Isn't it reasonable to doubt Young Earth Creationism?

[KingdomRose]

Mayhaps you've heard it before, but the word "day" (Hebrew "yom") is always, ALWAYS defined by the context in which it is used.

Genesis 1 uses day as a literal 24 hour day.

Genesis 2:4 uses day as an epoch of time, specifically as "the time period which includes the creation week." Today we would use day in the same way by saying, "back in the day, ..." or "in my day, ..." or "in this day and age, ...".

See how that works?

Yes, exactly. So "day" does not always mean a 24-hour length of time.

 

[JudgeRightly]

Yes, exactly. So "day" does not always mean a 24-hour length of time.

It also doesn't always mean an epoch of time.

No one who is a young earth creationist says it's always one definition or another. We say the definition is defined by the context.

"Two days ago during the day, I talked about back in the day."

KR, did you have any trouble at all understanding which definition I was using for each "day" in the above sentence? Did every word "day" mean an epoch of time? NO! That would be silly.

Yet you're trying to apply that same silly logic to Genesis, attempting to claim that every word "day" in Genesis MUST mean an epoch of time. That's wrong and dishonest.

Genesis 1, Exodus 20:11, the word "day" means 24 hour period. Genesis 2:4, etc, means an epoch of time. To say otherwise is foolishness.

 

[JudgeRightly]

Literal is literal.

Having second thoughts...?

About...?

 

[Stuu]

Yowch. Are you sure, at 80%, you aren't a dupe?

80% of my fellow countrypeople don't believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old. That's what we were discussing. I'm not sure how you interpreted it, but that is what you were responding to. The question of the age of the earth. This is still an indictment on our education system: a 4.54 billion year old earth would be non-controversial and almost universally accepted as a fact if it were not for the young earth creationism that poisons some people, which is almost entirely imported from the United States.

You'll have to forgive me, but I know, beyond doubt, God exists and, as I've said, atheism is entirely too arrogant and founded in arrogance and ignorance.

Yep, that's the kind of lie that some people get fed when we are visited by the occasional touring joke of a human peddling YEC propaganda, or through some internationally syndicated TV shows, especially the laughable Fox.

People across the world don't tend to adopt the term atheist even though that is essentially how many live their lives. Some people just don't feel the need to label themselves and others feel the ignorant prejudice that others show towards the term, much in the manner you like to have atheists as an out-group to call names with absolutely no justification, just following the nasty habits of some of your countrypeople. Some people might not even know what an atheist is, so they define themselves in terms of some other 'none' label.

In my country we have had a variety of religious beliefs represented in political leadership, and no one cares whether it is an atheist, a Catholic or a JW in the top job, although we are quite wary about anyone who is too open about believing in gods.

You nor the other 80 in 100 people there are the actuator of truth. Can't be. A (don't) gnostic (know) is the proper position for ignorant people (again not a slam, I'm trying to get you to see the bigger picture).

For you to claim that you know there is a god is fatuous. We are all agnostic (which means nothing is known about any gods, or it is not possible to know anything). You are agnostic about Baal and Wotan, you don't 'know' them and you can't prove they don't exist. And don't forget the origins of your own belief system are in Judaism, which itself began as polytheism.

The properties of your god have been defined so you cannot know in the sense that we all agree it is possible to know something, by using five senses or their extensions, or testable models that test reliably. You might use the word 'know' to yourself but in terms we can all agree, you don't know, you believe. And then you can tell me that I believe there are no gods. And as we have rehearsed already, the arguments can unfold again about whether our relative beliefs are supported by any good reasons.

When you say you know there is a god, then you call atheists arrogant, there is some irony there.

Again, an MA arguing with a PhD? He/she has spent the time and put in the dues. Having done half the work at this point, I value the hard work.

Conclusions based on evidence is all that counts if we are discussing science. PhD just means you should be better at that in a particular field, and if it is really the area of experise you might have a bit more insight into the various concepts or factors involved. Even with an MA arguing with an MSc and a BSc the letters mean nothing. That would be the logical fallacy of the appeal to authority. Just imagine if we took that seriously. The prize idiot creationist Henry Morris would have to be respected for his lies.

There are a couple of them who have come and gone on TOL. Start a thread in the religion or other section. It'd probably be a fascinating conversation.

I've got a short vacation time coming up so I might think about it then.

Stuart

 

[Stripe]

The one thing I am always open to is unambiguous evidence.

:darwinsm:

This is why we keep you Darwinists around. You're always good for a laugh.

I didn't say that it does not say "six days."

Your post is right there.

A "day" does not mean 24 hours in length.

Of course it does.

A "day" means a period of time of unspecified length, just as when someone says, "In my father's day..."

Except it doesn't say "in the day." It says "six days."

Why is it so difficult for you to understand that a creative "day" is not necessarily 24 hours in length?

Because the Bible says "six days." Literally.

You still haven't explained Genesis 2:4 that speaks of "the day that God created the heavens and the earth." Hello.

Hold on, sunshine. It's not us with the explaining to do.

The Bible says "six days."

You tell us why "six days" cannot mean what it plainly says.

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[Stuu]

It is a difficult comparison given what is available for different generations. None of them would know about DNA. None of us would relate well to the death penalty for heresy, so you are talking about removing one or the other from their contexts. I believe this kind of thinking is good, but necessarily superficial because it is but speculative.

