Snowflakes....designed or accidents of nature?

[McBell]

But you're missing where it says, "And here we can see..." and "Here is..." for the evidence. The "might have's" are the attempt to explain the reason to why one thing evolved this or that way. It's not, "it might have evolved" when they're showing you a picture of "this evolved", and then explain "it might have evolved because of..."

When your faith requires you to twist , manipulate, and flat out lie about the "evidence" in order to fit your faith, I say said faith is not worth having.
Sad how so many creationists have to twist, manipulate, and flat out lie about the truth in order to keep grasp of their faith.

 

[JayJayDee]

Do you assume that the Creator has human limitation? I don't. But you do!

. Do I?

To you, the Creator has to create the world like a handyman or carpenter would do, but not as a mathematician, game programmer, engineer, or scientist would do. Humans have expanded beyond the nitty-gritty one-piece-at-a-time designs. We have now software that do it for us. God can't do that according to you but has to handcraft each and every snowflake.

When did I ever say that? The originals were his "one piece at a a time" designs. If you had bothered to read my responses, you would see that I have said that God designed his creatures to be self sufficient, adaptable and with reproductive programming that would ensure their survival.

After taking a couple of classes in the topic, no, I can't make it go away in my mind simply because it's beautiful and solid. It's the only solution that works for the things that we do know about nature.

In your mind perhaps....I do not think that way.

We are all free to make up our own minds about this subject.

Why did God need samples of the kinds on the ark at all? If God can create any kind of genetic code from anything, then he didn't need anything at all. And since they were only "kinds" and all other 5 million species evolved from those "kinds", it shows that the story is stupid. He only needed a frog, and God could have super-evolved all species back again.

Again, in your estimation it doesn't add up...in my estimation, evolution is equally ridiculous. Macro-evolution does not answer the questions I have posed on this thread.

Aha. Sure. Magic explains it all.

No more magic than evolution claims.....couching it in scientific terms does not make it more believable.
There are no facts established for organic evolution. Adaptation is a fact but to stretch it beyond what is provable is conjecture as the language proves.

They live only one day. I guess he could have saved some eggs. But why bother, when God could've created them again?

Again, you assume a lot. God knows exactly what he did...we do not. You are putting limitations on a limitless Creator.

Sometimes he takes a path that has value as an object lesson...the flood is one such lesson. (Matt 24:36-39; 2 Pet 2:5, 6)

So how did the plants come back after being flushed down to the ocean floor or buried under tons of mud? I'm not sure you understand the size of this supposed flood.

He created them...he can either revive them or recreate them...he doesn't give us the detail. We have to fill in the blanks, just like evolutionists do. What makes their imagination more valid than ours?

These wouldn't have been regular weather conditions. Someone made a calculation once of the frictional forces and pressure produced by this size of a rain, and the pressure alone would bring the temperatures to a boil.

You think the Creator is subject to human estimations? He has no rules and can control all things in his creation if he chooses to.

With the intense forces pushing it down (tons of pressure), and whirlpools that would be created by such force, it would look like a pingpong ball in a bucket where you spray with a firehose on it.

Yes and the ark was designed to float above any changes taking place below it. You assume that God did not make the calculations that mere humans can make? He was in control of the outcome of his own actions......unless you assume he is limited in some way by what men think? This kind of thinking is as comical as you imagine ours is.

 

[Ouroboros]

. Do I?

Yes you do. You refuse the possibility that God used evolution only because that's how you prefer to interpret the story in your book. Your personal and church's preference how to read the story is guiding you how you want God to be, instead of honestly trying to dive into the science of evolution.

When did I ever say that? The originals were his "one piece at a a time" designs. If you had bothered to read my responses, you would see that I have said that God designed his creatures to be self sufficient, adaptable and with reproductive programming that would ensure their survival.

Adaption is mutation, genetic variance, and natural selection. In other words, evolution. Then why do you insisting on denying evolution?

The only way the body plan changes in a species is through the changes in the DNA. The DNA contains the genes. The genes are constructed of codons (3 nucleotides). The nucleotides are made out of natural elements. The nucleotides can change through different influences like virus, radiation, copy error, and more. There are several synonymous codon codes that produce the same peptides. There are million ways of producing the same or similar proteins (poly-peptides) from different genetic combinations. We all carry 5-20 unique mutations in our DNA. Mutations in the genes that changes the body plan (phenotype) can be seen, mostly observed by us in obvious genetic diseases, but occurs quite a bit in the background, without us even noticing it. Small changes. By looking at the body plan through the skeleton, we can, from these known facts, argue that different body plans come from different genetic material. If there are enough of a group of people with a different body plan, it's because that's what they have in their genes. We can see, through the fossil record that the body plans change drastically, like in the case of the dinosaur->bird evolution, or whales, or horses, or trilobites, or even humans.

