In case you haven't been reading, I have no problem with adaptation. This is what you are talking about here.
But even adaptation has its limits. You assume that all the varieties of all the various species of birds just happened randomly as a result of....what? "Preference"? That is a stretch of anyone's imagination to say the least. That is tantamount to placing tubes of paint in an empty art gallery and going back millions of years later to find masterpieces adorning the walls fully framed and signed.
You said you have no problem with adaptation but seem perplexed by how adaptation works. Some adaptations are strictly business, as you might call it, and some are purely based on mating preferences, as with the birds that I've linked.... Your mother chose your father for various reasons, right? (and vice versa) You, and all of your physical characteristics, are a result of their choices. You have, or will one day have, children. Your children are going to look as similar to you as you look to your parents. But, increasingly, the similarities between your offspring (from children down to great great great grandchildren) and your parents will start to dissipate. All of those changes, over all of those generations, are based on each mating individual's specific preferences or, at the very least, choices. There is no over-arching determining factor in who mates with whom other than what each individual preferred. Do you know why your paternal grandmother chose your paternal grandfather, for example? I'd say probably not. Some percentage of your parent's DNA will stick around for a long time, but it will become increasingly diluted as it mixes and blends with all of the other DNA that is injected with each successive generation's offspring. By the time your 4th child's 4th child's 4th child comes along, how similar will he/she be to your mom and dad?
If you play that mating game out over incredibly long periods of time, you get very different versions of not only your family, but of humans in general. If you go back far enough into your own ancestry, you get people who don't speak the same language, right? You get people who don't have the same skin color. You get people who don't what language is.You get people who have yet to dream of art. You get people who can't walk upright. You get people and who can't walk at all. This is the science of evolutionary adaptation that is evidenced in everything from Elephants to paramecium, yet you're arguing about paint colors...
The only connection that your tubes of paint analogy would have is in the explanation of abiogenesis, and I'm willing to admit that I don't know specifically how it started.I just don't explain away my lack of knowledge by saying ancient sky fairies did it.
And I really have to ask what you mean by "aesthetic preference" of the "avian ladies"? How did the aesthetic preference of the female result in more aesthetically pleasing plumage in the males? This is just nonsense to me.
The mating dances of those male birds are based around impressing the lady birds. I was trying to inject some humor into this conversation.
The females chose a male based on his plumage. Because of her choice, their offspring, if healthy, will carry on some aspects of the traits of the male which she chose. In doing so, she has given her offspring a chance to carry on the same type of plumage that the male had. If, by some random happenstance of DNA coding problems during conception, the male off spring of those two parents has some weird feather patterns, and those feather patterns are chosen by one of the next generation's females, then that weird feather pattern gets a change to pass on his weird feather legacy to a whole new generation of offspring. It's really very simple.
Since the Creator designed things on earth to take care of themselves and to adapt to changing environments, it appears that some did not survive the adaptation process. Or like dinosaurs, may have fulfilled a role and were no longer needed.
Mutations wipe things out...they seldom have beneficial effects, so those not adapted correctly died out as we would expect.
Mutations are the driving force behind adaption, which you just said you have no problem with...Please don't try and make the argument that mutations are only negative, ala Ken Hamm or those Answers in Genesis people. You're going to be made to look very ignorant if you do.
You should come to Australia......we have introduced plants here that not only survive, but flourish and take over the landscape. All they need is the right climate.
Do you think you could introduce arctic grasses into the plains of Australia? Why not?
Do you think that all of those success stories of transplanting certain botanical species was based on pure guesswork and luck, or did someone who knew a thing or two about speciation specifically select certain plants based on the types of climate they are adapted for?
That still doesn't explain how a mindless plant can become more colorful or develop the features of fake insects, including their pheromones, because it discerns that brighter colors or fake insects perpetuate their species more effectively....now does it? This is pure fantasy to me.
Go back to the example I used of your parents and you. If your family only ever lived in one particular environment, let's say it's either the Sahara or Siberia, do you think that over successive generations that your features would never change? That you guys would just stay normal old white people forever? Those harsh environments would require some very clever avoidance measures for dealing with it, or environmental adaption. There would be a lot of loss along the way. A lot of death just for the simple fact that your current form isn't adapted to that environment. But, overtime, a few of the traits of your bothers and sisters, children and grand children, would start to show benefits to the environment. As those traits became more perpetual with every passing generation, you would eventually wind up with a group of people, who are part of your direct lineage, but who look almost nothing like you did just a few generations before. Plants and animals function the same way.
The mindless plant doesn't make a choice. In their case, it's pure luck of the draw, which may sound harsh or improbable, but much harsher is it to imagine a designer who purposefully made one plant less prepared to deal with the world around it than another? This process of natural selection is just simply how natural life works. You can believe in God all you want to - but you need understand nature, regardless of your religious leanings, especially if you want to make arguments against it.
And I am saying that all that beauty is wasted on creatures who have no appreciation for it apart from their mating rituals.
Have you ever seen a cow appreciate a sunset.....or a dog appreciate the beauty of a forest? To him it is just a bunch of trees on which to leave his calling card.
