So, again, you weren't really interested in any answers forthcoming from the outset were you? Your mind was made up that evolution is impossible and therefore no matter what was presented to you you'd simply dismiss it anyway.
I was interested but I didn't come to this thread having never explored the issue of evolution.
That isn't to say that I wouldn't have allowed my mind to be persuaded had someone presented a surprise argument that managed, by some means, to be persuasive in manner that I couldn't refute. Nor does it mean that had I been presented with an argument I'd never heard before that I would simply ignore it. At the very least I'd look into it and either find a good refutation or admit that I could not do so. That's precisely what it means to "sharpen one's steel". Intellectually honest people aren't afraid to breach nearly any topic precisely because of this exact process. They know that either what they currently believe will be enhanced and strengthened or they will the learn. The intellectually honest are never afraid to learn the truth or to reject error.
What exactly is your point here anyway? Do you come here to be convinced away from your worldview or to defend it and poke holes in those worldviews that appose it?
I've been here for a very very long time, AB. If you think that anyone is here to be persuaded by anyone, you're wrong. It happens from time to time but coming here thinking that you're going to convince anyone of anything is an exercise in frustration, to say the least.
Exactly, but then again you entertain youtube videos as "evidence" and crank 'science' like 'electric universe theory'.
I entertained one alternative cosmology as an intellectual exercise. And the video I posted here is only evidence in the sense that the information is presents is evidence. The video itself is only as good as the content in it. Are you suggesting that the molecular biology depicted in the speaker's computer animations is false or in some way misleading or made up? Surely that isn't what you are suggesting.
As for the electric universe thread, it isn't quite dead yet. There are still five more videos in that series and I intend to post them all. If you can refute one word of the material they present, I invite you to do so. It's what the thread is intended to be for. If anyone on TOL ever shows up to do a good job of refuting their arguments my intent is (was) to take the debate over to their own forum and either defeat them in a debate or be defeated myself. Either way, I win.
It has, however, prevented you from being in any way objective to counter arguments presented to you of which you've had plenty.
I've responded to the arguments made. None have been made that don't automatically fall apart once removed from an evolutionary paradigm. I'm telling you that evolution is flawed on a conceptual level and that is the level at which I will keep the debate until such time as the evolutionist had earned the intellectual ground that he must stand on in order to offer interpretations of data. You want me to concede that ground by responding to specific "evidence" as though it were legitimate evidence because you know, perhaps just intuitively, that for me to do so concedes the entire debate. I won't be making that mistake.
I've been reading it on a daily basis. Not only was there in depth and credible support for evolution presented but it was also tailored to your particular specifics as with the OP. You were never going to really scrutinize it as some 'youtube' video apparently falsifies evolution anyway according to you, so you really just started this charade to assert that people (including the vast, vast majority of the scientific community) are being 'intellectually dishonest' not to concede that evolution is some sort of 'fantasy'.
That was my strategy in a nutshell, yes.
It worked out rather nicely although not with the impact I envisioned at the beginning.
But what you call credible support for evolution is only that if you accept the premise of the evolutionary paradigm. As such it isn't support, its question begging. A point I have made repeatedly and that has not been refuted. In fact, if anything, it was acknowledged, if not conceded.
You're not even open to the possibility of being wrong as you've openly stated so no argument would persuade you out of the entrenched position you've dug yourself in regardless.
Everyone is entrenched, AB. Everyone! Every scientist, every pastor, every expert or even skilled laymen on any topic you care to name. Every single person that spends the time and effort to learn gets more and more entrenched into whatever worldview he has chosen to accept. This is so precisely because of the time and effort he has put into the learning of it as well and the relationships he has built within and around that effort, whether its people he's learned from or with or people he has taught. The secret is to have dug your trench honestly and to have provided a means for escape from the hole you've dug if error is detected. There is one and only one single way to accomplish that. Sound reason! Unfortunately for you, logic is intellectual ground that atheists haven't earned and cannot use without borrowing from the Christian worldview. That alone disproves evolution but I almost never make or use that argument because it implies that I really ought not even be having the conversation in the first place because to do so implies your right to use the logic that rightly only belongs to my side of the argument. That sort of make TOL a boring place to be.
That's fine if that's what you wanna do. Just don't pretend that you've found some video on the internet that disproves evolution and expect it to fly.
Oh it flies alright. It flies so unbelievably well that none of you evolutionists have hardly touched the subject matter and none of you has addressed the actual argument I've made based on the information presented in that video. That argument being, in a nut shell, "Legs from fins, doesn't explain the legs found on molecular machines inside every cell that just so happen to not only have hip, knee and ankle joints but that are long enough so as to "step over obstacles" as the speaker put it in the video." There was, as best as I can recall, no explanation at all about where other legs come from. Legs from fins was pretty much the only thing offered. I could have chosen to press the issue by pointing out that fins are just water born legs and insisted on an explanation of where fish legs (fins) come from but I knew that doing so would prematurely back you guys into a corner and so chose to accept it for the sake of argument and instead attempted to get some explanation for where insect and spider legs came from. The closest we got to that was a
claim as to where spiders themselves came from but no form of any creature related to spiders or even insects was presented that didn't already have fully formed legs, and when it became apparent that nothing along that line was forthcoming, I pulled the trigger and presented the video.
Admittedly, the video didn't have the impact I was hoping for but that was because I naively expected a far more robust explanation of how evolutionary "science" believes legs of all sorts evolved. The ensuing conversations where not expected at the outset. They evolved from my attempts to draw what I was expecting out of whomever I could draw it out of but it never came. As a result the video which was intended to refute every explanation for all sort of legs only got to directly impact the legs from fins idea. It still refutes other leg evolution ideas in that it refutes evolution itself but just not with the impacts that I wanted. That is sort of the beautiful thing about the truth though. When you're stuck in a falsehood, robust explanations are indeed rather rare and hard to come by and when presented, whether in video form or otherwise, the truth still refutes the lie whether the lie is fully fledged or not.
Clete
