....The cell is self splitting, self replicating. An airplane is not....
So? An airplane was conceived in a designers mind. A cell also was conceived in a mind. We humans, with our limited minds have not yet come up with a self-replicating physical machine. A self-replicating computer program is about as close as we have come. Just as such a self replicating computer virus arises in some programmers mind, so also, a real living virus or any other living thing originates in a mind.
When addressing origins, the question where information comes from must be answered. The genes and DNA of living organisms is like the blueprints of the airplane. Someone drew up these blueprints before they were sent to the airplane factory. Similarly, someone came up with the code stored in the DNA of living things. This code represents the instructions to the factory how to build a living single or multi-celled creature. Included in these instructions, are those needed for replication. If we knew how, we also could include instructions to the airplane how to make a copy of itself.
The fossil records, as well as common observations, clearly show that living things are divided into two distinct groups, usually, but not always called species. There is for example, a group of animals called cats and another named the dogs. Within each group we have observed that many members thereof of may interbreed, forming a large variety within that group. Neither in the fossil record, nor in observations today, who we find any crossovers between these distinct groups.
Evolutionists interpret the evidence in terms of descent, whereas creationists interpret the same evidence in terms of reusable design elements. For example, the hemoglobin molecule's function is to transport oxygen. So the designer adopted a common basic design in all places where oxygen must be carried. We humans do this in the design of engines. The basic piston -- cylinder -- crank -- flywheel system is used over and over again, because it has been proven to work reliably.
Since most people, including college students, use their computers for web work, superfast graphics is not the slightest issue. Even with the fastest web connection, all Macs including the cheapest Mac book, is way faster than any data can be gotten off of the Internet. All Macs now shipped with at least 2Gb of RAM, so that the a normal user can run the usual programs they need to do that work. Even the old G4 iBook is plenty fast enough to play movies either from DVDs or from the web.
My advice is free and applies to any product.:-) If you do not like the sky high gasoline prices, get yourself a bicycle or walk. Nobody is forcing you to spend money except for the government which makes you pay taxes.
....Consumers don't make such hair-splitting distinctions....
Not only that, but most consumers don't bother to upgrade their OS at all. When their present computer doesn't do any more what they wanted to do, they will simply buy a new computer. When Microsoft tells us how many copies of VISTA they have sold, they are not talking about how many consumers have upgraded their present computers, which is a very small number. Most copies of VISTA are included with a new computer.
The new OSX10.6 will be shipped automatically on new generation multiprocessor hardware. The new OS will simply be an integrated part of the blazingly fast performance of these systems. It may be, that Apple will not even make the 10.6 version available as any sort of upgrade, but only at some point when it is ready, include with all new hardware. This would also put a crimp on the installation of OSX on non-Apple hardware. It is highly likely that Apple is also working hard to make the full-blown Mac OS X and the iPhone version as much alike as possible. This would greatly simplify the life of any developer who wishes to provide their software on both platforms. Apple may extend the secure iPhone software distribution system to the Mac as well.
....Apple should have nothing to do with "integrated graphics"....
Why should a Mac book toting college student or a soccer mom care about superfast graphics that are mostly useful for games? Apple does make computers for the graphics crowd that do care about these things and are willing to pay quite a bit extra for them.
....The average Safari/iTunes/Word user has zero use for any of this stuff....
If you are that kind of user, then just don't buy the next iteration of OS X. Your present Mac will perform just fine with what you have and Apple will not twist your arm to upgrade. If the improvements in the next operating system don't float your boat, wait until they come out with a version that does have all the bells and whistles that you want.
I do know for sure that 10.5 has never crashed any of our Intel or PPC systems here. As far as I am concerned, the automatic backup feature of Time Machine is enough of a reason to upgrade.
Because, as the creator God tells us, he specifically breathed his Spirit into man, making every human an eternal being with the ability to love. If there is an ability to love, then by necessity there must also be the ability NOT to love. Love is expressed by the lover wanting to bring pleasure and satisfaction in the object of love. Love is oriented toward another, not self. Adam, as every man does still today, chose not to love the object of love, but himself and his own desires. If you wish to learn what God's definition of love is, that you may read 1Corinthians 13.
This estrangement of mankind from the God of love is the root cause of all the crime, war and violence we experience today and throughout history. Religion, including Christianity, has often been used to further the selfish ambitions of the people in control of a particular religion. It was the religious leaders of the day, who delivered to Jesus over to the Romans to be crucified.
It is instructive to understand that when God gave the first commandment He said: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength". Notice, that he did not say serve or obey. That is because true love serves and obeys since that is part of love's intrinsic nature. Jesus re-itereted this command of God, when he was asked about the most important commandment.
The ability to love, cherish and respect another person is the greatest gift that God has ever given to humans. When Adam chose to depart from the way of love, the greatest tragedy to befall man and all of creation took place. Because God is love, as we are told in Scripture, he could not let this state of affairs remain for all eternity. That is why he chose to enter time and space, to leave the splendor of his eternal existence, cloaked his deity in human flesh, in order to redeem every human being that chooses to respond to his love. Jesus showed that the way of love is through service and obedience, even to the point of death. Because he is the only human being that ever lived without missing once, death had no power over him and God was rightfully able to resurrect Him from death.
(...Funny how the data lead most scientists, who 150 years ago....)
Funny how 150 years ago, most people were at least Christian oriented, if not true believing Christians. This is no longer true today. After Adam refused to love by disobeying God, God came looking for him, as was usual in order to have fellowship with the man he had made. Somehow out of knew that he had separated himself from God and demonstrated that knowledge by running and hiding from the presence of God.
Ever since that time, humans have been running away from God, avoiding him at all costs. They look at all of creation and can clearly see that it has a distinct order. It is not random. All people of all cultures, somehow sense that there is this "other" with whom they attempt to deal. That is why mankind is incurably religious.
This loving God is still looking for you. When will you stop running?
....But, in nature, we have DNA that never gets used....
In any given code system, there can be lots of code that never gets executed. How much code is there in an operating systems such as Windows that is just there but is never called? What is so remarkable about that?
