That exchange always struck me as just sort of confused rather than revealing. Things like our feelings aren't objective facts, they are judgments and internal experiences. Trying to validate faith beliefs (which make claims about objectively real things) by appealing to feelings is, imho, sort of lame and dishonest of the screenwriters.
This is one of the many interesting places where the Gospel writers have agendas that differ from each other. John in particular is far more interested in being anti-Jewish than the earlier Gospels, probably because at the time Mark was written, far more of the early church people were still Jews, but by the time John was written, Jews were very much contra-Christianity, both because Christianity had failed to take hold amongst educated Jews (who found the claimed Scriptural basis of Christian thought to be absurd) and because of the traumatic destruction of the Temple in the rebellion, which many Christians came to see as a sign from God. There are many "details" in John that aren't in any of the other Gospels in regards to Jews.
I know many believers like to pretend that you can just read all the Gospels by mashing them together and pretending that everything they all relate happened, but I think that does a real disservice to the texts and the writers that wrote them.
Why wouldn't it? Are you implying that there was some point in the past where bacteria and the natural forces that shape them and their environments were radically different? Isn't that just a form of last Thursadyism?
If we demonstrate that, in fact, evolution via common descent via natural selection is a plausible mechanism today, how can that NOT bear on the question of what happened in the past, where we are searching for a plausible explanation? Of course it bears on that question. And that's only the start: common descent via natural selection genetic drift, and so forth is a very distinctive process, meaning that we can look for evidence that it happened. And we do. And we find it. Again, how is that invalid for learning about the history of life.
There is no way to absolutely disprove the "Last Thursdayism" idea, the idea that God created the world as some sort of elaborate Truman show complete with all the evidence of ages and times that never existed. Most creationists shy away from this idea though because it basically requires God to be outright deceptive. This is particularly hard to deal with in the case of dating methods (in which all these various "clocks" are calibrated to specific times). It would be one thing if God had created a world that just looked "old." But it's way way worse than that. All the dating methods give SPECIFIC dates that all match up with each other and tell a story of events and times, and eras, all of which creationists would have to assert never actually happened. So we're left with a God who creates an entire phony timeline and story, spins what is essentially a giant lie.
They don't assume the non-existence of God: they try to explain testable things with other testible things. If you bring in untestable things like God miracles then you can explain anything instantly with no effort. There's no point to learning or examining anything once you consider miracles to be part of science.
Not believing in something isn't a belief. A causal acquaintance with the English language demonstrates this. The UN defines it that way because the UN is a confused and self-contradictory legalistic body that can't agree on anything or make sense of much of anything.
Arguing against religious arguments is not the same thing as trying to "recruit" anyone, and has nothing to do with a "strong effort" to not believe. You are confusing all sorts of different issues all into one.
Not doing something doesn't take any effort at all. Citation: English grammar.
Not really: it would be nice if people would not take advantage of the credulous trust of kids at all, and just teach them ABOUT metaphysical stuff that all sorts of different people believe without telling them that they are little Christians or Muslims or atheists and then molding them to be such. Teach them to be intelligent, compassionate, and then let them figure out what they believe without exploiting them.
Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that. There are more variations of passages in the New Testament than there are words in it, and in many cases its impossible to resolve which were original (or even whether or not that really matters: for all we know later versions are MORE accurate, not less, since the changes were corrections instead of errors). We're not just talking minor choices of words either: these are real differences that have very real theological implications (which in fact was part of why they likely varied so much between all the different copies). So the number of copies, in a way, actually swamps out a lot of the picture we might have of an "original" text. The idea that God would miraculously inspire word for word a text... but then fail to miraculously preserve it is problematic to say the least. The bible is a very human work, cover to cover, rife with human fights, politics, and concerns. That's not to say that it cannot possibly reflect anything holy or Godly, but presenting it as some sort of specially incorruptible document really doesn't do very good service to it.
Problem is that if God is truly this inscrutable, then there is litterally no reason why God's plan couldn't be that he rewards and loves only those that challenge his apparent immorality. Or perhaps God is truly evil, playing the nastiest prank ever. If you take refuge in the "God plan's" option, then you have no way to discount any of these infinite other scenarios. In other words, retreating into obscurity does not help apologists as they seem to think. It makes things worse.
"Here is interesting research showing how the human and chicken genomes are also very similar."
Right, because we are also related to them, though more distantly. That's the whole point: by how MUCH are we related. Common descent predicts that a very particular pattern of relation and distance will appear no matter how and where we look at the evidence that describes it. And that's exactly what is going on in this case AND in the case of the dinosaur/chicken matches.
"Not sure what the T-Rex data proves, other than lots of creatures have a similar genetic composition to a chicken."
