You mean John MacArthur? If we are thinking of the same guy, he isn't an academic Biblical scholar, and his claims are STILL on the very very early edge of what the scholarly consensus is.
Like I said, just about any scholarly textbook can tell you about these things. You don't have to take my word for it.
"This is what happens but a human is always a human and a monkey is always a monkey. "
Do you even know what a clade is? Do you have any idea how common descent is structured in the first place?
"Supposedly complete, but I haven't heard of any more about it."
And you are thus the sort of informed expert that we are supposed to believe when they conclude things about the hominid fossil record???
"The actual gap between man and a predecessor or common ancestor with another species is very wide."
There are gaps in actual the fossil record in the sense that we do not have a fossil of every homonid that ever lived. but this has nothing to do with whether or not we know that we shared a common ancestor with other apes.
We are apes. In every respect that an ape is different from all other primates, we are ape. Distinctively. Unequivocally. This isn't just a game of definitions either: it's a morphological reality that would be near impossible to explain via anything other than common descent even if we DIDN'T have a fossil record that clearly documents the relevant transitions or genetic records that just so happen to match up with that.
"That is why we are still on the hunt ofr the missing link."
No we aren't.
You clearly don't know what you are talking about. It's become very helpful, however, because people who have been taken in by creationist nonsense always tend to spout the same canards, like this one. They are like a big red flag that says 'this person has never actually bothered to understand the theory he wants to criticize."
"Humans have different DNA and are still humans."
What do you think speciation is anyway? All speciation is, ultimately, is different ENOUGH DNA so that some point in the reproductive process is no longer compatible. There is no magic line. It's no different for bacteria or sexual beings: all speciation is is genetic difference big enough to cross some arbitrary line we use to classify it.
Your dates are way way earlier than the scholarly consensus. Most scholars put Mark at the earliest, sometime around the 70s.
"The Roman councils on the subject just left everything as it had already been for some time. "
False.
"The manuscripts that we have from the time match those that we have today, with minor variations for different spellings of the same name, that kind of thing."
Also false.
Again, if you want the facts, read the actual scholarly academic work done on the Bible. Don't listen to apologists with axes to grind.
I hate to have to keep pointing this out, but it's just not true that creationists came up with those terms. They are terms that biologists use and have used. It's just that they don't have the significance and meaning that creationists place on them, because there is no biological barrier between one and the other. There is, however a real and important distinction between microevolutionary events and macroevolutionary events, like extinctions.
You are furiously splitting hairs: the fact is, all of these fields do the same as any other: they build models and attempt to test them as best they can. Speculation IS the hypothesis step: try to come up with a plausible explanation for something. String theory is based on extrapolating math from the observed facts no different than relativity: we weren't sure how to test it at the time either. Even with xenobiology (which isn't really much of a mainstream science anyway), the question is trying to figure out plausibility of various things given observed conditions. The observations are the conditions in question.
"Actually testing String Theory as a concept is beyond our current levels of technology."
Maybe, maybe not. We don't actually know that yet.
It's both. Theories are never "proven" in the sense you mean: to call something a theory is to say that it is a large framework of explanation, not to say anything about it's reliability or truth value. Common descent is a fact, and evolution is what explains this fact. You can pretend otherwise, but only by refusing to consider what the evidence actually shows.
You're going to have to explain this theory to the plants, then, who were apparently created trillions of years before the sun and the diurnal rhythms on which they all depend.
PE has been widely misrepresented as saying what you claim, but in fact that's not what it's about at all. PE is about the PACE of change, not about the gradual nature over the individual level: PE doesn't modify that or suggest that evolution is characterized by saltations (which is what you are basically implying). Even Darwin recognized this point, in fact, as Gould forgot in trying to make his criticisms sound more radical than they actually were.
Nitpick here: macroevolution and microevolution ARE terms used by biologists and not invented by creationists. The terms just happen to refer to the distinction between what happens when two populations can interbreed vs. when they can't. You're quite right that it has nothing to do with barring or setting up a line over which "new features" are defined.
Nope. You are still playing in the paradigm that there is some magic moment separating "new features" from just vague changes within a species. But speciation isn't about that: it's ONLY about reproductive compatibility. New features can appear within a given species without making them reproductively incompatible. There are women with four colored vision who can reproduce just fine with everyone else, for instance.
The reason for the distinction between macro and micro, as ACTUALLY used by biologists is based on the fact that different forces shape the development of populations depending on whether or not they can exchange genes or not. There's nothing more to it than that. It has nothing to do with features big or small being "added" anywhere.