Again, in your estimation it doesn't add up...in my estimation, evolution is equally ridiculous. Macro-evolution does not answer the questions I have posed on this thread.

There's no difference between micro and macro, and you know it. You already admit to micro, so you have essentially already given up on macro. It's just your insistence on not looking at the evidence.

No more magic than evolution claims.....couching it in scientific terms does not make it more believable.
There are no facts established for organic evolution. Adaptation is a fact but to stretch it beyond what is provable is conjecture as the language proves.

If the flood story is true, then your "adaptation" (evolution through genetic change) must've happened thousand times faster than what the theory claims. You're the one who has to rely on magic.

Again, you assume a lot. God knows exactly what he did...we do not. You are putting limitations on a limitless Creator.

That's your assumptions about God.

Sometimes he takes a path that has value as an object lesson...the flood is one such lesson. (Matt 24:36-39; 2 Pet 2:5, 6)

You're making assumptions about God based on an ancient book.

He created them...he can either revive them or recreate them...he doesn't give us the detail. We have to fill in the blanks, just like evolutionists do. What makes their imagination more valid than ours?

My imagination is based on the material I have looked at (in real life) and the books I've read and the studies I've done in class and on the field. It's not my major, but I did take some classes just for the fun of it.

You think the Creator is subject to human estimations? He has no rules and can control all things in his creation if he chooses to.

Your God is controlled by an ancient book and the ideas of some people 2,500 years ago that you never met.

My estimations are based on evidence I even held in my hands.

Yes and the ark was designed to float above any changes taking place below it. You assume that God did not make the calculations that mere humans can make? He was in control of the outcome of his own actions......unless you assume he is limited in some way by what men think? This kind of thinking is as comical as you imagine ours is.

Your assumptions are based on magical thinking and an ancient book written by people you never met.

My assumptions are based on physics that in turn is based on nature and reality and talking to real scientists and professors who has looked at these things and even some material I look at myself.

I trust myself more than your books.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

So you have to change what they actually say in order to make it more believable????? Really?

You seem to have missed the point entirely. Saying "this is what definitely happened" instead of "this is what may have happened" doesn't suddenly make the following claim more worth believing. The use of the conditional is a practice of academic honesty, not somehow an admission that people should feel free to completely ignore the implications. The fact that you seem to think this is somehow a great argument does nothing but make you look foolish for not understanding how an honest argument is made. If an admission of uncertainty is, to you, a sign that what is being said should be dismissed, then you obviously do not understand how to conduct yourself in an honest debate.

Your argument basically boils down to "They use conditionals, therefore I can safely ignore everything that say because they admit that they MIGHT be wrong". This is not a reasonable argument - it is just a way for you to conveniently avoid having to deal with the actual facts being presented. If you're looking for people claiming absolute certainties, then do yourself a favour and stop trying to debate science. Science deals exclusively with tentative conclusions that are never considered absolute certainties - as has been explained to you repeatedly.

And you speak for all scientists with that bit of verbal sleight of hand do you? Perhaps you need to go and alter all the pro-evolution writings to support your assertions.....just substitute more assertions for the ones that are already there......more imagination at work. What's new?

There is no verbal sleight-of-hand involved. You clearly had a problem with the use of the conditional, so I removed the conditional and made then into statements of certainty. You can now no longer engage in your intellectually dishonest tactic of dismissing the arguments purely on the basis that those who made them did not assert certainty - you now have to actually EVALUATE the arguments and their merits, rather than ignoring them.

You can't make conjecture and guesswork into a fact.

And you can't turn facts into guesswork. But since you seem desperate to avoid the facts and instead focus entirely on the language used by those who present them, I find this very telling of your position. You have already demonstrated to me that you have next to no understanding of evolution theory, and absolutely zero willingness to learn about it. The fact that you can't engage with their arguments, and instead try to hide in semantics, just proves further how desperate you're getting.

 

[Bunyip]

But not everyone have to believe a lie, but of course some are free to believe whatever they wish.

Sure, those people do not care if what they believe is true or not. You for example.

 

[FearGod]

Sure, those people do not care if what they believe is true or not. You for example.