Again, you're missing the point: the point is that there is a very particular family tree, and the similarities AND disimilarities situate things in specific places within that family tree. This evidence, like all other credible evidence, confirms the ancestral structure of that tree.
"Guess this means that I'm "related" to a T-rex too, since I apparently came from a chicken...could explain my short arms and overbite."
No, you did not come from a chicken. You and a chicken shared a common ancestor that was a more generic form of tetrapod from which both chicken and people eventually developed.
Maybe you'd like to read the article again, but "intact tissue with DNA" is pretty off-base as a description of what we are dealing with here.
All of your other examples are the same old same old creationist bullshit of half truths, lies, and made up nonsense that aren't even worth taking the time to debunk, because you'll never bother to inform yourself about any of the actual methods or fields they involve. Anyone that's actually interested should go ask a real scientist: and instead of being snowballed, they'll actually be informed.
"If there was an all powerful designer, and he wanted to create a T-Rex and a chicken, would they not necessarilly be similar, just as this data shows?"
What you have to understand is that what is important here is not just some similarities, but rather a very very specific pattern of similarities and disimilarities. That pattern is one of nested clades, and it paints a very specific family tree in a way that only makes sense in terms of actual, working through time, change via branching descent. A designer would, for instance, be free to mix and match traits: reuse "good ideas" across lineages." But that's not what we see in biology: we see traits that are just modified forms of some precursor: not just one trait, either, but distinctive groups of traits. Take our human molars. Those molars are of a sort that is distinctive in the animal kingdom: only apes have them. We have them. We ARE apes. And not just because of our molars: take ANY trait that distinguishes apes from other primates, and humans have that trait too. We do have features that are different from other apes: but then so does every ape species have its own distinctive traits: all of which are modified forms of the generic ape. That's what I mean about clusters of similarities and disimilarities.
Birds are in every respect just modified forms of the generic dinosaurs. They share all the traits that make dinosaurs distinctive from other creatures in their larger taxonomic group. In that sense they are nested within dinosaurs. And this pattern is confirmed by fossil evidence and now genetic evidence telling this same story of a specific, distinctive line.
Furthermore, we DO have transitional fossils that map out the general lineages of these changes. You don't need EVERY intermediate species to see this anymore than you need a full movie of an apple rotting to see a progression when what you do have are random photos, samples of the process captured midstream, all of which have traits that are distinctive;y dinosaur, and yet also having traits that are distinctive only otherwise to modern birds.
What's really telling is that every single one of the people who developed the modern theories of geology were young-earth creationists. They all just had the integrity to see that the data didn't support that belief.
"Another evidence for a much younger universe, not involving radioactivity, is the fact that there are still comets, especially the tenuous gas variety."
Geez, this is an old Henry Morris chesnut. It's so lame that it's not even worth debunking (anyone even in the least interested should go ask an actual astronomer about the issue and learn about it). The fact that you are making it pretty much discredits you completely. Arguments like this are designed to SOUND somewhat credible, IF one doesn't know what they are talking about (and most lurkers and laypeople wouldn't right off the bat, so they get flim-flammed).
"The motion of the Galaxies requires never found dark energy and matter in order to fit the current ancient ages required by evolutionary thinking."
Dark matter has not only been "found" we actually just came out with several rather elegant and amazing maps of it, as well as a way of testing for it (the famous "bullet" galazy experiment). Again, what you really need to do is actually read up on this stuff and LEARN about it, as opposed to not knowing anything about it, and just recycling some creationist tract without ever actually informing yourself about the real subject. The real subject is fascinating stuff, and you're missing out.
"Questioning the validity of a long and dearly held theory is often how REAL scientific progress is made."
Yes, but only if the skepticism is well-informed. By and large, creationist skepticism and other related skepticism is not: its criticisms are based on misrepresentations of evolution and ignore a great deal of the evidence.
As criticism, that sort of thing is more of waste of everyone's time than it is an aid to science or scientific progress.
Evolution is descent with modification. There is a larger group of tetrapods that we roughly call dinosaurs. Birds are more and more definitively being shown to be a sub group within this group. No, T-rexes themselves didn't survive, of course, but the taxonomic group that once encompassed all the things we call dinosaurs has been shown to also include birds. Whether or not we call birds dinosaurs really is an arbitrary matter depending on how we define "dinosaur" (i.e. is the term a good clade, or just a sloppy term like "monkey")
For what it's worth, I've never been convinced that philosophy in the sense of producing philosophical arguments is a proper academic field. Certainly it requires academic expertise to say, have read and understood and studied the works of philosophers. But that's not the same thing as claiming that there is a special expertise in philosophizing. There might be a talent for it, but I've never seen that having a degree in philosophy makes ones arguments sounder or more sensible. In many cases, it seems to give an excuse to people to be pointlessly verbose and obscure about ideas that are often either ridiculous or trivial, depending on how you interpret the sloppy jargon.