It's dishonest to say that even Dawkins portrays evolution as disproving God. What he says is that it removes a lot of the force of the design argument, and hence is certainly something that leads people to lose their faith. Which is, frankly, fair enough.
Nothing inherently makes us NEED to care about creatively interpreting the Bible or the words of Moses so that they must stay in some way accurate. It's only if you need to believe that it is that you jump through those hoops. And if you do, more power to you. But it's certainly not the case that if the plausibility of the whole thing comes into question, a person can legitimately decide that they aren't interested in trying to find ways to save it anymore.
Are you really so confused that you think we are talking about a MODERN cell? That doesn't even make any sense.
Vision almost certainly began due to the simple fact that some elements of simple cell chemistry are affected by light: nothing more than that. That's what gets built on, not an entire specialized cell appearing out of nowhere (which is the ID explanation!)
"Both of which are no more transitional than a chicken to a chickenhawk."
Of course they are. They have traits otherwise unique to the lobed fishes and then in addition those unique to land animals. That's what transitional MEANS.
"What you probably missed is the simple fact that the entire world should be littered with fossil records."
This isn't a simple fact. The conditions under which fossils are created and preserved are very rare and very particular. Some ecologies don't form fossils at all, some DO form tons (we DO have literal mats of fossilized sea creatures in silt beds, for instance). The problem is that you just don't know what you are talking about: you don't seem to have any concept at all of how fossils could be formed in the first place. The vast vast vast majority of things that die today do not form fossils: one might scream at you: where are all the fossils you claim are created whenever anything dies... from 100 years ago?? Is the world only 100 years old?
"So where's this half-fish, half-mammal, crocodile-like creature which you talk about?"
Biologists don't talk about that because it's nonsense. Taxonomy doesn't work that way. Mammals are SUBSETS of the lobed fishes, not half anythings. It's descent with modification: branching clades, not one thing transitioning into another.
"Is it? Then please explain branches of science such as theoretical physics, cosmology, life origins, xenobiology, and various others that are by their nature largely or even totally speculative -- string theory for example is isn't backed up by any experimental data, so those who support it are currently doing so entirely as a matter of faith."
Bullplop. All of these disciplines, while indeed speculative, are focused ON trying to amass facts and reasoning, and they all hungrily bound their speculations based on facts and seek more to resolve disputes. Speculation is part of the scientific method and is hardly the same thing as faith: none of these people have FAITH that the speculation they are chasing down is true: they are following a hunch and trying to back it up. String theory, in fact, is about to undergo a partial test when the new collider comes online.
"I mean they keep finding all these species that have been supposedly extinct for 20-50 million years..."
I think you are a little confused. What they find are species of a GROUP thought extinct. For instance, the coelacanth was thought long extinct until modern specimens were found, but "coelacanth" is not a species, but and ORDER level name. The modern species aren't even of the same genus as the fossil species we thought were the last. All this means is that some line of these fish survived into the modern era in small enough populations to go unnoticed, not that they weren't subject to evolutionary change along the way.
"Frankly, the math on Evolution doesn't stack up. Even giving 200 billion years of time you don't get from the simplest life to the most complex."
How would you possibly, as a layperson, judge this. If you say that "math" doesn't add up, then show your work.
"Let alone the fact that the simplest life has a DNA which is a very specific instruction set."
The "simplest" (by which I assume you mean the one with the smallest genome) life alive today is MODERN life: hence one just as much "evolved" as anything else on the planet. The fact that all known organisms share some of the same basic building blocks (which, by the way, all deal with very basic cellular functions: i.e. those in common to all cellular life)
"How you go from no instruction set to a complex instruction set is still unknown."
In sense that you are talking about abiogenesis (not evolution) that's true, but we know now that it's certainly plausible: we just don't know exactly how.
"And what about viruses? Virus isn't even living, it's just code waiting for a host living cell to attach itself to. How did that (de)-evlove?"
There is no such thing as "evolution." Such a concept assumes that evolution is directional, and it is not. Viruses appear to have broken off larger genomes (and some, in fact, end up back in an organism's DNA) but we don't really have a full understanding of where they all came from. Why not get a bio-chem degree and come help us find out?
"Also isn't one of the major foundations of evolution that life cannot de-evolve? It always goes from lower to higher?"
Nope. There is no real way to define "lower" or "higher" and no need to in biology.