That is not the issue anyway. The issue is whether the code just happened by statistical, mindless, processes, or whether there is a programmer. Evolutionists believe the code came into being by a mindless statistical process and creationists say that just as in human written programs, the code of life was written by a programmer. Just as in human programs, if there is a hardware error of some sort, the program may get corrupted. This is not the fault of the programmer is it now?
If you, as most people, who were not so ignorant of what is really in the Bible, God's revelation to men, you would know that there was this thing theologians call the fall. This is where death and corruption entered into God's perfect universe, at least as far as the Earth is concerned. At that point in time, all of nature became subject to what scientists call the third law of thermodynamics, commonly known as entropy. All code, whether created by God, or written by humans, needs hardware wherein it is stored. Even originally perfect code may get corrupted by faulty hardware.
(..The octopus evolved its brain and eyes independently, whereas most other species are believed to have inherited their brain and their eyes from a past ancestor...)
God created the octopus' brain and eyes independently, whereas most other species received their brain and their eyes from the creator immediately.
Can you see, that just by changing a few words of your sentence, the creationists view fits the data just as well? You also are using the word "believed". You are certainly right about that, because in both cases is it simply a belief. The data we have is the existence of the octopus. Evolutionists and creationists simply interpret that data differently depending on their core beliefs.
...Citrate is no more edible to normal E. coli than rocks are to you...
That is a bogus comparison because obviously there are living creatures that can digest citrate, but I know of no life form that can live on pure rocks. It is reasonably certain that there are other life forms out there in the wild that can live on citrate. So what is the big deal if this particular life form is able to adapt to eat something that is clearly edible to other life forms?
The bottom line of all this is that these E. coli bacteria remained E. coli bacteria before and after the experiment. Just because an organism can adapt to a different food source does not automatically make it a different new organism. Darwin's finches were always finches, regardless of the thickness or length or other configuration of their beaks.
Evolutionists interpret similarities in genetics and otherwise in terms of descent of one organism from another. In every instance I have ever heard of, these similarities can also be interpreted in terms of common design elements. Horse buggies and automobiles have four wheels in common. Does that mean that horse buggies are the ancestors of automobiles in the evolutionary sense? No, of course not. It is just that any vehicle with four wheels is a stable well worked out design.
Human writers of code reuse sections of it in many places, wherever it may be applicable. Why should the author of the genetic code not also use this principle? Evolutionists say organism X has many genetic similarities to organism Y and therefore organism X is the ancestor of organism Y. Intelligent design advocates say that the designer used code from organism X also in organism Y because the design goals are very similar.
....The genetic similarities between species seem to imply that the more complex species are often derived from the simpler ones....
Genetic and other similarities are interpreted by evolutionists in terms of descent of one organism from another. This is purely an interpretation. Every one of these similarities whether genetic or otherwise can be explained equally well in terms of reusable design. Do automobiles descend from horse-drawn wagons just because they both have four wheels? No, of course not. The designers and builders of automobiles understand that a four wheeled vehicle is a stable, proven design.
An intelligent Creator worth anything would certainly reapply designs and principles that work, in other applications. Programmers use proven sections of code over and over, perhaps with slight modifications. So why should the programmer of the genetic code not also reuse debugged and working segments of His code where it fits?
Every bit of evidence that evolutionists interpret according to their worldview and logic, can also be viewed through creationist and the logic of design glasses.
...You never proved God, you've merely asserted Him...
God cannot be proved nor disproved. We know about the law of cause and effect. Every effect has a cause. The universe is the effect. What is its cause? Today's scientists tell us that there was a big bang. So what caused the bang to go bang? If the universe was not caused by something outside of itself, the only alternative left is that it was caused by itself. That is absurd.
If we were smart enough to understand God, we would have to be God. There are really only two ways of knowing. One of these is by first-hand experience and the other is by whatever someone else tells you. If you experience something, you have to believe in the senses. We all know that those can be fooled quite easily. When someone else tells you something, you have to decide whether to believe them or not.
All that God has ever asked of us humans is to believe what he tells us. That was the case early on in the garden. God had told Adam that in the day he eats of this fruit whatever it was, he will die. Obviously, Adam did not believe God, because if he had he would not have eaten. At issue was then and still is today whether we believe or disbelieve.
Nobody goes to hell for their bad deeds and nobody goes to heaven for their good deeds. When you tell somebody to his face that you do not believe them, you are in fact branding them to be a liar. When you tell something to someone that you know to be true and they tell you they don't believe you, they are telling you that you are a liar and you have the perfect right to get angry at them for that. God does not get angry at you or anyone else for doing bad stuff, but he does get upset when you call him a liar. People who disbelieve are calling God a liar and God is perfectly justified in sending them away from himself to darkness into hell.
Throughout the entire Bible at issue is always believe or disbelieve. We read that Abraham believed God and that was credited to him as righteousness. This belief is more than lip service, but requires action on our part. If you really and truly believe, for example, that some stock you own will go to half its value by next week, you will sell that stock tomorrow.
Jesus said to Nicodemus a religious ruler of the Jews: "If you do not believe me when I tell you about earthly things, how are you going to believe me if I tell you about heavenly things?" Children tend to believe what their parents and other adults tell them. Only when they find out that they have been lied to about something, do they begin to disbelieve.
In our normal human experience we tend to say: "Show me or prove it to me and then I'll believe." Like so many things in the Bible, God turns this on its head. He tells us: "Believe and then I will show you." If you are willing to believe God, and that is a key, willing, then God will show you so that you will know for sure.
....Was that change an indication of some sort of "desperation" on their part....
I don't think that is very likely. I did not do the experiment and I'm not a microbiologist. One of the things I would look at the though, is how consistent the makeup of the food source was over the duration of the whole experiment. It could be that even seemingly insignificant changes allow the bacteria to process different components of their food supply differently. We know that in human nutrition and in animals as well, trace elements can make a huge difference in their health and well-being. Many life processes are extremely sensitive to very small changes in the environment and nutrition.
In any case, even after 35,000 generations, the bacteria was still basically E. coli and not something else. Scientists have raised countless generations of fruit flies. By radiation and chemical means they have induced grotesque mutations in these fruit flies. Even so nobody has ever produced anything but fruit flies. It is a fundamental rule that life begets life and like begets like. Nobody has ever demonstrated otherwise. This is completely and utterly contrary to the evolutionary conjecture that species have evolved from the simple to the complex.