The idea that Dawkins is a philosopher of religion is a pretty silly one (and one I doubt Dawkins himself would agree with), but it's worth noting that it's pretty dishonest to paint Flew as having "gone in the opposite direction." Flew is now extremely old. He at one point thought that he heard a good argument for deism, but later himself stated that he may have gotten confused and his mental acuity is not what it used to me. He never became religious or endorsed religious ideas. Dawkins has many times stated that he has little or no quarrel with diesm, simply theism, and so on.
What the heck are you talking about. If you are saying that they are closer to US than apes, then you are wrong. If you are saying that their DNA is somehow more tightly packed... well I've never heard that one before, do tell!
"The record is just that the record. All the assumption pulled from the record isn't as you say unambiguous."
You don't seem to understand how science works. When there are assumptions made, the scientists next step is not to go out for beer and put their feet up, it is to and test those assumptions, and so on and so on until everything but the truth is eliminated. The end result of this process is pretty darn certain.
"It is just a bunch of theories put together. That is why it is called the theory of evolution not the evolution fact!"
This statement is another red flag pointing to your ignorance. Only creationists ever seem to make this mistake. In science, "theory" is not a level below fact. Theories are MADE of facts and explanations put together to make something comprehensive. Furthermore, we DO talk about the fact of evolution: that is, common descent. Things like natural selection are what explain that fact.
Theories in science do not "become" laws or facts. They are bodies of explanation, and the are often COMPOSED of laws and facts.
"And as i said, There has never been the missing link that pulls two species together. If there is, show me the money. Show me this record that has the intermediate between ape and man. So far, all we have found is one or the other."
There are countless transitional fossils. Your problem is that you don't seem to understand what a transitional fossil is, so you can't recognize it when you see it. In terms of hominids, we have a fossil record that shows a very clear and obvious transition of a more generic ape form to the specific sort of ape that homo sapiens are. There is no "one or the other": humans are a type of ape just like they are a tpe of mammal, and the fossil record shows how that type developed from a more general form, just as the other apes did.
"LOL.. It proves all of those to a better degree that evolution does."
No, not in the slightest. It doesn't explain the evidence. It doesn't explain the particular pattern of similarities and disimilarities we see in genetic clades, some of which involve very specific insertions of virus code into some ancestral line at a specific point in time that later diverged and branched out.
"But the fact that you appear to not have any clue about it ("Whatever it is") but then dismiss it ("it makes no sense and is grossly inconsistent with the fossil record, the genetic record, and virtually everything we know about past life on earth" ) makes me wonder if we are talking about the religion of evolution or the science of evolution. How do you know if it is inconsistent if you don't know what it is? It does play into what we do know and can prove very nicely. What it doesn't do is play favors to the fairytales we make about what we think could of happened. And it has been around since almost the beginning of evolution as a theory of origin. It saddens me that you are convinced of evolution and have no knowledge of this."
You've already described what you think it is (and as far as I know, you made it up yourself, because I can't find any reference to it in any of the actual biology journals I read: the closest thing to anything called bubble theory in abiogenesis, but that doesn't seem to be what you were talking about. In any case, what you've already described is more than enough to see that, whatever it is, it's clearly false and contradicted by the evidence.
"But the flaw is in assuming a common ancestor."
No, the common ancestry is not simply assumed: it is something that was shown, and is now part of biological clades because it was shown that ancestry EXPLAINS the pattern of nested clades we find in nature.
"I'm saying this isn't possible and no one has proven it is. At most, It is just organism coming from the same area of creation. And Even then, it doesn't lose it's definition, it just refines it. So it really doesn't matter much to our discussion when the discussion is what it is."
"Without the fossil record of everything in the chain, we are just making guesses to what we think is happening."
The record is pretty darn clear and unambiguous. Demanding that every single creature that ever lived be turned into a fossil simply isn't reasonable. Fossilization doesn't work that way. Think of the fossils we have as random samples of what sorts of creatures were alive and when. All of these samples speak unambiguously with what we expect from evolution via common descent. There really isn't any plausible alternative. And remember, this fossil evidence doesn't stand on it's own: it's merely one piece in a convergence of all sorts of evidence, all confirming the same basic picture.
"There is no proof outside the evidence pushing one way or another and the evidence can go the other way."
But the evidence can't go any other way. This has been checked in virtually every way its possible to check.