"a) Man will learn how to create new life and assemble DNA and RNA to create new creatures. b) Man will witness natural evolution from one species to another."
B has already happened. A has happened, though not from scratch, though even that is something we are very close to being able to do.
Lol. You have it backwards: these claimed oppositions are so laughably misinformed that most science advocates actually actively promote them. It isn't the secularists and atheists presecuting these nuts either: it's the IRS throwing them in jail for tax fraud, corruption, and in the case of "Harunyahya" thrown in a mental hospital by the Turkish government.
Seems like you just want to sling insults instead of engaging in a discussion. That sort of thing leads to misreading other posters, as you just discovered.
I think you basically don't get it. The FSM is a particular parody of a PARTICULAR argument in the ID community. Portraying it as some sloppy straw man of all religious beliefs is itself a dishonest straw man position.
Actually, we're a constitutional Republic. America is a country of citizens of all different religious opinions.
The reasoning that not having the government praise God is somehow promoting non-religion specious. People do not need the government to pray to god for them. Our government is a secular institution invented to serve some important secular roles: the whole point of the founder's design was that religion would be left up to the people (and, at the time, the states), NOT something the federal government had any authority to muck around with.
And you are simply wrong about SoCaS. The constitutional convention debated and rejected views like yours: they explicitly chose NOT to include any sort of invocations of God in the Constitution, NOT put it in the oaths of office, NOT require religious tests and so forth. That state is not supposed to get into the religious business period ALSO means that the state is supposed to be neutral and disinterested in religious matters. How can you possibly keep the state out of the church when you advocate having the state get involved in religious matters as an active player?
Probably Ken Miller: he's a prominent Catholic anti-ID biologist and he wrote a basic textbook. But he works at Brown, I believe, which is not in the South as far as I am aware.
What jolly old atheists have been arguing for is more reason, not less. The fact that it doesn't [i]require[/i] religion to send people to a gulag or enforce a dogma and jail dissidents hardly has anything to do with whether or not people should be more reasonable and less superstitious, and whether religion can be rightly criticized for endorsing ignorance.
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You mean John MacArthur? If we are thinking of the same guy, he isn't an academic Biblical scholar, and his claims are STILL on the very very early edge of what the scholarly consensus is.
Like I said, just about any scholarly textbook can tell you about these things. You don't have to take my word for it.
"This is what happens but a human is always a human and a monkey is always a monkey. "
Do you even know what a clade is? Do you have any idea how common descent is structured in the first place?
"Supposedly complete, but I haven't heard of any more about it."
And you are thus the sort of informed expert that we are supposed to believe when they conclude things about the hominid fossil record???
"The actual gap between man and a predecessor or common ancestor with another species is very wide."
There are gaps in actual the fossil record in the sense that we do not have a fossil of every homonid that ever lived. but this has nothing to do with whether or not we know that we shared a common ancestor with other apes.
We are apes. In every respect that an ape is different from all other primates, we are ape. Distinctively. Unequivocally. This isn't just a game of definitions either: it's a morphological reality that would be near impossible to explain via anything other than common descent even if we DIDN'T have a fossil record that clearly documents the relevant transitions or genetic records that just so happen to match up with that.
"That is why we are still on the hunt ofr the missing link."
No we aren't.
You clearly don't know what you are talking about. It's become very helpful, however, because people who have been taken in by creationist nonsense always tend to spout the same canards, like this one. They are like a big red flag that says 'this person has never actually bothered to understand the theory he wants to criticize."
"Humans have different DNA and are still humans."
What do you think speciation is anyway? All speciation is, ultimately, is different ENOUGH DNA so that some point in the reproductive process is no longer compatible. There is no magic line. It's no different for bacteria or sexual beings: all speciation is is genetic difference big enough to cross some arbitrary line we use to classify it.
Your dates are way way earlier than the scholarly consensus. Most scholars put Mark at the earliest, sometime around the 70s.
"The Roman councils on the subject just left everything as it had already been for some time. "
False.
"The manuscripts that we have from the time match those that we have today, with minor variations for different spellings of the same name, that kind of thing."
Also false.
Again, if you want the facts, read the actual scholarly academic work done on the Bible. Don't listen to apologists with axes to grind.
I hate to have to keep pointing this out, but it's just not true that creationists came up with those terms. They are terms that biologists use and have used. It's just that they don't have the significance and meaning that creationists place on them, because there is no biological barrier between one and the other. There is, however a real and important distinction between microevolutionary events and macroevolutionary events, like extinctions.