....the background radiation from that event we call the Big Bang....
The question remains: Who or what caused the "Big Bang"? What was before the bang banged? We can observe and calculate that space-time and matter-energy had a beginning. They did not always exist. As I said before, Einstein showed this mathematically. The existence of the universe requires a cause that was there before the universe was. The only other explanation is that the universe created itself, which is absurd. The Bible is the only document we possess that tells us about an eternal, uncaused being, called Elohim, in the original Hebrew that part of the Bible was written in.
ALL other religions and world views always place their version of God within our time-space-matter-energy universe, or as as part of it. ONLY in the Bible does the real, eternal self-existent God reveal Himself as One outside of and entirely independent of the Universe and its content.
All holy books and religious philosophies other than the teachings we find in the Bible are upward directed. By human effort and rituals the attempt is made to appease or satisfy whatever deity a particular religion or philosophy promulgates. Only in the Scriptures do we find this process reversed. It is God reaching down to man in love, rather than man by some self-effort trying to reach up to God.
In stark contrast to all other religions and philosophies, the founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ is alive, not dead like ALL other originators of the various religions. For none of the others is it even claimed that their founder is still alive for ever more. I am not talking here about a life in the collective memory of the adherents of some religion, but a real, physical actual, resurrection which occurred in history.
These three factors first convinced me that the basic message of the Bible is true. Since then I have experienced first-hand the working of this eternal God in my life and the lives of those like-minded individuals around me. I know that reality is far greater than the fraction thereof we humans can grasp with our physical senses, even when those senses are extended greatly by scientific instrumentation. We read in this marvelous book that no human mind has ever imagined the splendor that God holds in store for those who believe and trust him and learned to love him. For me personally, God has lifted the curtain just a teensy-weensy bit and allowed me a tiny peek into the dimensions beyond time and space where he dwells.
If you can conceive of and believe in a being, a God, who can create the whole universe and everything in it from absolutely nothing, then believing any and all of the miracles as related to the Bible becomes easy.
Hey, they obviously left out cars and trains here. A way to disable all cars on all LA freeways might have same use. I don't know what, but I'm sure some hare-brain in government could figure out what that would be good for.
Never once did I say that software does not exist. All I said is that software or information is not a material good. Sound or electricity are not immaterial but are very much physical, but the information carried by them is different. That is why we have the whole body of law called intellectual property law. Why intellectual property? What is different about intellectual property from normal physical property? Think about that for a minute.
(..Software is a material item..)
In order for software or information to be perceived and utilized by us, it must be on a physical carrier. These two items are distinct and separate and are treated as such by a large body of law.
(..why do some people have a traumatic brain injury..)
Why do computers misbehave on a transient or permanent basis when the hardware malfunctions either because of a passing electrical transient or a more permanent and therefore more serious hardware defect? There is nothing wrong with the software, but nevertheless the computer messes up, loses data and if the error is severe enough, ceases to function entirely. In computers as well as in people it is often difficult to tell whether the malfunction is due to hardware or software.
(...It has not been observed outside the Bible..)
I guess my mention of the Bible really pulled your chain didn't it? The fact is that we do observe and practice every day the distinction between a poem and the poet, a sculpture and to sculptor, the composition from the composer and programmer from the program. That, as such, has nothing to do with the Bible. Everything we do, first begins as processes of thought and planning, which have an existence of their own, not dependent on the material world. A thought or an idea is distinct from any eventual physical embodiment that may eventually come from these.
(..if all the evidence shows it impossible for the world..)
The word impossible only applies to us and what we know, not to God. Presently he scientists tell us that the universe originated in something called the "Big Bang". In essence they are telling us that first there was nothing and then it exploded. If that is not a miracle, I don't know what is. They are in effect substituting "nothing" for what the Bible attributes to a transcendent eternal God. If nothing can work the miracle of an entire universe, why should an all powerful all-knowing God not be able to do what nothing supposedly did? We are told in the Bible that Jesus created everything that exists and apart from him nothing exists that does exist.
If Jesus, claiming to be God come in human form can make the entire universe out of absolutely nothing, might it not be possible for him to do trivial stuff, such as turning water into wine? If a big bang can create the miracle of life, eventually over billions of years, as scientists try to tell us, why should the God who created time itself along with everything else not be able to do the same thing in six days or even in an instant? Why does time itself even have to enter into the picture?
Einstein tells us that time-space and matter-energy all came into existence together. This is exactly what we read in the very first verse of the Bible. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Modern science merely substitutes the words "Big Bang" or in slightly more scientific terms the word "singularity" for God.
If this God, or singularity, if you prefer, can fashion an entire universe and all life from nothing, then all the rest of the so-called miracles related in the Bible are exercises in triviality.
...just as a computer program is a material thing....
You are mistaken in this for the simple reason that if software were material, it could not travel at the speed of light. Software has no mass and the speed at which it can travel is limited to its physical carrier, whether that be at a truck or a beam of light. The speed of light is only a propagation limit for physical matter and energy. If you could find a vehicle upon which you could load information or software, that could travel at any speed, much faster than light, then that software would also be able to travel in that manner. What is the speed of thought?
The material symbolism by which software or information is embodied is not its essence. The chemistry of ink on paper does not tell you anything about the arrangements of the symbols and their meaning on that paper. The ones and zeros on a computer disk only have meaning to a mind that has understanding. Computer hardware does not express or impute meaning to the program it is executing but just runs it.
It is a basic mistake to consider the operation of a computer in terms of its hardware rather than its software. It is the software that gives function and life to the computer. Your brain is really nothing more than an incredibly complicated system executing immaterial instructions. These instructions, your thoughts, your emotions, your will, in short everything about you, make up the real you, not the physical body including the brain in which they now execute. No matter how minutely you examine the circuits and chips of a computer, that will tell you nothing about its software which is only evident when it is actually executing. If a computer cannot execute the instructions, that does not mean that the instructions are now gone, but simply that they cannot be executed in the current hardware. The pertinent instructions may be stored in multiple places at once. We call this backups.