The patterning and designs on myriads of creatures is nothing short of breathtaking, yet you want us to believe that it is all accidental. That the aesthetically pleasing colors and designs are the product of "preference" on the part of living things?
Take a look at the simple caterpillars of various species and tell me there is no designer......
Who's to say they don't appreciate it? You also need to do more research into animal behavior and cognition before you make that argument.
We have the same Creator who used the same raw materials to create all living beings. Similarities do not make us the same at all. There are gulfs between man and animals that can never be breached. Spirituality for example makes us very different. There is no human culture on earth that is devoid of spirituality. Some nations can deny it to their citizens but they cannot stamp it out....it is inherent.
Language is not simple for humans either. We alone can communicate either verbally or with written language. We can convey in writing exactly what we can say with speech.
The gulfs between man and animal is simply an area of ignorance on the part of certain aspects of the theistic community. We are one in the same, some are simply more advanced in their complexity than others.
I'm going to recommend this book:
Roger Fouts and others spent years teaching American Sign Language to Chimpanzees and studying what they did with it. What they found was that while we may be ignorant of the thought processes of other species, that doesn't mean that there are no thoughts among the "lesser" species, as you might call them.
You'll probably never read this. But you should.
Washoe, for example, long after the study was over, and for years until her death, would teach her young the same sign language that had been taught to her. She would even take magazines, flip through them, and using the pictures in the magazines, teach new words to her young. This was all completely independent and on her own.
Our design and engineering skills are not programmed but are the result of years of study. How many years of study does it take for a beaver to build a dam? Or for all the varieties of birds to learn to make the nests that are peculiar to their species? Who teaches them?
Who trained the migratory birds or butterflies in navigation? We do not possess those skills unless we learn them from someone who learned them from someone else. Do you see the difference? Do you want to?
It actually takes quite a few... I think you're mistaken in how you assume animals function. Male beavers have their entire youth and adolescence to learn dam construction from their fathers and from play. One big difference is that most mammalian species come out of the womb much more advanced than we humans do. That can give the appearance of being born with the knowledge to do things, but that's an incorrect understanding of the life of each of those individual animals.
Do all birds know how to fly from birth, or are the taught within a matter of seconds through a very harsh school of "Time to leave the nest, sucker. Hope you don't fall to your death."
And falling to their death happens more often that I think you give it credit for.
What animals indulge in art without man to provide them with the materials? There is no "art" from animals found in caves, like there is for native people's in various countries. Animals can mimic man.
Art is one step away from tool creation, which we know the greater apes can do. Again, I'll just suggest you read that book, or any other on the higher activities of the great apes. Independent, spontaneous art, devoid of human influence, happens.
Well, actually it is against the laws of God and man to kill someone because you don't like them. We, unlike the animals have a conscience and a sense of morality that is not seen in the animal kingdom.
War, on the other hand has been used for millennia as a lawful way to murder those you don't like.
So war is just an acceptable form of murder, which we are supposedly against because we are different from the animals. Do you know which other closely related species engages in turf and resource wars? Gorillas and chimpanzees...
The Bible's explanation for that is simple. Death and violence were never supposed to part of the human experience.
When "sin" (imperfection) entered the world, then violence entered right along with it. The first murder was committed by Adam's son. In one generation, violence and murder became part of life....such is the power of sin.
You're going to start running into logical fallacies here if you choose the intelligent design approach and then start using the "sin entered the world" argument...
WRONG! God never spread his message with violence or murder. In the days of ancient Israel, he used his nation to clear out squatters from the land he promised to give them as an inheritance. The Canaanites were the vilest of human beings, who indulged in violence and perverted sex to a sickening degree. He cleared them out like the vermin they were. Their worship was demonic. (Deut 18:9-12)
So the people who were intelligently designed to live in a certain place were then kicked of that place, and straight murdered, because some other people that were intelligently designed were promised the place that some other people were already in?
God no longer sanctions war. There is no land or territory for his people to protect any more. Christians live in every corner of the globe and were told to be "no part of this world". (John 15:18-21)
Hence no human can tell us to break the laws of God and take the life of a fellow human.
Since God sanctioned his people as his executional force in ancient times, there was no "murder" committed.
Murder is the "unlawful" taking of human life. Since God is the arbiter of who lives and who dies, his perfect justice was served. Just as we would expect from any human justice system. The punishment should fit the crime.
God's sanction made it execution for a capital crime....not murder. The highest penalty one could pay for any crime committed in Israel was death. The authorized executioner was therefore not a murderer.
The Christian message was never spread with violence or murder. Please don't confuse what Roman Catholicism did as something "Christian". They "converted" people at the point of a sword or forced confession with cruel torture. None of that was sanctioned by the Christ. Make no mistake.....Christendom is not Christianity.
Again, you're just making excuses for murder when God performs it as being pure and holy or righteous and whatever, and in the same breath arguing for intelligent design in a steady state existence that should have required no corrections, since it was, as it were, intelligently designed.
Just think about that for a second.
