Questions on Evolution and the Existence of God and...

by ILoveTTATT 130 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Billy the Ex-Bethelite

  "My belief isn't secure from attack as you assert."

  No, you just ignore the mountains of evidence that prove that the Bible's story of the Noachian deluge is complete fiction.

  "Scientists aim for their studies' findings to be replicable — so that, for example, an experiment testing ideas about the attraction between electrons and protons should yield the same results when repeated in different labs. This goal of replicability makes sense. After all, science aims to reconstruct the unchanging rules by which the universe operates, and those same rules apply, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from Sweden to Saturn, regardless of who is studying them. If a finding can't be replicated, it suggests that our current understanding of the study system or our methods of testing are insufficient. ... The desire for replicability is part of the reason that scientific papers almost always include a methods section."

  Excellent! Then all those Bible thumpers should be able to replicate the global flood scenario as reported in the Bible. Rather than using reconstructed arks as money-making amusement attractions. It should be easy to gather two of every "kind" of animal, float in one of their reconstructed arks (a real wooden one like Noah had, not one built atop a steel barge) for a year or so, land on a deserted island and repopulate it with something on the order of the millions of species we see today. Or do you think that your Bible stories don't require the same standard of scientific proof?
• 

  Billy the Ex-Bethelite

  "The experimant in actuality better supports the biblical view that animals were created according to definite "kinds"."

  Would the thylacine have been a dog 'kind' or a marsupial 'kind'?

  Would the platypus be a duck 'kind' or an otter 'kind'?
• 

  Billy the Ex-Bethelite

  Here's the Wikipedia entry for thylacine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_wolf

  Unfortunately, they were hunted to extinction. They are an example of convergent evolution. Although they were also called Tasmanian Wolf or Tasmanian Tiger, they are not closely related to either the dog family or the cat family. They were marsupials, a weird and wonderful family of animals that Noah evidently made a special trip to Australia to deliver.
• 

  alecholmesthedetective

  You're welcome jgnat!
• 

  adamah

  Perry said-

  So just change the definition when it suits you? Information is not simply a tool to attack opponents so long as the end justifies the means. That's unacceptable, to me at least..

  Perry, you really need to work on your reading comprehension skills, since you understand the definition you cite. You have weaknesses that are likely colored by your biases.

  For example, you cite this:

  UNDERSTANDING HOW SCIENCE REALLLY WORKS - UC Berkley

  Scientists aim for their studies' findings to be replicable — so that, for example, an experiment testing ideas about the attraction between electrons and protons should yield the same results when repeated in different labs. This goal of replicability makes sense.

  See, you missed that the study's FINDINGS need to be replicable: NOT the entire theory of evolution, since that's NOT what they're claiming to do. No scientist is going to be so ignorant as to title their study, "Conclusive Proof of Evolution for YEC". That's absurd to expect a single experiment to show, esp when dealing with events that have occurred billions of years ago, long after the lion's share of the physical evidence is erased (well, actually the evidence has been reabsorbed and re-purposed: nature doesn't waste anything. So it's a statistical likelihood that a few of the same atoms that made up a living dinosaur that walked in N. America are found in all of us, after having repeatedly re-entered the cycle of life via eating).

  Instead, scientists are reporting their findings which are much-more limited in scope to only showing a much-more limited and testable hypothesis, which is what they often claim in the title of the study. Scientists work off the efforts of others, for if they had to reinvent the wheel everytime to verify what is already accepted as fact (and hence, which is why they cite other articles), science wouldn't get very far. The results of MANY SUCH STUDIES are consistent in pointing to the fact of evolution, with sources from diverse fields of endeavor all pointing towards to truth.

  Adam
• 

  jgnat

  There is no artificial selection in the experiment I quoted. The only controls are on the environment, and evolution has been steadily progressing through 58,000 generations now.

  Evolution does not allow for morphing as you describe. Read more about common ancestry.

  So how does one distinguish between one kind and another? Is the definition solid enough to run experiments against it either to prove it or disprove it?
• 

  DS211

  Marky mark Marked
• 

  adamah

  jgnat said-

  There is no artificial selection in the experiment I quoted. The only controls are on the environment, and evolution has been steadily progressing through 58,000 generations now.

  Nope. If the experimenters are controlling the environment (and they ARE), then it's not 'natural selection', but 'artificial selection', eg they've fed the population different nutrients (eg citrate) at different points in time, and that's the experimenters monkeying with the environment; it's NOT natural selection.

  In fact, ANY experiment that attempts to control the environment is by definition NOT 'natural', but 'artificial'.

  Unless the population the microbiologists were studying was found 'in the wild' and they observed it, only, without ANY attempts to intervene (i.e. they acted more like naturalists or animal behaviorists in the field studying mammals from afar), then it's not a study of 'natural selection'. They weren't trying to show natural selection, but attempting to demonstrate the SAME process that operates in natural selection: ADAPTATION, or changes in the frequency of alleles in the gene pool over time.

  Adam
• 

  ILoveTTATT

  I know that there are a lot of questions on my mind, and I know that I haven't had time to read the enormous amount of information you have given here, but I have another one:

  Did abiogenesis at one point "divide over zero" in that it violated the second law of thermo? (I am thinking no, since all life needs energy from some source, most get it from the sun, others even from minerals...)

  I haven't examined this issue in depth, but just in terms of the chemistry and energy, is life fundamentally different? I know that calling chemicals organic or inorganic is not accurate since that was a term used to describe the apparent inability to sinthesize "organic" molecules... well that died when urea was sinthesized... (or soaps, depending on what you want to use as the first organic molecule sinthesized)...
• 

  adamah

  ILuvTTATT asked-

  Did abiogenesis at one point "divide over zero" in that it violated the second law of thermo? (I am thinking no, since all life needs energy from some source, most get it from the sun, others even from minerals...)

  Oh, do you mean "violated laws of thermodynamics", such as that required by postulating the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient being who was never created (so it didn't evolve to that highly-complex state), but always just existed in that perfect state? Kind of like that violation of the laws of thermodynamics?

  Since there's different hypotheses of abiogenesis, it's hard to say broadly, other than to say all of the credible ones take into account the energy input required.

  Interestingly, NASA astrobiologists have discovered an energy source on frozen Europa, due to flexure of gravity, which raises the possibilities for emergence of life (with effects on the Drake equation):

  http://video.pbs.org/video/2157407032/

  ILuvTTATT asked- I haven't examined this issue in depth, but just in terms of the chemistry and energy, is life fundamentally different? I know that calling chemicals organic or inorganic is not accurate since that was a term used to describe the apparent inability to sinthesize "organic" molecules... well that died when urea was sinthesized... (or soaps, depending on what you want to use as the first organic molecule sinthesized)...

  Even though biological molecules are routinely synthesized (as you say), the two terms are still useful to distinguish between interactions of laregly carbon-based molecules which are commonly seen inside living matter, vs the interactions of matter outside the body...