In the same way, when your brain ceases to operate, the software of your mind, of your soul, can still and does exist. Just as as there is no way to tell from the computer itself that a backup has been made and stored somewhere, so there is also no way to tell whether or where a backup exists of your immaterial software, your soul, your mind, your spirit. With computers the ability to send immaterial information silently almost anywhere is a big security concern.
Is it so inconceivable to you that your thoughts, the complete record of your deeds and even the DNA instructions to build your hardware, your body, might be backed up somewhere? The Bible tells us exactly that is true, only in terms of books, the technology understood by those who penned it.
....the taller monkeys, with their heads up higher, will be able to see farther over obstructions.....
It is true that they would be able to see further, but they would also be seen from further away. The predator might not be aware of the monkey in the underbrush or grass unless its head was sticking up. Therefore, being taller is both an advantage and a disadvantage for the monkey. Whether the advantage or disadvantage predominates depends mostly on the environment which does not tend to be constant over very long periods of time and because many animals tend to migrate from one environment to another environment. Therefore I would say that being taller does not necessarily give monkeys a distinct survival advantage. Furthermore, most, if not all monkeys live in forests, not grasslands. I do not see where a taller upright walking monkey would have a significant advantage over those that walk on all fours across the forest floor when they were not swinging from tree to tree.
The problem is that there is no such person that is totally unassuming. Such a creature simply does not exist. You are no different, but have a certain worldview, just as everybody has a world view. There are things that we simply have to accept as a given that cannot be proven but to simply accepted on faith.
You cannot live without faith. When you get on an airplane you have faith that that airplane will take you to your destination. You do not know this and cannot know this for certain, but you can reasonably believe it to be the case.
No thinking person would assert that the airplane was not a product of mind that was carefully thought-out and planned. Yet there are people who will assert that they and all living things came about by processes that did not involve careful thinking and planning. Even one single cell of your body contains more parts than all the airplanes have ever been made put together. If all of the parts of a cell do not work precisely together as they were designed to, then the cell dies.
You cannot get around the fact that the airplane was designed and neither can you get around the fact that you too, along with all life are designed and not some sort of cosmic accident.
...."I have no bread, I will eat these rocks instead,"...
No, it's more like I am lost in the wilderness and there is no Burger King or grocery store. So now I will have to eat worms, bugs, snails and other edible things that may be found there, if I wish to survive.
The bacteria in this experiment, were placed into an environment that eventually forced them to digest substances that could still sustain their life. They did not become a new species or kind, but remained exactly as they had always been. Once an E. coli always an E. coli, once a worm, always a worm, once a person, always a person. That is all we consistently observe occurring in nature. You just cannot get around it because that is how things are.
How is it possible to tell that these bacteria did not have this ability all along, rather than expressing it at some point due to the extended pressure of the changed environment? Being able to utilize a different food source is nothing more than an adaptation.
Most of us do not normally eat worms, snails, insects, frogs and other creatures. However, people that have been lost in the wilderness have survived on such and other things. As populations have migrated to other regions of the earth, where their food sources have changed, but they have not evolved into some other species because that.
These bacteria were E. coli before and after the experiment and they will always be E. coli no matter what is done to them or how their abilities to utilize various substances is changed. Even after 35,000 generations, they did not evolve into a new species. This experiment is no proof of evolution.
....Give me one good reason why over the course of generations genes in monkeys couldn't slowly be mutated to stand upright and gain benefits from it....
The driving force for evolution is driven by the the so-called survival of the fittest mechanism. How would the ability to stand upright give a consistent survival advantage to monkeys who gradually stood upright over a time span of millions of years or even only 500,000 years? Being taller might give them an advantage in reaching higher hanging fruit or other sources of food, but also make them more visible to their enemies. Monkeys that get eaten because they are more visible certainly don't have an advantage. In their presumed environment, being taller is at best, a wash. It is certainly not a distinct, decisive survival advantage to be taller.
Even after in this case 35,000 generations, these bacteria were still E. coli and nothing more. They did not evolve into another species of bacteria, let alone an entirely different organism. They were still the same, essentially unchanged life form they had always been. If anything, the experiment shows, that even after a 35,000 generations, the change is still well within the definition of a single species.
Being able to utilize a slightly different food source is nothing more than evidence for the amazing adaptability of all living things.
You don't HAVE a soul or spirit, you ARE a living, immaterial, eternal spirit being that is housed temporarily in a material body, so you are able to interact with a material universe. That's what it really means to be made in the image of God. Jesus tells us that God is Spirit and they that worship Him must do so in spirit and truth. God reveals to us in Genesis that He personally breathed into the lifeless form of Adam's body and Adam BECAME (not received) a living spirit.
...If however you fixate on the lessons of the Bible, you are stuck with an awkward sort of soul arithmetic....
That assumes that what is called 'soul' in the Bible is a material object. Here on/., we *love* technology in general and computers in particular.
What is it about a computer that makes it do what it does? Is it the hardware or the software? In Macs, there are two rather different sets of hardware, yet these can execute the same software, at least as evident externally. Then there is the whole concept of virtualization and emulation. Software then is immaterial and so is the soul.
Your body is the hardware, but the real you, the OS as it were, runs inside the body. The soul might be defined as the sum total of your being, your OS. Your intelligence, emotions, and will. Can software exist independently of hardware? Of course! Can software be expressed without some sort of hardware? Not any way that we know. Once the hardware stops working, does the software disappear? Of course not. You can take that software, and load it into a faster, far better hardware and have that software execute faster than ever before. We also duplicate software and then upgrade or customize it and send it at the speed of light to distant parts of the earth or even outer space.
If we humans can do that sort of thing with immaterial software, is it so inconceivable that a God who can create the whole universe from nothing might have the ability to store and later load the software, that is the real you, into new, eternal hardware, just as he tells us in scripture He will do? Will that new hardware and software bear a resemblance to your present being? Software is immaterial and not subject to destruction and neither is the real you, the soul. God keeps good, updated backups of every person.
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....The cell is self splitting, self replicating. An airplane is not....
So? An airplane was conceived in a designers mind. A cell also was conceived in a mind. We humans, with our limited minds have not yet come up with a self-replicating physical machine. A self-replicating computer program is about as close as we have come. Just as such a self replicating computer virus arises in some programmers mind, so also, a real living virus or any other living thing originates in a mind.
