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Offline ratcharmer

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Re: How the Bible supports the evolutionary theory (yup, you read it right) https://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php?topic=60830.msg1219481#msg1219481
« Reply #12 on: January 06, 2016, 04:53:38 pm »
For anyone who is particularly interested in this topic I'd sincerely recommend the book "The Language of God" by Francis S. Collins. It's written by a leader of the human genome project.

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Re: How the Bible supports the evolutionary theory (yup, you read it right) https://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php?topic=60830.msg1219488#msg1219488
« Reply #13 on: January 06, 2016, 06:21:26 pm »
So, this might not be advisable, but I'm going to make a post here :P

To Khaleesi and others who believe in evolution that is compatible with the Bible:

  • "Day" - The Hebrew word used for "day" throughout Genesis 1 ("yom") is the same word used in Genesis 1:5, "God called the light 'day,' and the darkness he called 'night.'" Yes, 2 Peter 3:8 says, "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." So I get where you're coming from, but the original language does not fit this theory. Also, in the Ten Commandments, Exodus 20:11 uses the same word when it says, "For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." So we're supposed to rest every 7 periods of thousands or millions of years? That wouldn't make sense.
  • Evolving species - The problem with believing that God used (macro) evolution to create animals is that it requires death to have been in the picture prior to man having been created/evolved. But Romans 5:12 contradicts this: "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned--" Death entered the world through sin, which entered the world through Adam and Eve. More to back this up, from Genesis 3:19: "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." Evolution doesn't work without death, Genesis 1 doesn't work with death. To further this point, the idea of "survival of the fittest" is not consistent with what we know of the character of God, especially in a pre-fallen world (1 Corinthians 14:33: "For God is not a God of disorder but of peace").
  • "Man in our image" - To be made in the image of God is to be made not only with a body, but a spirit (or soul). God does not have a body (John 4:24: "God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth."). And no other creature in the world has a spirit/soul. Other aspects of being made in God's image: reason and morality. No other creature has these, either. The problem with using this as an explanation for the process of humans evolving is that at some point, God had to give man a soul, right? Wouldn't that be Genesis 1:27 ("So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.")? But then it can't mean the process, but the actual moment man was created.

To those who believe in the Theory of Evolution as an explanation for the origin of life:

  • Micro- vs Macro-Evolution - For those that don't know, microevolution refers to varieties within a given type. Selective dog breeding is a good example of this. In fact, another good example can be found in Genesis 30:37-43. Macroevolution refers to major evolutionary changes over time. This would be like fish evolving from invertebrate animals, or humans and apes evolving from a common ancestor. Everything before and after this paragraph refers to macro-evolution.
  • Fossils - If evolution were true, the fossil record would reflect it. But it doesn't. In fact, Darwin himself said, "To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer." (The Origin of Species, Part Two, p. 90) There just isn't any fossil evidence for the transitional forms that we'd expect to find between known species.
  • First Life - There is no scientific evidence for life being created from anything other than life. There are guesses/theories/hypotheses, but none of which can be tested or proven. Nothing that can be considered evidence or fact. Note that theories like gravity can be tested, while the origin of life via evolution cannot.
  • Odds - Without divine intervention, the odds that the Earth would form in a way that supports life is astronomical (see what I did there?). One website I found ( http://www.reasons.org/articles/probability-for-life-on-earth ) took in 322 required parameters for life on Earth, used 258 sources to help determine the probability of each one, then calculated the probability of all of them happening. The result: 1 chance in 10^282 that Earth could support life without divine intervention. I'm not posting this to say that it couldn't happen, but that you need just as much faith (if not more) to believe that it happened than you do to believe in the creation story in Genesis 1.

That's why I don't believe in Evolution via Genesis, or in Evolution at all. Any questions or criticisms? (I'm open to discussion on all of this, but please keep it to the topic and avoid making it personal, with me or anyone else. Thanks!)

EDIT: Forgot to go back and put the link in in the Odds section.
« Last Edit: January 06, 2016, 07:03:59 pm by UTAlan »

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Re: How the Bible supports the evolutionary theory (yup, you read it right) https://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php?topic=60830.msg1219490#msg1219490
« Reply #14 on: January 06, 2016, 06:25:10 pm »
UTA believes nothing.

All is lies.