"According to the bubble theory of evolution"
You keep bringing this up as if anyone cared what the "bubble" theory of evolution was. Whatever it is, it makes no sense and is grossly inconsistent with the fossil record, the genetic record, and virtually everything we know about past life on earth. It also seems ignorant of how evolution works, which is via nested clades. This is why I asked you if you knew what clades were. If you don't know, I can see why it might seem confusing to think of a pig turning into a crocodile. But evolution never suggests that such a thing happens. In fact, if such a thing happened, it would disprove a lot of key elements of evolution.
"I don't need to know what a clade is to support this argument."
Of course you do. If you didn't, then you'd say silly things like "pigs turn into people."
"But a clade is a group of organism thought to be the basis of other life based form that stem of life. It is still a hypothesis and not proof."
No, a clade is a _definition_, and the original definition of a clade is simply a group of creatures whose members share certain homologous features. The that all life, modern and fossil, falls quite well into nested clades (that is, clades within clades) is a FACT, and one that was recognized long before modern evolutionary theory. It is evolutionary theory that explains this state of affairs in the only way anyone seems able to: that these groupings are ancestrally derived. And remember, this is something one is forced to recognize before we even get into genetics and fossils.
"I arguing that some ancient horse didn't become a pig on one side of the family and a dog on the other."
Again, if you don't know what you are talking about, then why pretend to. Show me where any biologist claims that horses are a common ancestor of dogs and pigs. Again, anyone that understood what nested clades were and that common descent is descent with modification would know this right off the bat, instead of having to have it pointed out.
"Lol.. The term Ape is just a classification"
It is an classification based on real morphology, and as such, is unavoidable. It comes straight out of ANY attempt to group life based on similarities and differences. You can forget human beings for a second: once you look at all primates, you see that there is a group, apes, that share certain features that are distinctive and clearly set them apart as their own group within primates. When you note what these key features are, it turns out that human beings have them all. Human beings are apes: not by definitional trickery, but by unavoidable taxonomy.
That these relationships are ancestrally derived is quite clear. All the fossil, genetic, morphologic, and other evidence confirms it.
"If we all came form the same pond/ocean of sludge but more ammonia or gold(whatever) was concentrated towards the middle of the pool, it would have produce a different life that is very similar and possibly create the appearance of these connections and allowing for different breed in the same family."
I don't have the slightest idea what you are talking about.
Raymond E. Brown's An Introduction to the New Testament is still considered to be pretty standard. Mark is generally dated anywhere from 68-72. It's true that many believers would like the dates to be earlier, and some even claim to be or are Bible scholars, but I'm simply pointing out that this is not the actual scholarly consensus.
"Show me the money. Were is this fossil record? It isn't available for public display and as far as I can tell, there isn't a complete rendition of it on the internet."
Of course there is. The talk-origins section gives a perfectly reasonable assessment of things. Your problem seems to be that you want to see every single species that ever lived as a fossil. But none of that is necessary. As I said, even the fossil record itself really isn't necessary: it's just icing on the cake showing that what every other physical fact in the world already suggested would be the case: that there would be this transition.
And you didn't answer my question as to whether you know what a clade is. It's a really really important concept if you are going to understand how the fossil record is used as evidence and why.
"And it isn't a reality. Some of the fossils being describes as a different species turned out to be the same species."
That's exactly the sort of problem you'd expect if common descent via evolution were true. In fact, it's a point of amusement with creationists, because while they all claim that this or that fossil is either "man" or "ape" (which belies ignorance to begin with, because man IS an ape), different creationists can't seem to agree with each other on which is which.
None of this invalidates the very real and very obvious fossil record of hominid transition.
"The problem is that humans are humans and if you subclass them, they are still humans. This doesn't appear to be what your saying and it doesn't appear to be what others are saying with bacteria and all. Also, using means other then natural means don't necessarily count as evolution but more like manipluaton."
I don't know what you are talking about. Humans are a subclass of apes. Every feature that distinguishes apes from other primates is found in humans as well. We have the same distinctively ape pattern of bodily hair coverage (down to the follicle), we have molars that are unique in the animal kingdom... (unique to apes, that is) and virtually every other marker there is for "ape." In fact, we are so morphologically similar that creationist taxonomists wanted to group us together long before Darwin and the idea of evolution looked like a threat to creationist beliefs. About the only major morphological difference we have from apes that isn't just a size or balancing shift is the indent in the top of your mouth: the one in between all those ape teeth you have.
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You are seriously arguing that Stalin stressed individual dignity and worth and the use of REASON?
Seriously?
You weren't joking, right?
Trying to compare people that reject something makes no sense. It's like talking about the commanlity between people who don't live in Iowa.