When addressing origins, the question where information comes from must be answered. The genes and DNA of living organisms is like the blueprints of the airplane. Someone drew up these blueprints before they were sent to the airplane factory. Similarly, someone came up with the code stored in the DNA of living things. This code represents the instructions to the factory how to build a living single or multi-celled creature. Included in these instructions, are those needed for replication. If we knew how, we also could include instructions to the airplane how to make a copy of itself.
The fossil records, as well as common observations, clearly show that living things are divided into two distinct groups, usually, but not always called species. There is for example, a group of animals called cats and another named the dogs. Within each group we have observed that many members thereof of may interbreed, forming a large variety within that group. Neither in the fossil record, nor in observations today, who we find any crossovers between these distinct groups.
Evolutionists interpret the evidence in terms of descent, whereas creationists interpret the same evidence in terms of reusable design elements. For example, the hemoglobin molecule's function is to transport oxygen. So the designer adopted a common basic design in all places where oxygen must be carried. We humans do this in the design of engines. The basic piston -- cylinder -- crank -- flywheel system is used over and over again, because it has been proven to work reliably.
....horrible integrated graphics junk.....
Since most people, including college students, use their computers for web work, superfast graphics is not the slightest issue. Even with the fastest web connection, all Macs including the cheapest Mac book, is way faster than any data can be gotten off of the Internet. All Macs now shipped with at least 2Gb of RAM, so that the a normal user can run the usual programs they need to do that work. Even the old G4 iBook is plenty fast enough to play movies either from DVDs or from the web.
....why do you think you can offer any advice ....
My advice is free and applies to any product.:-) If you do not like the sky high gasoline prices, get yourself a bicycle or walk. Nobody is forcing you to spend money except for the government which makes you pay taxes.
....Consumers don't make such hair-splitting distinctions....
Not only that, but most consumers don't bother to upgrade their OS at all. When their present computer doesn't do any more what they wanted to do, they will simply buy a new computer. When Microsoft tells us how many copies of VISTA they have sold, they are not talking about how many consumers have upgraded their present computers, which is a very small number. Most copies of VISTA are included with a new computer.
The new OSX10.6 will be shipped automatically on new generation multiprocessor hardware. The new OS will simply be an integrated part of the blazingly fast performance of these systems. It may be, that Apple will not even make the 10.6 version available as any sort of upgrade, but only at some point when it is ready, include with all new hardware. This would also put a crimp on the installation of OSX on non-Apple hardware. It is highly likely that Apple is also working hard to make the full-blown Mac OS X and the iPhone version as much alike as possible. This would greatly simplify the life of any developer who wishes to provide their software on both platforms. Apple may extend the secure iPhone software distribution system to the Mac as well.
....Apple should have nothing to do with "integrated graphics"....
Why should a Mac book toting college student or a soccer mom care about superfast graphics that are mostly useful for games? Apple does make computers for the graphics crowd that do care about these things and are willing to pay quite a bit extra for them.
....The average Safari/iTunes/Word user has zero use for any of this stuff....
If you are that kind of user, then just don't buy the next iteration of OS X. Your present Mac will perform just fine with what you have and Apple will not twist your arm to upgrade. If the improvements in the next operating system don't float your boat, wait until they come out with a version that does have all the bells and whistles that you want.
I do know for sure that 10.5 has never crashed any of our Intel or PPC systems here. As far as I am concerned, the automatic backup feature of Time Machine is enough of a reason to upgrade.
...Why did the fall of man happen?...
....)
Because, as the creator God tells us, he specifically breathed his Spirit into man, making every human an eternal being with the ability to love. If there is an ability to love, then by necessity there must also be the ability NOT to love. Love is expressed by the lover wanting to bring pleasure and satisfaction in the object of love. Love is oriented toward another, not self. Adam, as every man does still today, chose not to love the object of love, but himself and his own desires. If you wish to learn what God's definition of love is, that you may read 1Corinthians 13.
This estrangement of mankind from the God of love is the root cause of all the crime, war and violence we experience today and throughout history. Religion, including Christianity, has often been used to further the selfish ambitions of the people in control of a particular religion.
It was the religious leaders of the day, who delivered to Jesus over to the Romans to be crucified.
It is instructive to understand that when God gave the first commandment He said: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength". Notice, that he did not say serve or obey. That is because true love serves and obeys since that is part of love's intrinsic nature. Jesus re-itereted this command of God, when he was asked about the most important commandment.
The ability to love, cherish and respect another person is the greatest gift that God has ever given to humans. When Adam chose to depart from the way of love, the greatest tragedy to befall man and all of creation took place. Because God is love, as we are told in Scripture, he could not let this state of affairs remain for all eternity. That is why he chose to enter time and space, to leave the splendor of his eternal existence, cloaked his deity in human flesh, in order to redeem every human being that chooses to respond to his love. Jesus showed that the way of love is through service and obedience, even to the point of death. Because he is the only human being that ever lived without missing once, death had no power over him and God was rightfully able to resurrect Him from death.
(...Funny how the data lead most scientists, who 150 years ago
Funny how 150 years ago, most people were at least Christian oriented, if not true believing Christians. This is no longer true today. After Adam refused to love by disobeying God, God came looking for him, as was usual in order to have fellowship with the man he had made. Somehow out of knew that he had separated himself from God and demonstrated that knowledge by running and hiding from the presence of God.
Ever since that time, humans have been running away from God, avoiding him at all costs. They look at all of creation and can clearly see that it has a distinct order. It is not random. All people of all cultures, somehow sense that there is this "other" with whom they attempt to deal. That is why mankind is incurably religious.
This loving God is still looking for you. When will you stop running?
....But, in nature, we have DNA that never gets used....
In any given code system, there can be lots of code that never gets executed. How much code is there in an operating systems such as Windows that is just there but is never called? What is so remarkable about that?
That is not the issue anyway. The issue is whether the code just happened by statistical, mindless, processes, or whether there is a programmer. Evolutionists believe the code came into being by a mindless statistical process and creationists say that just as in human written programs, the code of life was written by a programmer. Just as in human programs, if there is a hardware error of some sort, the program may get corrupted. This is not the fault of the programmer is it now?