Nothing is real.
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Offline Arum

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Re: How the Bible supports the evolutionary theory (yup, you read it right) https://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php?topic=60830.msg1219491#msg1219491
« Reply #15 on: January 06, 2016, 06:58:35 pm »
To those who believe in the Theory of Evolution as an explanation for the origin of life:

  • Micro- vs Macro-Evolution - For those that don't know, microevolution refers to varieties within a given type. Selective dog breeding is a good example of this. In fact, another good example can be found in Genesis 30:37-43. Macroevolution refers to major evolutionary changes over time. This would be like fish evolving from invertebrate animals, or humans and apes evolving from a common ancestor. Everything before and after this paragraph refers to macro-evolution.
  • Fossils - If evolution were true, the fossil record would reflect it. But it doesn't. In fact, Darwin himself said, "To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer." (The Origin of Species, Part Two, p. 90) There just isn't any fossil evidence for the transitional forms that we'd expect to find between known species.
  • First Life - There is no scientific evidence for life being created from anything other than life. There are guesses/theories/hypotheses, but none of which can be tested or proven. Nothing that can be considered evidence or fact. Note that theories like gravity can be tested, while the origin of life via evolution cannot.
  • Odds - Without divine intervention, the odds that the Earth would form in a way that supports life is astronomical (see what I did there?). One website I found () took in 322 required parameters for life on Earth, used 258 sources to help determine the probability of each one, then calculated the probability of all of them happening. The result: 1 chance in 10^282 that Earth could support life without divine intervention. I'm not posting this to say that it couldn't happen, but that you need just as much faith (if not more) to believe that it happened than you do to believe in the creation story in Genesis 1.

That's why I don't believe in Evolution via Genesis, or in Evolution at all. Any questions or criticisms? (I'm open to discussion on all of this, but please keep it to the topic and avoid making it personal, with me or anyone else. Thanks!)

I haven't studied the bible, so I will take those references as they are, though I'm going to focus mostly on the second part.

Fossil records - Fossils are incredibly rare simply because the conditions required for fossils to exist are inhospitable to most forms of life; this is what stops the erasure of bones and flesh. Even the fossils that we find today are mostly incomplete, and we have to figure out the rest of the bone shapes and sizes from the surrounding rock that the bone was imprinted in before it vanished.

Since Charles Darwin, we have found a lot more fossils, the most prominent one being Sue the Dinosaur. Even of her, only 80% of it is complete, from fossils dating approximately 65 million years ago. To find fossils that are 540 to 490 million years old would be NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE, due to them being 8 times older than Sue.

Additionally, for transitional species, it's only small changes that occur over time. If you compared a alligator skeleton from 67 mya to one from today, they'd be slightly different, though not unwholly recognizable towards each other, due to how slowly evolution occurs in animals with longer life spans. We have actually found that bacterial colonies can evolve over time, and not just selectively pressured bacteria (a.k.a the ones that are drug-resistant and are going to kill us someday). Multiple studies have been done, though one significant one showed changes in the DNA of bacteria over a long time, found here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment. It is wikipedia, I am aware. This is mostly significant because most bacteria produce offspring within a time span of 20 minutes; to go for 36 years at 20 minutes each for a full 60,000 generations shows exactly how long it takes.

Life did indeed pretty much only come from life. That's pretty much it. Life begins, and then it continues on and on until it changes into what we have today. However, the start of life has mostly been fully explained, here https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17987-how-life-evolved-10-steps-to-the-first-cells/. Such theories can be tested; I did read about one scientist replicating the origin of Earth's atmosphere, and running electricity through a solution of water containing carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, along with a few other things. I can't seem to find it, though I will update if I do.

And for your final point, where life was a 10^282 chance of occurring, this becomes sort of like that monkeys with typewriters thing. If you have a universe with enough time, hydrogen will eventually become self aware and wonder what it is. Life didn't have to occur on this planet; it could have occurred on Mars (I believe there were reports of microbes being found on Mars?) which means that God did not only create life on Earth, if he did, though the Bible only talks about the life created on Earth.

One further question, for the sake of the argument; what makes the Bible's version of the creation of life more important than the Egyptians? The Mesopotamians? For that matter, why is it only specifically that the bible is correct in its creation of life? And where did God come from, originally?

The truth is usually always in between all of these; humans are inventive, though for multiple humans across time and space with no possible contact to each other or their cultures to make the same temples, to have the same gods, to have the same religious symbols, suggests that there is definitely some higher being or something coded into our DNA  that makes us do these things, think these things. Whether we really are a fluke of chance, a mindless consequence of existence, or the creation of some creature, remains to be seen.
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Re: How the Bible supports the evolutionary theory (yup, you read it right) https://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php?topic=60830.msg1219495#msg1219495
« Reply #16 on: January 06, 2016, 07:59:55 pm »
To those who believe in the Theory of Evolution as an explanation for the origin of life:

The Theory of Evolution isn't, and doesn't claim to be, an explanation for the origin of life. It's an explanation for how life (however it originated) produced the diversity of present-day species.

Quote
  • Fossils - If evolution were true, the fossil record would reflect it. But it doesn't. In fact, Darwin himself said, "To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer." (The Origin of Species, Part Two, p. 90) There just isn't any fossil evidence for the transitional forms that we'd expect to find between known species.