Well, yes and no. Check out talk-origins summary of the issue, which is better than anything I could write:
m l
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/macroevolution.ht
You are furiously splitting hairs: the fact is, all of these fields do the same as any other: they build models and attempt to test them as best they can. Speculation IS the hypothesis step: try to come up with a plausible explanation for something. String theory is based on extrapolating math from the observed facts no different than relativity: we weren't sure how to test it at the time either. Even with xenobiology (which isn't really much of a mainstream science anyway), the question is trying to figure out plausibility of various things given observed conditions. The observations are the conditions in question.
"Actually testing String Theory as a concept is beyond our current levels of technology."
Maybe, maybe not. We don't actually know that yet.
It's both. Theories are never "proven" in the sense you mean: to call something a theory is to say that it is a large framework of explanation, not to say anything about it's reliability or truth value. Common descent is a fact, and evolution is what explains this fact. You can pretend otherwise, but only by refusing to consider what the evidence actually shows.
You're going to have to explain this theory to the plants, then, who were apparently created trillions of years before the sun and the diurnal rhythms on which they all depend.
You're wrong, just look at the contribution that ID has made to information theory. Why, it came up with the absolute perfect sorting algorithm:
s ignsort.html
http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/intelligentde
PE has been widely misrepresented as saying what you claim, but in fact that's not what it's about at all. PE is about the PACE of change, not about the gradual nature over the individual level: PE doesn't modify that or suggest that evolution is characterized by saltations (which is what you are basically implying). Even Darwin recognized this point, in fact, as Gould forgot in trying to make his criticisms sound more radical than they actually were.
Nitpick here: macroevolution and microevolution ARE terms used by biologists and not invented by creationists. The terms just happen to refer to the distinction between what happens when two populations can interbreed vs. when they can't. You're quite right that it has nothing to do with barring or setting up a line over which "new features" are defined.
Nope. You are still playing in the paradigm that there is some magic moment separating "new features" from just vague changes within a species. But speciation isn't about that: it's ONLY about reproductive compatibility. New features can appear within a given species without making them reproductively incompatible. There are women with four colored vision who can reproduce just fine with everyone else, for instance.
The reason for the distinction between macro and micro, as ACTUALLY used by biologists is based on the fact that different forces shape the development of populations depending on whether or not they can exchange genes or not. There's nothing more to it than that. It has nothing to do with features big or small being "added" anywhere.
It's dishonest to say that even Dawkins portrays evolution as disproving God. What he says is that it removes a lot of the force of the design argument, and hence is certainly something that leads people to lose their faith. Which is, frankly, fair enough.
Nothing inherently makes us NEED to care about creatively interpreting the Bible or the words of Moses so that they must stay in some way accurate. It's only if you need to believe that it is that you jump through those hoops. And if you do, more power to you. But it's certainly not the case that if the plausibility of the whole thing comes into question, a person can legitimately decide that they aren't interested in trying to find ways to save it anymore.
Are you really so confused that you think we are talking about a MODERN cell? That doesn't even make any sense.
Vision almost certainly began due to the simple fact that some elements of simple cell chemistry are affected by light: nothing more than that. That's what gets built on, not an entire specialized cell appearing out of nowhere (which is the ID explanation!)
"Both of which are no more transitional than a chicken to a chickenhawk."
Of course they are. They have traits otherwise unique to the lobed fishes and then in addition those unique to land animals. That's what transitional MEANS.
"What you probably missed is the simple fact that the entire world should be littered with fossil records."
This isn't a simple fact. The conditions under which fossils are created and preserved are very rare and very particular. Some ecologies don't form fossils at all, some DO form tons (we DO have literal mats of fossilized sea creatures in silt beds, for instance). The problem is that you just don't know what you are talking about: you don't seem to have any concept at all of how fossils could be formed in the first place. The vast vast vast majority of things that die today do not form fossils: one might scream at you: where are all the fossils you claim are created whenever anything dies... from 100 years ago?? Is the world only 100 years old?
"So where's this half-fish, half-mammal, crocodile-like creature which you talk about?"
Biologists don't talk about that because it's nonsense. Taxonomy doesn't work that way. Mammals are SUBSETS of the lobed fishes, not half anythings. It's descent with modification: branching clades, not one thing transitioning into another.