If you, as most people, who were not so ignorant of what is really in the Bible, God's revelation to men, you would know that there was this thing theologians call the fall. This is where death and corruption entered into God's perfect universe, at least as far as the Earth is concerned. At that point in time, all of nature became subject to what scientists call the third law of thermodynamics, commonly known as entropy. All code, whether created by God, or written by humans, needs hardware wherein it is stored. Even originally perfect code may get corrupted by faulty hardware.
(..The octopus evolved its brain and eyes independently, whereas most other species are believed to have inherited their brain and their eyes from a past ancestor...)
God created the octopus' brain and eyes independently, whereas most other species received their brain and their eyes from the creator immediately.
Can you see, that just by changing a few words of your sentence, the creationists view fits the data just as well? You also are using the word "believed". You are certainly right about that, because in both cases is it simply a belief. The data we have is the existence of the octopus. Evolutionists and creationists simply interpret that data differently depending on their core beliefs.
...Citrate is no more edible to normal E. coli than rocks are to you...
That is a bogus comparison because obviously there are living creatures that can digest citrate, but I know of no life form that can live on pure rocks. It is reasonably certain that there are other life forms out there in the wild that can live on citrate. So what is the big deal if this particular life form is able to adapt to eat something that is clearly edible to other life forms?
The bottom line of all this is that these E. coli bacteria remained E. coli bacteria before and after the experiment. Just because an organism can adapt to a different food source does not automatically make it a different new organism. Darwin's finches were always finches, regardless of the thickness or length or other configuration of their beaks.
Evolutionists interpret similarities in genetics and otherwise in terms of descent of one organism from another. In every instance I have ever heard of, these similarities can also be interpreted in terms of common design elements. Horse buggies and automobiles have four wheels in common. Does that mean that horse buggies are the ancestors of automobiles in the evolutionary sense? No, of course not. It is just that any vehicle with four wheels is a stable well worked out design.
Human writers of code reuse sections of it in many places, wherever it may be applicable. Why should the author of the genetic code not also use this principle? Evolutionists say organism X has many genetic similarities to organism Y and therefore organism X is the ancestor of organism Y. Intelligent design advocates say that the designer used code from organism X also in organism Y because the design goals are very similar.
....The genetic similarities between species seem to imply that the more complex species are often derived from the simpler ones....
Genetic and other similarities are interpreted by evolutionists in terms of descent of one organism from another. This is purely an interpretation. Every one of these similarities whether genetic or otherwise can be explained equally well in terms of reusable design. Do automobiles descend from horse-drawn wagons just because they both have four wheels? No, of course not. The designers and builders of automobiles understand that a four wheeled vehicle is a stable, proven design.
An intelligent Creator worth anything would certainly reapply designs and principles that work, in other applications. Programmers use proven sections of code over and over, perhaps with slight modifications. So why should the programmer of the genetic code not also reuse debugged and working segments of His code where it fits?
Every bit of evidence that evolutionists interpret according to their worldview and logic, can also be viewed through creationist and the logic of design glasses.
...You never proved God, you've merely asserted Him...
God cannot be proved nor disproved. We know about the law of cause and effect. Every effect has a cause. The universe is the effect. What is its cause? Today's scientists tell us that there was a big bang. So what caused the bang to go bang? If the universe was not caused by something outside of itself, the only alternative left is that it was caused by itself. That is absurd.
If we were smart enough to understand God, we would have to be God. There are really only two ways of knowing. One of these is by first-hand experience and the other is by whatever someone else tells you. If you experience something, you have to believe in the senses. We all know that those can be fooled quite easily. When someone else tells you something, you have to decide whether to believe them or not.
All that God has ever asked of us humans is to believe what he tells us. That was the case early on in the garden. God had told Adam that in the day he eats of this fruit whatever it was, he will die. Obviously, Adam did not believe God, because if he had he would not have eaten. At issue was then and still is today whether we believe or disbelieve.
Nobody goes to hell for their bad deeds and nobody goes to heaven for their good deeds. When you tell somebody to his face that you do not believe them, you are in fact branding them to be a liar. When you tell something to someone that you know to be true and they tell you they don't believe you, they are telling you that you are a liar and you have the perfect right to get angry at them for that. God does not get angry at you or anyone else for doing bad stuff, but he does get upset when you call him a liar. People who disbelieve are calling God a liar and God is perfectly justified in sending them away from himself to darkness into hell.
Throughout the entire Bible at issue is always believe or disbelieve. We read that Abraham believed God and that was credited to him as righteousness. This belief is more than lip service, but requires action on our part. If you really and truly believe, for example, that some stock you own will go to half its value by next week, you will sell that stock tomorrow.
Jesus said to Nicodemus a religious ruler of the Jews: "If you do not believe me when I tell you about earthly things, how are you going to believe me if I tell you about heavenly things?" Children tend to believe what their parents and other adults tell them. Only when they find out that they have been lied to about something, do they begin to disbelieve.
In our normal human experience we tend to say: "Show me or prove it to me and then I'll believe." Like so many things in the Bible, God turns this on its head. He tells us: "Believe and then I will show you." If you are willing to believe God, and that is a key, willing, then God will show you so that you will know for sure.
....Was that change an indication of some sort of "desperation" on their part....
I don't think that is very likely. I did not do the experiment and I'm not a microbiologist. One of the things I would look at the though, is how consistent the makeup of the food source was over the duration of the whole experiment. It could be that even seemingly insignificant changes allow the bacteria to process different components of their food supply differently. We know that in human nutrition and in animals as well, trace elements can make a huge difference in their health and well-being. Many life processes are extremely sensitive to very small changes in the environment and nutrition.
In any case, even after 35,000 generations, the bacteria was still basically E. coli and not something else. Scientists have raised countless generations of fruit flies. By radiation and chemical means they have induced grotesque mutations in these fruit flies. Even so nobody has ever produced anything but fruit flies. It is a fundamental rule that life begets life and like begets like. Nobody has ever demonstrated otherwise. This is completely and utterly contrary to the evolutionary conjecture that species have evolved from the simple to the complex.
....the background radiation from that event we call the Big Bang....