That exchange always struck me as just sort of confused rather than revealing. Things like our feelings aren't objective facts, they are judgments and internal experiences. Trying to validate faith beliefs (which make claims about objectively real things) by appealing to feelings is, imho, sort of lame and dishonest of the screenwriters.
This is one of the many interesting places where the Gospel writers have agendas that differ from each other. John in particular is far more interested in being anti-Jewish than the earlier Gospels, probably because at the time Mark was written, far more of the early church people were still Jews, but by the time John was written, Jews were very much contra-Christianity, both because Christianity had failed to take hold amongst educated Jews (who found the claimed Scriptural basis of Christian thought to be absurd) and because of the traumatic destruction of the Temple in the rebellion, which many Christians came to see as a sign from God. There are many "details" in John that aren't in any of the other Gospels in regards to Jews.
I know many believers like to pretend that you can just read all the Gospels by mashing them together and pretending that everything they all relate happened, but I think that does a real disservice to the texts and the writers that wrote them.
Why wouldn't it? Are you implying that there was some point in the past where bacteria and the natural forces that shape them and their environments were radically different? Isn't that just a form of last Thursadyism?
If we demonstrate that, in fact, evolution via common descent via natural selection is a plausible mechanism today, how can that NOT bear on the question of what happened in the past, where we are searching for a plausible explanation? Of course it bears on that question. And that's only the start: common descent via natural selection genetic drift, and so forth is a very distinctive process, meaning that we can look for evidence that it happened. And we do. And we find it. Again, how is that invalid for learning about the history of life.
There is no way to absolutely disprove the "Last Thursdayism" idea, the idea that God created the world as some sort of elaborate Truman show complete with all the evidence of ages and times that never existed. Most creationists shy away from this idea though because it basically requires God to be outright deceptive. This is particularly hard to deal with in the case of dating methods (in which all these various "clocks" are calibrated to specific times). It would be one thing if God had created a world that just looked "old." But it's way way worse than that. All the dating methods give SPECIFIC dates that all match up with each other and tell a story of events and times, and eras, all of which creationists would have to assert never actually happened. So we're left with a God who creates an entire phony timeline and story, spins what is essentially a giant lie.
They don't assume the non-existence of God: they try to explain testable things with other testible things. If you bring in untestable things like God miracles then you can explain anything instantly with no effort. There's no point to learning or examining anything once you consider miracles to be part of science.
Uh oh, I'm gonna have to argue with you!
Not believing in something isn't a belief. A causal acquaintance with the English language demonstrates this. The UN defines it that way because the UN is a confused and self-contradictory legalistic body that can't agree on anything or make sense of much of anything.
Arguing against religious arguments is not the same thing as trying to "recruit" anyone, and has nothing to do with a "strong effort" to not believe. You are confusing all sorts of different issues all into one.
Not doing something doesn't take any effort at all. Citation: English grammar.
Not really: it would be nice if people would not take advantage of the credulous trust of kids at all, and just teach them ABOUT metaphysical stuff that all sorts of different people believe without telling them that they are little Christians or Muslims or atheists and then molding them to be such. Teach them to be intelligent, compassionate, and then let them figure out what they believe without exploiting them.
Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that. There are more variations of passages in the New Testament than there are words in it, and in many cases its impossible to resolve which were original (or even whether or not that really matters: for all we know later versions are MORE accurate, not less, since the changes were corrections instead of errors). We're not just talking minor choices of words either: these are real differences that have very real theological implications (which in fact was part of why they likely varied so much between all the different copies). So the number of copies, in a way, actually swamps out a lot of the picture we might have of an "original" text. The idea that God would miraculously inspire word for word a text... but then fail to miraculously preserve it is problematic to say the least. The bible is a very human work, cover to cover, rife with human fights, politics, and concerns. That's not to say that it cannot possibly reflect anything holy or Godly, but presenting it as some sort of specially incorruptible document really doesn't do very good service to it.
Problem is that if God is truly this inscrutable, then there is litterally no reason why God's plan couldn't be that he rewards and loves only those that challenge his apparent immorality. Or perhaps God is truly evil, playing the nastiest prank ever. If you take refuge in the "God plan's" option, then you have no way to discount any of these infinite other scenarios. In other words, retreating into obscurity does not help apologists as they seem to think. It makes things worse.
"Here is interesting research showing how the human and chicken genomes are also very similar."
Right, because we are also related to them, though more distantly. That's the whole point: by how MUCH are we related. Common descent predicts that a very particular pattern of relation and distance will appear no matter how and where we look at the evidence that describes it. And that's exactly what is going on in this case AND in the case of the dinosaur/chicken matches.