There are two different points you seem to be mixing up here:

  • Transitional forms: there are no transitional forms between present species, and the theory of evolution doesn't predict any. Present species are not claimed to have evolved from other present species, but rather from common ancestors. There are plenty of fossils representing transitional forms between past species and present ones. However, every time a transitional form is found that fills a gap between two already known forms - the result is that now there are three known forms and two gaps!
  • Darwin's quote relates to the lack of fossils from the Precambrian period. These are not missing transitional forms, because the Precambrian precedes everything else. The reason that there are few fossils from before the Cambrian period is that earlier forms of life mostly had no materials that fossilize.

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Re: How the Bible supports the evolutionary theory (yup, you read it right) https://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php?topic=60830.msg1219504#msg1219504
« Reply #17 on: January 06, 2016, 09:15:51 pm »
I won't reiterate the replies already, but just add a few bits and pieces of my own.

  • Fossils - If evolution were true, the fossil record would reflect it. But it doesn't. In fact, Darwin himself said, "To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer." (The Origin of Species, Part Two, p. 90) There just isn't any fossil evidence for the transitional forms that we'd expect to find between known species.

"Species" is actually something of an artificial construct.  A species is defined so that members of different species cannot have fertile offspring.  You mention dogs, and you're correct to say that they are the same species as every breed of dog can procreate with every other breed of dog.  As a counter-example, lions and tigers are different species and, while they can have offspring, those offspring are infertile.

The reason I mention this is to talk about what are known as ring species.  This is where you have a species that starts off in one geographical location and spreads out in different directions.  So you have a colony which we can call colony N, then to (say) the West of colony N you'll have colony M, and to the East you'll have colony O.  To the West of colony M you'll have colony L, and to the East of colony O you'll have colony P.  And so on until you reach colonies A & Z. 

The thing is, as the colonies are separated by distance and time, they adapt to their environments, and they change genetically.  This can lead you to a situation where creatures from colony N can have fertile offspring with creatures from colony A and colony Z, but creatures from colony Z cannot have fertile offspring with creatures from colony A. 

One example of this is the bird known as the green warbler.  The species is thought to have originated in Nepal, and encircle the Tibetan Plateau (hence the name "ring species"), meeting up again on the other side.  And while the two populations that co-exist in the same space (colonies A & Z) cannot breed with each other, they can all breed with their neighbours all the way around the ring in an unbroken chain.  Indeed, you sometimes see cross-breeds between the group located in Nepal (colony N) and one of the groups on the other side of the ring.

So, not only are previous posters absolutely right about the presence of transitional forms in the fossil record, there are examples of transitional forms that are still alive.

Quote
  • First Life - There is no scientific evidence for life being created from anything other than life. There are guesses/theories/hypotheses, but none of which can be tested or proven. Nothing that can be considered evidence or fact. Note that theories like gravity can be tested, while the origin of life via evolution cannot.

Well, gravity is actually a bad example.  There's more evidence for the theory of evolution by natural selection than there is for any theory of gravitation.   We know that relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible, though.   The best theory is quantum field theory, but it's entirely impossible to test that with relation to gravitation.  It's just utterly impossible to build a Graviton detector, and even if you could it couldn't give you meaningful results.

None of which is really relevant because abiogenesis is not evolution by natural selection, and evolution by natural selection is not abiogenesis.  They're just not the same thing at all.

Quote
One website I found ( http://www.reasons.org/articles/probability-for-life-on-earth ) took in 322 required parameters for life on Earth, used 258 sources to help determine the probability of each one, then calculated the probability of all of them happening. The result: 1 chance in 10^282 that Earth could support life without divine intervention.

Firstly, this is the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.  It's applying posterior probability to something that wasn't predicted.  It's assuming that life evolving on Earth was the end goal.  It's easy to assign significance to something after the fact and have it seem amazing.

Let me put it this way - counting the number of cards in :entropy gives me 16.  Using that as an average for each element because I'm too lazy to count them all and ignoring the anomaly of :rainbow, that gives us a total of 192 cards in the game.  Now, when you visit the Oracle in the morning and you get an :entropy Pillar do you sit back on your chair, gobsmacked that out of all the possible cards you could have got you got that one which was a 1 in 192 chance?  Of course you don't, because you're not attaching any special significance to that card.  In order for it to have significance you have to say "I'm going to get an :entropy Pillar with this roll" before you hit the button.  If you do that, then that 1 in 192 chance becomes significant.

What's happening there is that that website is drawing the target around the bullet holes after the gun has already been fired.

Secondly, the latest research suggests that there's probably around 6 * 10^21 Earth-like planets out there in the universe.  So they can't be all that rare.

Thirdly, I've only skimmed it, but not a single one of the variables listed that I can see have a single thing to do with evolution.

Fourthly, while there are plenty of references given on that page, they're not useful as at no point are we told what papers are relevant to what variables and, most importantly, the author doesn't show his working out.

And, fifthly, you should always be suspicious of anybody who has started with the conclusion that they want to reach, and are fitting the data to support it, which is what the author of that piece admits to be his raison d'etre.

 

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