The question remains: Who or what caused the "Big Bang"? What was before the bang banged? We can observe and calculate that space-time and matter-energy had a beginning. They did not always exist. As I said before, Einstein showed this mathematically. The existence of the universe requires a cause that was there before the universe was. The only other explanation is that the universe created itself, which is absurd. The Bible is the only document we possess that tells us about an eternal, uncaused being, called Elohim, in the original Hebrew that part of the Bible was written in.
ALL other religions and world views always place their version of God within our time-space-matter-energy universe, or as as part of it. ONLY in the Bible does the real, eternal self-existent God reveal Himself as One outside of and entirely independent of the Universe and its content.
All holy books and religious philosophies other than the teachings we find in the Bible are upward directed. By human effort and rituals the attempt is made to appease or satisfy whatever deity a particular religion or philosophy promulgates. Only in the Scriptures do we find this process reversed. It is God reaching down to man in love, rather than man by some self-effort trying to reach up to God.
In stark contrast to all other religions and philosophies, the founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ is alive, not dead like ALL other originators of the various religions. For none of the others is it even claimed that their founder is still alive for ever more. I am not talking here about a life in the collective memory of the adherents of some religion, but a real, physical actual, resurrection which occurred in history.
These three factors first convinced me that the basic message of the Bible is true. Since then I have experienced first-hand the working of this eternal God in my life and the lives of those like-minded individuals around me. I know that reality is far greater than the fraction thereof we humans can grasp with our physical senses, even when those senses are extended greatly by scientific instrumentation. We read in this marvelous book that no human mind has ever imagined the splendor that God holds in store for those who believe and trust him and learned to love him. For me personally, God has lifted the curtain just a teensy-weensy bit and allowed me a tiny peek into the dimensions beyond time and space where he dwells.
If you can conceive of and believe in a being, a God, who can create the whole universe and everything in it from absolutely nothing, then believing any and all of the miracles as related to the Bible becomes easy.
....a 15 million X increase in compute power....
Is not really needed for this. Just find the culprit(s) and use the rubber hose decryption key on him/them.
Hey, they obviously left out cars and trains here. A way to disable all cars on all LA freeways might have same use. I don't know what, but I'm sure some hare-brain in government could figure out what that would be good for.
....If the software doesn't exist,.....
..)
..)
..)
Never once did I say that software does not exist. All I said is that software or information is not a material good. Sound or electricity are not immaterial but are very much physical, but the information carried by them is different. That is why we have the whole body of law called intellectual property law. Why intellectual property? What is different about intellectual property from normal physical property? Think about that for a minute.
(..Software is a material item
In order for software or information to be perceived and utilized by us, it must be on a physical carrier. These two items are distinct and separate and are treated as such by a large body of law.
(..why do some people have a traumatic brain injury
Why do computers misbehave on a transient or permanent basis when the hardware malfunctions either because of a passing electrical transient or a more permanent and therefore more serious hardware defect? There is nothing wrong with the software, but nevertheless the computer messes up, loses data and if the error is severe enough, ceases to function entirely. In computers as well as in people it is often difficult to tell whether the malfunction is due to hardware or software.
(...It has not been observed outside the Bible..)
I guess my mention of the Bible really pulled your chain didn't it? The fact is that we do observe and practice every day the distinction between a poem and the poet, a sculpture and to sculptor, the composition from the composer and programmer from the program. That, as such, has nothing to do with the Bible. Everything we do, first begins as processes of thought and planning, which have an existence of their own, not dependent on the material world. A thought or an idea is distinct from any eventual physical embodiment that may eventually come from these.
(..if all the evidence shows it impossible for the world
The word impossible only applies to us and what we know, not to God. Presently he scientists tell us that the universe originated in something called the "Big Bang". In essence they are telling us that first there was nothing and then it exploded. If that is not a miracle, I don't know what is. They are in effect substituting "nothing" for what the Bible attributes to a transcendent eternal God. If nothing can work the miracle of an entire universe, why should an all powerful all-knowing God not be able to do what nothing supposedly did? We are told in the Bible that Jesus created everything that exists and apart from him nothing exists that does exist.
If Jesus, claiming to be God come in human form can make the entire universe out of absolutely nothing, might it not be possible for him to do trivial stuff, such as turning water into wine? If a big bang can create the miracle of life, eventually over billions of years, as scientists try to tell us, why should the God who created time itself along with everything else not be able to do the same thing in six days or even in an instant? Why does time itself even have to enter into the picture?
Einstein tells us that time-space and matter-energy all came into existence together. This is exactly what we read in the very first verse of the Bible. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Modern science merely substitutes the words "Big Bang" or in slightly more scientific terms the word "singularity" for God.
If this God, or singularity, if you prefer, can fashion an entire universe and all life from nothing, then all the rest of the so-called miracles related in the Bible are exercises in triviality.
...just as a computer program is a material thing....
You are mistaken in this for the simple reason that if software were material, it could not travel at the speed of light. Software has no mass and the speed at which it can travel is limited to its physical carrier, whether that be at a truck or a beam of light. The speed of light is only a propagation limit for physical matter and energy. If you could find a vehicle upon which you could load information or software, that could travel at any speed, much faster than light, then that software would also be able to travel in that manner. What is the speed of thought?
The material symbolism by which software or information is embodied is not its essence. The chemistry of ink on paper does not tell you anything about the arrangements of the symbols and their meaning on that paper. The ones and zeros on a computer disk only have meaning to a mind that has understanding. Computer hardware does not express or impute meaning to the program it is executing but just runs it.
It is a basic mistake to consider the operation of a computer in terms of its hardware rather than its software. It is the software that gives function and life to the computer. Your brain is really nothing more than an incredibly complicated system executing immaterial instructions. These instructions, your thoughts, your emotions, your will, in short everything about you, make up the real you, not the physical body including the brain in which they now execute. No matter how minutely you examine the circuits and chips of a computer, that will tell you nothing about its software which is only evident when it is actually executing. If a computer cannot execute the instructions, that does not mean that the instructions are now gone, but simply that they cannot be executed in the current hardware. The pertinent instructions may be stored in multiple places at once. We call this backups.
