal evolutionary mechanisms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7HBMWfRqSA

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The argument is quite simple and circular

Wrong.

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God doesn't exist, therefore OOL arrived out of an undirected material process.

False and misleading on several counts.

First, almost no atheists claim that the Bible God, or any gods, don't exist. Rather, they argue that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that such exist.

Second, science has no need to invoke gods to explain how the universe works. Chemists do not invoke gods to explain why hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water. Astronomers do not invoke gods to explain why the moon orbits the earth. And biologists have no need to invoke gods to explain the evolution of life.

Third, as I have carefully explained many times, and you JW apologists invariably ignore, the Theory of Evolution does not include Abiogeneis -- the Origin of Life. It explains what happened AFTER that unknown origin.

Fourth, Bible-God believers have a similar problem: they cannot explain the origin of their God. It's grossly hypocritical to criticize someone else for one's own faults.

Finally, the notion of a Bible God contradicts reality and common sense. As I've said many times, the New Testament says that "God is love" and that He knows when even a sparrow falls to the earth. Yet He created a world where, for more than half a billion years predation and the resulting mayhem and suffering have reigned supreme. Can you spell "logical contradiction"?

Furthermore, the Old Testament itself testifies that its God is quite the opposite of love. As Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion:

<< The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. >>

You know quite well that anyone who knows the Bible can cite passages that illustrate each of Dawkins' characterizations. Since the Bible contradicts itself on the supposedly loving nature of its God, at most only one statement is true: God is love, or God is a monster. But the paleontological record indicates the latter.

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If you point out that the chemistry and physics doesn't work, it's suggested that this is proof of the power of time + chemistry + physics.

This is incoherent.

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Also most people don't differentiate between micro and macro evolution.

Nor do most biologists. They're just different amounts of the same thing.

These terms were actually invented by Young-Earth Creationists. A few real scientists use them simply because "creation-science" is more or less known by many non-scientists.

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Micro is true - we see this happen all the time. The finches in the Galapagos ...an example given all the time relative to finch beak size which is merely demonstrating that during various environmental variations finches have differential reproductive rates favoring larger beaks at one time and smaller beak sizes at another time.

Still, they remain finches.

 

Sure, and nothing more happened there than happens with breeding dogs and cats. The point of what happened is that natural variations -- which on that time scale were NOT mutations -- were naturally selected to produce different body structures.

But over much longer periods of time, mutations accumulate and populations change. There is no evidence -- and you cannot cite any -- that "micro" has limits which cannot be crossed over to "macro".

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Fossil records are even more incomplete and unconvincing today than they were fifty years ago.

Nonsense. Today the fossil record is convincing that all manner of life forms have evolved. You obviously have read only Creationist sources about this. Try reading some proper sources for a change, such as:

Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, Donald Prothero, 2017

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, Neil Shubin, 2009

The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity, Douglas Erwin and James Valentine, 2013

It's now known that many dinosaurs had feathers, and some apparently could glide well, if not actually fly. The earliest birds were almost indistinguishable from certain small theropod dinosaurs. And on and on.

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Of course, now that we have a better understanding of DNA and the chicken and egg problem this presents, as you can't have DNA (manufactured out of protein) without DNA already there along w/the rest of the organism, we see it as even more problematic.

Another imaginary problem manufactured by one who knows nothing of science.

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You still see in some texts Haeckel's faked embryos, w/the demolished ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny argument.

LOL! You've been reading the Young-Earth Creationist nonsense put out by Jonathan Wells, one of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's starry-eyed cultists, in his thoroughly dishonest book Icons of Evolution. See https://ncse.ngo/icon-4-haeckels-embryos for a debunking.

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You still see the Miller-Urey experiment cited, though this produced a random assortment of left and right chiral forms of amino acids and in the design had a trap and used an atmosphere that's known today to be the wrong type for the early earth. No, this was simply a primitive, yet designed peptide synthesizer, nothing more than that. Yet it's still cited.

More obsolete criticisms. Science moved on long ago. Try reading newer material.

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The artists renderings of early man are fanciful, and are in the main fictional representations based on artists imaginations. These are just a few.

Ah, now you're getting into nonsense from Watchtower publications. Artists' renderings are relevant only to non-scientific audiences.