"Not sure what the T-Rex data proves, other than lots of creatures have a similar genetic composition to a chicken."
Again, you're missing the point: the point is that there is a very particular family tree, and the similarities AND disimilarities situate things in specific places within that family tree. This evidence, like all other credible evidence, confirms the ancestral structure of that tree.
"Guess this means that I'm "related" to a T-rex too, since I apparently came from a chicken...could explain my short arms and overbite."
No, you did not come from a chicken. You and a chicken shared a common ancestor that was a more generic form of tetrapod from which both chicken and people eventually developed.
Maybe you'd like to read the article again, but "intact tissue with DNA" is pretty off-base as a description of what we are dealing with here.
All of your other examples are the same old same old creationist bullshit of half truths, lies, and made up nonsense that aren't even worth taking the time to debunk, because you'll never bother to inform yourself about any of the actual methods or fields they involve. Anyone that's actually interested should go ask a real scientist: and instead of being snowballed, they'll actually be informed.
"If there was an all powerful designer, and he wanted to create a T-Rex and a chicken, would they not necessarilly be similar, just as this data shows?"
What you have to understand is that what is important here is not just some similarities, but rather a very very specific pattern of similarities and disimilarities. That pattern is one of nested clades, and it paints a very specific family tree in a way that only makes sense in terms of actual, working through time, change via branching descent. A designer would, for instance, be free to mix and match traits: reuse "good ideas" across lineages." But that's not what we see in biology: we see traits that are just modified forms of some precursor: not just one trait, either, but distinctive groups of traits. Take our human molars. Those molars are of a sort that is distinctive in the animal kingdom: only apes have them. We have them. We ARE apes. And not just because of our molars: take ANY trait that distinguishes apes from other primates, and humans have that trait too. We do have features that are different from other apes: but then so does every ape species have its own distinctive traits: all of which are modified forms of the generic ape. That's what I mean about clusters of similarities and disimilarities.
Birds are in every respect just modified forms of the generic dinosaurs. They share all the traits that make dinosaurs distinctive from other creatures in their larger taxonomic group. In that sense they are nested within dinosaurs. And this pattern is confirmed by fossil evidence and now genetic evidence telling this same story of a specific, distinctive line.
Furthermore, we DO have transitional fossils that map out the general lineages of these changes. You don't need EVERY intermediate species to see this anymore than you need a full movie of an apple rotting to see a progression when what you do have are random photos, samples of the process captured midstream, all of which have traits that are distinctive;y dinosaur, and yet also having traits that are distinctive only otherwise to modern birds.
What's really telling is that every single one of the people who developed the modern theories of geology were young-earth creationists. They all just had the integrity to see that the data didn't support that belief.
"Another evidence for a much younger universe, not involving radioactivity, is the fact that there are still comets, especially the tenuous gas variety."
Geez, this is an old Henry Morris chesnut. It's so lame that it's not even worth debunking (anyone even in the least interested should go ask an actual astronomer about the issue and learn about it). The fact that you are making it pretty much discredits you completely. Arguments like this are designed to SOUND somewhat credible, IF one doesn't know what they are talking about (and most lurkers and laypeople wouldn't right off the bat, so they get flim-flammed).
"The motion of the Galaxies requires never found dark energy and matter in order to fit the current ancient ages required by evolutionary thinking."
Dark matter has not only been "found" we actually just came out with several rather elegant and amazing maps of it, as well as a way of testing for it (the famous "bullet" galazy experiment). Again, what you really need to do is actually read up on this stuff and LEARN about it, as opposed to not knowing anything about it, and just recycling some creationist tract without ever actually informing yourself about the real subject. The real subject is fascinating stuff, and you're missing out.
"Questioning the validity of a long and dearly held theory is often how REAL scientific progress is made."
Yes, but only if the skepticism is well-informed. By and large, creationist skepticism and other related skepticism is not: its criticisms are based on misrepresentations of evolution and ignore a great deal of the evidence.
As criticism, that sort of thing is more of waste of everyone's time than it is an aid to science or scientific progress.
Evolution is descent with modification. There is a larger group of tetrapods that we roughly call dinosaurs. Birds are more and more definitively being shown to be a sub group within this group. No, T-rexes themselves didn't survive, of course, but the taxonomic group that once encompassed all the things we call dinosaurs has been shown to also include birds. Whether or not we call birds dinosaurs really is an arbitrary matter depending on how we define "dinosaur" (i.e. is the term a good clade, or just a sloppy term like "monkey")
For what it's worth, I've never been convinced that philosophy in the sense of producing philosophical arguments is a proper academic field. Certainly it requires academic expertise to say, have read and understood and studied the works of philosophers. But that's not the same thing as claiming that there is a special expertise in philosophizing. There might be a talent for it, but I've never seen that having a degree in philosophy makes ones arguments sounder or more sensible. In many cases, it seems to give an excuse to people to be pointlessly verbose and obscure about ideas that are often either ridiculous or trivial, depending on how you interpret the sloppy jargon.