In the same way, when your brain ceases to operate, the software of your mind, of your soul, can still and does exist. Just as as there is no way to tell from the computer itself that a backup has been made and stored somewhere, so there is also no way to tell whether or where a backup exists of your immaterial software, your soul, your mind, your spirit. With computers the ability to send immaterial information silently almost anywhere is a big security concern.
Is it so inconceivable to you that your thoughts, the complete record of your deeds and even the DNA instructions to build your hardware, your body, might be backed up somewhere? The Bible tells us exactly that is true, only in terms of books, the technology understood by those who penned it.
....the taller monkeys, with their heads up higher, will be able to see farther over obstructions.....
It is true that they would be able to see further, but they would also be seen from further away. The predator might not be aware of the monkey in the underbrush or grass unless its head was sticking up. Therefore, being taller is both an advantage and a disadvantage for the monkey. Whether the advantage or disadvantage predominates depends mostly on the environment which does not tend to be constant over very long periods of time and because many animals tend to migrate from one environment to another environment. Therefore I would say that being taller does not necessarily give monkeys a distinct survival advantage. Furthermore, most, if not all monkeys live in forests, not grasslands. I do not see where a taller upright walking monkey would have a significant advantage over those that walk on all fours across the forest floor when they were not swinging from tree to tree.
...No-one who is truly unassuming....
The problem is that there is no such person that is totally unassuming. Such a creature simply does not exist. You are no different, but have a certain worldview, just as everybody has a world view. There are things that we simply have to accept as a given that cannot be proven but to simply accepted on faith.
You cannot live without faith. When you get on an airplane you have faith that that airplane will take you to your destination. You do not know this and cannot know this for certain, but you can reasonably believe it to be the case.
No thinking person would assert that the airplane was not a product of mind that was carefully thought-out and planned. Yet there are people who will assert that they and all living things came about by processes that did not involve careful thinking and planning. Even one single cell of your body contains more parts than all the airplanes have ever been made put together. If all of the parts of a cell do not work precisely together as they were designed to, then the cell dies.
You cannot get around the fact that the airplane was designed and neither can you get around the fact that you too, along with all life are designed and not some sort of cosmic accident.
...."I have no bread, I will eat these rocks instead," ...
No, it's more like I am lost in the wilderness and there is no Burger King or grocery store. So now I will have to eat worms, bugs, snails and other edible things that may be found there, if I wish to survive.
The bacteria in this experiment, were placed into an environment that eventually forced them to digest substances that could still sustain their life. They did not become a new species or kind, but remained exactly as they had always been. Once an E. coli always an E. coli, once a worm, always a worm, once a person, always a person. That is all we consistently observe occurring in nature. You just cannot get around it because that is how things are.
....Because not having this ability....
How is it possible to tell that these bacteria did not have this ability all along, rather than expressing it at some point due to the extended pressure of the changed environment? Being able to utilize a different food source is nothing more than an adaptation.
Most of us do not normally eat worms, snails, insects, frogs and other creatures. However, people that have been lost in the wilderness have survived on such and other things. As populations have migrated to other regions of the earth, where their food sources have changed, but they have not evolved into some other species because that.
These bacteria were E. coli before and after the experiment and they will always be E. coli no matter what is done to them or how their abilities to utilize various substances is changed. Even after 35,000 generations, they did not evolve into a new species. This experiment is no proof of evolution.
....Give me one good reason why over the course of generations genes in monkeys couldn't slowly be mutated to stand upright and gain benefits from it....
The driving force for evolution is driven by the the so-called survival of the fittest mechanism. How would the ability to stand upright give a consistent survival advantage to monkeys who gradually stood upright over a time span of millions of years or even only 500,000 years? Being taller might give them an advantage in reaching higher hanging fruit or other sources of food, but also make them more visible to their enemies. Monkeys that get eaten because they are more visible certainly don't have an advantage. In their presumed environment, being taller is at best, a wash. It is certainly not a distinct, decisive survival advantage to be taller.
Even after in this case 35,000 generations, these bacteria were still E. coli and nothing more. They did not evolve into another species of bacteria, let alone an entirely different organism. They were still the same, essentially unchanged life form they had always been. If anything, the experiment shows, that even after a 35,000 generations, the change is still well within the definition of a single species.
Being able to utilize a slightly different food source is nothing more than evidence for the amazing adaptability of all living things.
....and I believe I have a soul....
You don't HAVE a soul or spirit, you ARE a living, immaterial, eternal spirit being that is housed temporarily in a material body, so you are able to interact with a material universe. That's what it really means to be made in the image of God. Jesus tells us that God is Spirit and they that worship Him must do so in spirit and truth. God reveals to us in Genesis that He personally breathed into the lifeless form of Adam's body and Adam BECAME (not received) a living spirit.
...If however you fixate on the lessons of the Bible, you are stuck with an awkward sort of soul arithmetic....
/., we *love* technology in general and computers in particular.
That assumes that what is called 'soul' in the Bible is a material object. Here on
What is it about a computer that makes it do what it does? Is it the hardware or the software? In Macs, there are two rather different sets of hardware, yet these can execute the same software, at least as evident externally. Then there is the whole concept of virtualization and emulation. Software then is immaterial and so is the soul.
Your body is the hardware, but the real you, the OS as it were, runs inside the body. The soul might be defined as the sum total of your being, your OS. Your intelligence, emotions, and will. Can software exist independently of hardware? Of course! Can software be expressed without some sort of hardware? Not any way that we know. Once the hardware stops working, does the software disappear? Of course not. You can take that software, and load it into a faster, far better hardware and have that software execute faster than ever before. We also duplicate software and then upgrade or customize it and send it at the speed of light to distant parts of the earth or even outer space.
If we humans can do that sort of thing with immaterial software, is it so inconceivable that a God who can create the whole universe from nothing might have the ability to store and later load the software, that is the real you, into new, eternal hardware, just as he tells us in scripture He will do? Will that new hardware and software bear a resemblance to your present being? Software is immaterial and not subject to destruction and neither is the real you, the soul. God keeps good, updated backups of every person.
....Christians sure do work hard to believe in something that doesn't exist....
Christians sure do work hard to believe in something that YOU BELIEVE doesn't exist.
There, I corrected that for you.