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https://iconsofevolution.com/category/criticism/

The mathematics behind the chemistry is overwhelming. If one accepts that the Cambrian explosion of life forms occurred some 600 million years ago, you have a finite number of seconds to work with. So you don't have enough time, you don't have the right kind of atmosphere, and you have to produce not one single cell but a myriad of living creatures all differentiated into different reproducing groups.

 

The posters Arauna and True Tom Harley have said somewhat the same thing. Yet when I challenged them to produce either calculations or links to calculations, they could not.

Perhaps you can produce such calculations. But I think not.

[ Video deleted ]

I won't try to debunk all the nonsense in this video, since it will fall on deaf ears. However, a bit on David Berlinski (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Berlinski):

<< He is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, a center dedicated to promulgating the pseudoscience of intelligent design.

Berlinski shares the movement's rejection of the evidence for evolution, but does not openly avow intelligent design and describes his relationship with the idea as: "warm but distant. It's the same attitude that I display in public toward my ex-wives."[1] Berlinski is a critic of evolution, yet, "Unlike his colleagues at the Discovery Institute,...[he] refuses to theorize about the origin of life."

Berlinski is a secular Jew and agnostic about the God of the Bible. He presents no ideas on the origin of life. >>

'Nuff said.

[xero]

I'm in limbo land right now. I've been reading Mike Heiser's stuff as well. Some take the account in Genesis as a polemic countering other pagan accounts. I can't explain at this point how they're doing that, as I read through this a while back.

https://drmsh.com/genesis-1-2-as-polemic/

Suffice to say that there's a way of reading this which accords w/the people who were living at the time this was written, and this isn't exactly the way we read the same thing. (at least that's what I'm getting as the argument). In addition there's the issue of material which isn't included, but which was accepted as generally true (manuscripts found along w/the dead sea scrolls, like Enoch, which clearly has mythological elements, but which even NT writers appeared to be drawing from. In 2nd temple Judaism, there was the issue of a screwed up spiritual council, and you get glimpses of this in Job)

 

[AlanF]

18 hours ago, xero said:

Plate tectonics needs something to get it started.

https://www.newgeology.us/

Posting nonsense from the equivalent of Flat-Earthers does you more harm than good.

Not that most JW apologists would notice.

[AlanF]

8 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

It could be off by plus or minus 8

You've certainly confirmed your stupidity.

[AlanF]

6 hours ago, Srecko Sostar said:

I have neutral questions:

If God created lions and tigers and bears (today predators) and other animals in Paradise Earth of Eden and outside of Eden to eat grass and fruits, Did He created them with teeth and claws and digestive system just for plant foods?

After the fall of Eden or after Great Flood, how did these animals become omnivores or carnivores?

Did their teeth and claws grow later, so they could catch food?

If not, why did God create them with such teeth and claws?

If their teeth and claws grew later, was it "micro or macro evolution"?

Similar with many other animals in food chain. Birds eats insects. One sort of insects eats other sort of insects. They all killing (murder) each other.  

And so on and so forth.

A 1983 Awake! series argued that the whole of animal life fell into chaos because Adam sinned.

What a lot of bollocks! And of course, right from the JW Governing Body.

[AlanF]

5 hours ago, xero said:

Good questions. I remember a 1946 Awake article on Dinosaurs and carnivorous activity and thought it stretching things a bit. Too many look designed for them to not be designed for carnivorous activity. You do have examples of animals like Pandas who have the kind of teeth predators have, and I've seen videos of snakes eating grapes, but there seem to be so many of these kinds of things to be explained away as it were. If we look at the chain of life we have carnivorous activity at the roots of plants wholly needful for plant and all life. This is where you (me) start asking how far and why we (me) are willing to stretch all this. Cats have to eat meat because they don't produce a certain amino acid, but then it turns out some plants have this in abundance. Can all animals be vegetarian? These are the kinds of things people who have no interest in the bible are asking. Some because they have instinctive moral feelings about it all, like PETA. Then there's the case of some who are culturing meat in vats, so that one can imagine eating a steak or a hamburger that was never alive as an animal (there's a TED talk on this).