Dawkins is not a eugenicist, as even reading that quote shows. Wes Smith is however, a liar and a purveyor of nonsense.
The idea that Dawkins is a philosopher of religion is a pretty silly one (and one I doubt Dawkins himself would agree with), but it's worth noting that it's pretty dishonest to paint Flew as having "gone in the opposite direction." Flew is now extremely old. He at one point thought that he heard a good argument for deism, but later himself stated that he may have gotten confused and his mental acuity is not what it used to me. He never became religious or endorsed religious ideas. Dawkins has many times stated that he has little or no quarrel with diesm, simply theism, and so on.
What the heck are you talking about. If you are saying that they are closer to US than apes, then you are wrong. If you are saying that their DNA is somehow more tightly packed... well I've never heard that one before, do tell!
"The record is just that the record. All the assumption pulled from the record isn't as you say unambiguous."
You don't seem to understand how science works. When there are assumptions made, the scientists next step is not to go out for beer and put their feet up, it is to and test those assumptions, and so on and so on until everything but the truth is eliminated. The end result of this process is pretty darn certain.
"It is just a bunch of theories put together. That is why it is called the theory of evolution not the evolution fact!"
This statement is another red flag pointing to your ignorance. Only creationists ever seem to make this mistake. In science, "theory" is not a level below fact. Theories are MADE of facts and explanations put together to make something comprehensive. Furthermore, we DO talk about the fact of evolution: that is, common descent. Things like natural selection are what explain that fact.
Theories in science do not "become" laws or facts. They are bodies of explanation, and the are often COMPOSED of laws and facts.
"And as i said, There has never been the missing link that pulls two species together. If there is, show me the money. Show me this record that has the intermediate between ape and man. So far, all we have found is one or the other."
There are countless transitional fossils. Your problem is that you don't seem to understand what a transitional fossil is, so you can't recognize it when you see it. In terms of hominids, we have a fossil record that shows a very clear and obvious transition of a more generic ape form to the specific sort of ape that homo sapiens are. There is no "one or the other": humans are a type of ape just like they are a tpe of mammal, and the fossil record shows how that type developed from a more general form, just as the other apes did.
"LOL.. It proves all of those to a better degree that evolution does."
No, not in the slightest. It doesn't explain the evidence. It doesn't explain the particular pattern of similarities and disimilarities we see in genetic clades, some of which involve very specific insertions of virus code into some ancestral line at a specific point in time that later diverged and branched out.
"But the fact that you appear to not have any clue about it ("Whatever it is") but then dismiss it ("it makes no sense and is grossly inconsistent with the fossil record, the genetic record, and virtually everything we know about past life on earth" ) makes me wonder if we are talking about the religion of evolution or the science of evolution. How do you know if it is inconsistent if you don't know what it is? It does play into what we do know and can prove very nicely. What it doesn't do is play favors to the fairytales we make about what we think could of happened. And it has been around since almost the beginning of evolution as a theory of origin. It saddens me that you are convinced of evolution and have no knowledge of this."
You've already described what you think it is (and as far as I know, you made it up yourself, because I can't find any reference to it in any of the actual biology journals I read: the closest thing to anything called bubble theory in abiogenesis, but that doesn't seem to be what you were talking about. In any case, what you've already described is more than enough to see that, whatever it is, it's clearly false and contradicted by the evidence.
"But the flaw is in assuming a common ancestor."
No, the common ancestry is not simply assumed: it is something that was shown, and is now part of biological clades because it was shown that ancestry EXPLAINS the pattern of nested clades we find in nature.
"I'm saying this isn't possible and no one has proven it is. At most, It is just organism coming from the same area of creation. And Even then, it doesn't lose it's definition, it just refines it. So it really doesn't matter much to our discussion when the discussion is what it is."
It matters a lot, because you don't
"Without the fossil record of everything in the chain, we are just making guesses to what we think is happening."
The record is pretty darn clear and unambiguous. Demanding that every single creature that ever lived be turned into a fossil simply isn't reasonable. Fossilization doesn't work that way. Think of the fossils we have as random samples of what sorts of creatures were alive and when. All of these samples speak unambiguously with what we expect from evolution via common descent. There really isn't any plausible alternative. And remember, this fossil evidence doesn't stand on it's own: it's merely one piece in a convergence of all sorts of evidence, all confirming the same basic picture.