There's no one on earth can prove that God doesn't exist, but only our brains can realize such fact, stuck to the stone did it if it make sense to your brain.

 

[Bunyip]

There's no one on earth can prove that God doesn't exist, but only our brains can realize such fact, stuck to the stone did it if it make sense to your brain.

Of course nobody can prove that your invisible wizard in the sky does not exist. You can't prove that invisible smurfs did not make the moon - so what?

 

[FearGod]

Of course nobody can prove that your invisible wizard in the sky does not exist. You can't prove that invisible smurfs did not make the moon - so what?

My brain did, i don't have to see or touch the air to realize that it exists.

 

[Bunyip]

My brain did, i don't have to see or touch the air to realize that it exists.

Sure, so what?

 

[`mud]

One CAN feel the wind, and the water, and the sand.
We all know that they all exist, but an unseen proof of nothing,
welllll.....that is a stretch.
~
'mud

 

[jonathan180iq]

JJD, I say this sincerely. Once you've had a chance to step back from this and clear your head, you should come back and read through it again. Your entire argument for the last several pages of debate has been reduced to 3 basic points:

1. "God designed everything" (And you know this because the Watchtower tells you so)
2. "The problem isn't the evidence, it's the interpretation" (while at other times you've also stated that scientists are basically all part of an anti-creationist conspiracy theory)
3. "They use wording that I don't like."

Now, you can shout this stuff as loud as you like all day long. That's totally cool...But, starting with #3, essentially your basis for contesting the entire evolutionary model is because you don't like how sentences are formed... And, as I've posted here: Snowflakes....designed or accidents of nature? If you've ever written a paper of any kind you should have been instructed against using the same designations repeatedly. In the links provided, you'll see nearly every single word or phrase that you have a problem with as being a complementary replacement words for "said". So, instead of reading all of those textbook passages and seeing some sort of evidence to the conspiracy, and instead of trying to create a "gotcha" moment where you think you've realized the folly of all the great minds of scientific discovery, you'll be able to read it for what it is. "This guy said."" The data said."" This previous study said."" Yadda Yadda said."

For all the harping that you are doing on scientific discoveries, have you (or the Watchtower) suggested a single alternative explanation of these discoveries other than "God did it"?

Certainly you recognize "God did it" isn't science. And surely you see the difference between hundreds of years of field study, one the one hand, and arm-chair conjecture on the other. Ask yourself also why you think the writers of the Watchtower, with their obvious history or printing grossly inaccurate predictions and data, are a worthy source for you to rely on for an accurate understanding or depiction of scientific discovery. If you have been taught by a source that is very obviously biased against evolution, don't you think that your own understanding of the world around is only going to remain biased?

Here's an example - If I wanted to know what Jehova's witnesses believed, wouldn't you think it wiser of me to learn directly from a JW source, or would you rather I learned it from a source that really didn't like JW's? How would you feel if I used that biased source in an argument against you, telling you what was wrong with JWs and what you believed? Would my argument be credible? I think we can agree that would be a flawed approach on my part, right? Do you see how that's exactly what you're doing when you attack the evolutionary model based on what you've learned form the Watchtower?

Evolutionary science isn't something that crosses cultures, religions, creeds, and historical understanding because it's just some made-up anti-christian conspiracy. It predates Christianity, I assure you. The basis of evolutionary understanding didn't start with Darwin; it can be traced back to the Greeks. He's just credited with finally scientifically proposing the driver, Natural Selection. If the evolutionary model was still based on metaphysical explanations, then you'd be right to attack the premise or the presuppostion...But it's not. And it hasn't been for a couple hundred years. So, for you personally, to continue harping on this throw-back argument from the turn of the last century shows your lack of understanding of even the introductory level of this topic. To continue pushing back against well-established knowns is making you look more and more foolish.

You can read that as a personal attack on you or whatever, but it's not like that. I'm telling you this so that you can take a breath and re-assess. I promise it's for your own benefit.

 

[FearGod]

One CAN feel the wind, and the water, and the sand.
We all know that they all exist, but an unseen proof of nothing,
welllll.....that is a stretch.
~
'mud

And what if there is no wind or if in a room.

 

[`mud]

You have a lot wind, blow on yourself !
Pretend it's the breath of god.
~
'mud

 

[`mud]

And the snowflakes fall.
~
'mud

 

[FearGod]

You have a lot wind, blow on yourself !
Pretend it's the breath of god.
~
'mud

The soul isn't a breath, and blowing doesn't mean that you know what air is, we know it only due to modern science, but if you were a cave man then when you blow on yourself you'll say i'm a wind.