Is my concern moral squeamishness, or scriptural squeamishness? What's wrong with death, if you dont know you're alive, and when you die, you have no pain, only feeling some pressure, like a lobster, or some other animal w/o a nervous system like ours.

Do Pigeons Know They're Alive?

Is pain the issue? Physical pain? Or ...is it psychological pain, the pain of loss, and anticipation of loss and the fear it brings which is the issue? Why life at all?

I read a book years ago entitled "Programs of the Brain" and one line in it got my attention - "The meaning of life is to live"

It seems that we're programmed to desire life, and we want it to keep going.

Do we concern ourselves w/the lives of others out of genuine altruism, or because we simply don't want someone to move the furniture around in our lives w/o permission?

In regard to the DNA modifications necessary to alter the morphology and behavior (yes there is behavioral DNA) of animals, I think it not likely that animals, post creation were modified. The whole evolutionary process is more one of filtration and information-loss over time.

 

Yes indeed. It make perfect sense for venomous snakes to chase fleeing bananas, for constrictors to squeeze watermelons they've caught to death, for spiders to build webs to catch flying seeds and poison them.

Have you JWs no common sense?

[AlanF]

5 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

You have triggered one of these silly fallacies Michael Shermer carries on about, dressed up in Latin verbiage to make clear that whoever uses it is educated.

In English, it means, “just because I don’t have the answer to something, that does not mean that your answer is correct. (“Fallacy of negation,” I think it is. My bad—no Latin)

It is a fallacy to be employed when you are criticizing a evolutionist position. It MAY NOT be employed for the opposite position, criticizing one who thinks creation. 

Therefore I will let the question stand, with the caveat that it doesn’t mean anything, as it wouldn’t were it used to criticize evolution.

This is very much like when @AlanFcarries on about no poop being found in the Sinai desert and thinks he has struck logical pay dirt. Yet when you cite something contradictory in his evolution mantra, he will wag his head and cry “fallacy of negation.”

@Araunais right. It is almost like the priesthood of a religion—abounding in so many ‘heads I win/tails you lose’ scenarios.

You're far too stupid for it to be worthwhile to correct you errors.

[TrueTomHarley]

15 minutes ago, AlanF said:

You're far too stupid for it to be worthwhile to correct you errors.

Translation: “Shazam! I never thought of that.”

[AlanF]

xero said:

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Truth be told, there are either atheists who are convinced that God doesn't exist and they are happy with that belief, or there are atheists who are convinced that God doesn't exist and they are unhappy with that belief.

You still can't get it right, so let me try again.

Almost no atheists claim that the Bible God, or any gods, don't exist. Rather, they argue that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that such exist. Your premise is a straw man.

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The big issue, unspoken in many cases is the reasons given for pain and suffering.

Yes, the ancient problem of Theodicy. I brought that up in my previous long post, which you'll no doubt try to ignore.

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Read carefully the book of Job, . . .

Job does nothing to answer the obvious questions.

See if you can address the contradictions between "God is love" and "God is a monster".

[AlanF]

2 hours ago, xero said:

Another way of calculating how long man and other creatures have been here is examined:

Genetic Clock Ticking - Fast or Slow

LOL! Citing the Young-Earth Creationist Institute for Creation Research!

Have you no sense of shame?

[AlanF]

2 hours ago, xero said:

Just to be a contrarian, I note:

²⁹  Then God said: “Here I have given to you every seed-bearing plant that is on the entire earth and every tree with seed-bearing fruit. Let them serve as food for you.f ³⁰  And to every wild animal of the earth and to every flying creature of the heavens and to everything moving on the earth in which there is life,* I have given all green vegetation for food.”g And it was so.

So you can read that and say meat was off limits, or you can say it was simply not mentioned, but assumed. Not that this is the view I'm taking, but strictly speaking we'd have to say it just wasn't mentioned. Then just outside the gate in Genesis 4 you have meat being offered, and no doubt eaten as well. 

There's a lot assumed about Genesis, and a lot unwritten.

Almost no one who considers the details of Genesis thinks about its self-consistency: If Abel killed animals and offered them as burnt sacrifices to God, how did he know that God wanted this? And if God wanted Abel to kill animals for sacrifice, why not for food?

After all. Abel and company would have seen all manner of predators doing their thing.