"There is no proof outside the evidence pushing one way or another and the evidence can go the other way."
But the evidence can't go any other way. This has been checked in virtually every way its possible to check.
"According to the bubble theory of evolution"
You keep bringing this up as if anyone cared what the "bubble" theory of evolution was. Whatever it is, it makes no sense and is grossly inconsistent with the fossil record, the genetic record, and virtually everything we know about past life on earth. It also seems ignorant of how evolution works, which is via nested clades. This is why I asked you if you knew what clades were. If you don't know, I can see why it might seem confusing to think of a pig turning into a crocodile. But evolution never suggests that such a thing happens. In fact, if such a thing happened, it would disprove a lot of key elements of evolution.
"I don't need to know what a clade is to support this argument."
Of course you do. If you didn't, then you'd say silly things like "pigs turn into people."
"But a clade is a group of organism thought to be the basis of other life based form that stem of life. It is still a hypothesis and not proof."
No, a clade is a _definition_, and the original definition of a clade is simply a group of creatures whose members share certain homologous features. The that all life, modern and fossil, falls quite well into nested clades (that is, clades within clades) is a FACT, and one that was recognized long before modern evolutionary theory. It is evolutionary theory that explains this state of affairs in the only way anyone seems able to: that these groupings are ancestrally derived. And remember, this is something one is forced to recognize before we even get into genetics and fossils.
"I arguing that some ancient horse didn't become a pig on one side of the family and a dog on the other."
Again, if you don't know what you are talking about, then why pretend to. Show me where any biologist claims that horses are a common ancestor of dogs and pigs. Again, anyone that understood what nested clades were and that common descent is descent with modification would know this right off the bat, instead of having to have it pointed out.
"Lol.. The term Ape is just a classification"
It is an classification based on real morphology, and as such, is unavoidable. It comes straight out of ANY attempt to group life based on similarities and differences. You can forget human beings for a second: once you look at all primates, you see that there is a group, apes, that share certain features that are distinctive and clearly set them apart as their own group within primates. When you note what these key features are, it turns out that human beings have them all. Human beings are apes: not by definitional trickery, but by unavoidable taxonomy.
That these relationships are ancestrally derived is quite clear. All the fossil, genetic, morphologic, and other evidence confirms it.
"If we all came form the same pond/ocean of sludge but more ammonia or gold(whatever) was concentrated towards the middle of the pool, it would have produce a different life that is very similar and possibly create the appearance of these connections and allowing for different breed in the same family."
I don't have the slightest idea what you are talking about.
Raymond E. Brown's An Introduction to the New Testament is still considered to be pretty standard. Mark is generally dated anywhere from 68-72. It's true that many believers would like the dates to be earlier, and some even claim to be or are Bible scholars, but I'm simply pointing out that this is not the actual scholarly consensus.
"Show me the money. Were is this fossil record? It isn't available for public display and as far as I can tell, there isn't a complete rendition of it on the internet."
Of course there is. The talk-origins section gives a perfectly reasonable assessment of things. Your problem seems to be that you want to see every single species that ever lived as a fossil. But none of that is necessary. As I said, even the fossil record itself really isn't necessary: it's just icing on the cake showing that what every other physical fact in the world already suggested would be the case: that there would be this transition.
And you didn't answer my question as to whether you know what a clade is. It's a really really important concept if you are going to understand how the fossil record is used as evidence and why.
"And it isn't a reality. Some of the fossils being describes as a different species turned out to be the same species."
That's exactly the sort of problem you'd expect if common descent via evolution were true. In fact, it's a point of amusement with creationists, because while they all claim that this or that fossil is either "man" or "ape" (which belies ignorance to begin with, because man IS an ape), different creationists can't seem to agree with each other on which is which.
None of this invalidates the very real and very obvious fossil record of hominid transition.
"The problem is that humans are humans and if you subclass them, they are still humans. This doesn't appear to be what your saying and it doesn't appear to be what others are saying with bacteria and all. Also, using means other then natural means don't necessarily count as evolution but more like manipluaton."
I don't know what you are talking about. Humans are a subclass of apes. Every feature that distinguishes apes from other primates is found in humans as well. We have the same distinctively ape pattern of bodily hair coverage (down to the follicle), we have molars that are unique in the animal kingdom... (unique to apes, that is) and virtually every other marker there is for "ape." In fact, we are so morphologically similar that creationist taxonomists wanted to group us together long before Darwin and the idea of evolution looked like a threat to creationist beliefs. About the only major morphological difference we have from apes that isn't just a size or balancing shift is the indent in the top of your mouth: the one in between all those ape teeth you have.