 

[`mud]

You're telling me that you don't have the breath of god inside of you ?
You're telling me that he isn't inside of you, inside your home ?
You're telling me that you are a windy person, like a cave man ?
Can you say any more ignorant statements ?
I'm tempted to tell you to go get......oh, that would be nasty.
This is getting nowhere, go out and feel the breeze, god's in there somewhere.
~
'mud

 

[Jared Jammer]

Well you did not. Not in any way.

Your posted nothing against him.

Pseudoscience does not expose credible professors.

I most certainly did. Ken Miller made a dishonest claim, and I exposed it, along with his idiocy.

That you refuse to accept this clear-cut fact demonstrates how unreasonable, emotion-driven, and dare I say dishonest, you are.

Now, begone from my sight before I block you, anti-science fiend.

 

[FearGod]

You're telling me that you don't have the breath of god inside of you ?
You're telling me that he isn't inside of you, inside your home ?
You're telling me that you are a windy person, like a cave man ?
Can you say any more ignorant statements ?
I'm tempted to tell you to go get......oh, that would be nasty.
This is getting nowhere, go out and feel the breeze, god's in there somewhere.
~
'mud

Grandpa, sleep well.

 

[Ouroboros]

One CAN feel the wind, and the water, and the sand.
We all know that they all exist, but an unseen proof of nothing,
welllll.....that is a stretch.
~
'mud

So true.

We don't have to see everything to know it exists. We know protons exist, by experiments and observations of the effects. Same with air, we know it exists based on how we can observe the effects of it.

When I was a Christian, there was this little analogous story about that you knew Jesus had been with you because there were footprints in the sand, so as a Christian, I understood how we not always can see directly, but indirectly, what is.

Now, that's how evolution works sometime too. In the fossil record, we weren't there, just like Creationist never were "there" during Genesis. We can't see the evolution of the fossils directly, but they are footprints, more than 500,000 of them (there's a database with their classifications, and there's more than a half-million of them to date). All of these footprints, all of them, fit into the same walk, same direction, same transformations, same, same, same. And the fossil record, as a whole, is only considered one out of many supporting evidences for evolution. Not the theory (model) of how it works (theory of evolution), but the evidence for the process of evolution actually occurring on this planet (the fact). Biological evolution is happening, because we know it is happening. But we don't always know how or why, that's what the theory is for (and that part can sometimes be wrong and need correction, hence the confusion with Creationists that we don't know, but the changes in the theory doesn't change the facts, and the facts are that it's happening).

 

[Ouroboros]

“Intelligent design cannot explain the presence of a nonfunctional pseudogene, unless it is willing to allow that the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles. Evolution, however, can explain them easily. Pseudogenes are nothing more than chance experiments in gene duplication that have failed, and they persist in the genome as evolutionary remnants of the past history…"
--Kenneth R. Miller


"But definitely, the so-called psudeogenes are really functional, not to be considered any more as just “junk” or “fossil” DNA. Surely, many functional pseudogenes and novel regulatory mechanisms remain to be discovered and explored in diverse organisms."
--RNA Biology 9:1, 27–32; January 2012; G 2012 Landes Bioscience

Moral of the story? Ken Miller is a joke promoting 19th-century junk science for personal gain.

That's how science works. The theory is made to explain the facts and evidence that we have, and sometimes it is actually wrong. Does one detail being wrong in a huge theory of millions of details suddenly make all those other million details also wrong? No.

He was wrong about that non-coding genes are just junk or non-functional. They do seem to give some function. But... they are still non-coding, so from the perspective of protein synthesis, they're not used at all. And over 90% of the DNA is like this. Not used for protein production. It seems like they help supporting the structure of the DNA (if I remember correctly), but any code could do this. Since this code isn't used as code, any code would do, so the strange thing here is that we have remnants of old code that we don't use in there. Code for producing proteins that we don't need.

"What are pseudogenes?

Pseudogenes are genomic DNA sequences similar to normal genes but non-functional; they are regarded as defunct relatives of functional genes.
" -- Background Information on Pseudogenes

So he wasn't completely wrong in the first quote. What he was wrong about is that they have no function at all, but I think he's wrong in the second one too that they're not "fossil" genes. Not all of them are vestigial, but some of them are. Left over code from our ancestry.

That's how they turned the dormant teeth gene on in the chicken. It's a "junk" gene normally. Non-coding.