The guy who's views this AC is pushing is a famous Islamic creationist and Holocaust denier. His real name is Adnan Oktar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Oktar
"Is it? Then please explain branches of science such as theoretical physics, cosmology, life origins, xenobiology, and various others that are by their nature largely or even totally speculative -- string theory for example is isn't backed up by any experimental data, so those who support it are currently doing so entirely as a matter of faith."
Bullplop. All of these disciplines, while indeed speculative, are focused ON trying to amass facts and reasoning, and they all hungrily bound their speculations based on facts and seek more to resolve disputes. Speculation is part of the scientific method and is hardly the same thing as faith: none of these people have FAITH that the speculation they are chasing down is true: they are following a hunch and trying to back it up. String theory, in fact, is about to undergo a partial test when the new collider comes online.
"I mean they keep finding all these species that have been supposedly extinct for 20-50 million years..."
I think you are a little confused. What they find are species of a GROUP thought extinct. For instance, the coelacanth was thought long extinct until modern specimens were found, but "coelacanth" is not a species, but and ORDER level name. The modern species aren't even of the same genus as the fossil species we thought were the last. All this means is that some line of these fish survived into the modern era in small enough populations to go unnoticed, not that they weren't subject to evolutionary change along the way.
"Frankly, the math on Evolution doesn't stack up. Even giving 200 billion years of time you don't get from the simplest life to the most complex."
How would you possibly, as a layperson, judge this. If you say that "math" doesn't add up, then show your work.
"Let alone the fact that the simplest life has a DNA which is a very specific instruction set."
The "simplest" (by which I assume you mean the one with the smallest genome) life alive today is MODERN life: hence one just as much "evolved" as anything else on the planet. The fact that all known organisms share some of the same basic building blocks (which, by the way, all deal with very basic cellular functions: i.e. those in common to all cellular life)
"How you go from no instruction set to a complex instruction set is still unknown."
In sense that you are talking about abiogenesis (not evolution) that's true, but we know now that it's certainly plausible: we just don't know exactly how.
"And what about viruses? Virus isn't even living, it's just code waiting for a host living cell to attach itself to. How did that (de)-evlove?"
There is no such thing as "evolution." Such a concept assumes that evolution is directional, and it is not. Viruses appear to have broken off larger genomes (and some, in fact, end up back in an organism's DNA) but we don't really have a full understanding of where they all came from. Why not get a bio-chem degree and come help us find out?
"Also isn't one of the major foundations of evolution that life cannot de-evolve? It always goes from lower to higher?"
Nope. There is no real way to define "lower" or "higher" and no need to in biology.
"a) Man will learn how to create new life and assemble DNA and RNA to create new creatures.
b) Man will witness natural evolution from one species to another."
B has already happened. A has happened, though not from scratch, though even that is something we are very close to being able to do.
Lol. You have it backwards: these claimed oppositions are so laughably misinformed that most science advocates actually actively promote them. It isn't the secularists and atheists presecuting these nuts either: it's the IRS throwing them in jail for tax fraud, corruption, and in the case of "Harunyahya" thrown in a mental hospital by the Turkish government.
Seems like you just want to sling insults instead of engaging in a discussion. That sort of thing leads to misreading other posters, as you just discovered.
I think you basically don't get it. The FSM is a particular parody of a PARTICULAR argument in the ID community. Portraying it as some sloppy straw man of all religious beliefs is itself a dishonest straw man position.
Actually, we're a constitutional Republic. America is a country of citizens of all different religious opinions.
The reasoning that not having the government praise God is somehow promoting non-religion specious. People do not need the government to pray to god for them. Our government is a secular institution invented to serve some important secular roles: the whole point of the founder's design was that religion would be left up to the people (and, at the time, the states), NOT something the federal government had any authority to muck around with.
And you are simply wrong about SoCaS. The constitutional convention debated and rejected views like yours: they explicitly chose NOT to include any sort of invocations of God in the Constitution, NOT put it in the oaths of office, NOT require religious tests and so forth. That state is not supposed to get into the religious business period ALSO means that the state is supposed to be neutral and disinterested in religious matters. How can you possibly keep the state out of the church when you advocate having the state get involved in religious matters as an active player?
Probably Ken Miller: he's a prominent Catholic anti-ID biologist and he wrote a basic textbook. But he works at Brown, I believe, which is not in the South as far as I am aware.
What jolly old atheists have been arguing for is more reason, not less. The fact that it doesn't [i]require[/i] religion to send people to a gulag or enforce a dogma and jail dissidents hardly has anything to do with whether or not people should be more reasonable and less superstitious, and whether religion can be rightly criticized for endorsing ignorance.