Well yes it is a bit of a generalisation. But I think the point about every person who has been to school possessing knowledge that would seem spectacular in 1840 is true.

Along a similar line: Native Americans were often called savages, but a lot of medicines and agriculture understanding came from them.

Yes, the forest is being rediscovered as a source of chemical compounds that are used by its plant (and other) inhabitants to win battles against one another and have medical potential, knowledge that existed to some extent in first nation peoples.

Similar to taking us out of our context and transplanting us in medieval ages, or vise versa, there are always assumptions with anything regarding 'time.' Time, even "millions of years" is a construct for understanding. Being a construct, it is subject to buying into a speculative nature.

But this is not speculative, and it's not about 'millions of years'. This does not require isotope dating. The only 'speculation' would be that the earth has always had hot and cold seasons, and I have never heard of a creationist arguing against that.

So, you can count the years by counting the layers. You could count them yourself, I'd say well past 20,000 years or so before the task became one you would start to find difficult because it starts to get a bit specialised as the layers get thinner. Of course it would take a while, as it does for the ice core scientists, especially when they are making measurements of many different chemical markers across hundreds of thousands of years worth of ice.

I hope you appreciate that this is actually a real thing. It is not a conspiracy, and these people are not trying to peddle any agenda. I was lucky enough to visit an ice core lab myself and I have spoken to some of the scientists who work on ice cores in my country. I have a former work colleague, an engineer, who did instrument work measuring isotopes. These people are not dupes, and they certainly are not idiots. They are independent and critical in their thinking both positively and negatively about their working conditions, and the love they have for the work. I could tell you myself if any of them had become bitter and leaked out any suggestion of a conspiracy.

They would laugh and probably tell me that they had never even thought their day jobs would be considered part of a conspiracy. The instruments don't lie, they just spit out isotope data and other kinds of measurements. The people don't lie, they have no reason to do that, and they have every reason not to. The ice really is that old, and the layers are calibrated and matched between different ice cores and correlated to recorded volcanic eruptions (the more recent ones) as a way of keeping the counting accurate as they go down the core.

None of us were there.

If that argument is valid, then coroners' records are historical fiction.

Scientists often get caught up in formal operational thinking, but your 5 senses are not all there is. I just watched an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy. In it, an actor/scientist joked that everything is made of chemicals and if it weren't it wouldn't exist. It is like a blind man denying red. It is an untenable non-observation.

Well, it depends what you mean by 'everything', and 'chemicals', doesn't it. For almost all situations that is true. Did you have some cases where you think that generalisation shouldn't apply?

By the same token, how can any human being possibly deny the existence of God, given another's sight (or feel, or other sense) of Him? Can't. Doesn't make logical sense.

It makes complete sense from where I am standing.

Atheism is political, not science nor tenable observation. It is a declaration from egocentrism and disbelief. "Atheism" says more about you or whoever, than it does about actual conditions. I ALWAYS know I'm dealing with an egocentric individual at that point.

All individuals are egocentric to some extent. Atheism is the first position everyone should take based on observation, because no one can detect your god using senses. Even if you claim to be able to, most others deny it is possible, whether atheist or not. Of course if you can show us an unambiguous photograph, we might have to change our minds.

Philosophy cannot be dead. Hawking wasn't seeing past the end of his 'proverbial' nose at that point. It is near idiot savant for him to have asserted it.

What, does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if there is no one there to hear it? That must be dead, surely.

Some of this is and should be expected. You find it humorous. I rather, find it needs investigation and explanation and those make sense.
I'm actually encouraged a bit by the numbers because 1) Christians make up more than atheists or Mormons, or Jews. That means the numbers here lie a little bit. If you take 20 Jews, 20 atheists, and ONLY 20 Christians, the representative level isn't there. Nor does this interpret 'why' others would do better. Jesus, Himself, said He came to confound the wise. If this stat were off, the wise wouldn't be confounded. I'm not talking about anti-intellectualism with such, nor calling black - white. I'm saying there are explanations for why you see these statistics.

The background of most Western nations is that they have some history of christianity dominating public life. So someone who realises that they are atheist tends to do some research into their own beliefs in relation to the different major religions, with the bible getting quite a bit of the attention. And that is how they come to do better in the religion questions. And I would speculate that 'Jews' might include secular Jews, in which case you are dealing with yet more atheists!

Without confounding you (homage to your wisdom), a lot of Christians are not as intelligent as you are. That IS the beauty of Christianity. You don't HAVE to be a brain surgeon. That some of us are or could be? Of course Jesus never intended to keep intelligent people out. It is simply a religion that can and does reach everybody. Think also about 'the masses.' 80% Atheists?

No, not 80% atheist. 80% realise that the earth really is very old.

That is a 'hasty' judgement, not a scholastic one. Surely you've read the counterpoints?

Yes, and I love the description of them that called such counterpoints 'exegetical acrobatics'.
Stuu: No, it's just that I usually do my homework before posting.

Like your hasty, quick'n'dirty just ▲just above▲

I did my homework on that some months ago. In fact, I even discussed it with some JWs who visited in January. They came back later with the 'counterpoint' about possibly Herod the Great actually being the sons, but the sons were very far from great!

Very simple. You CANNOT assert I've never seen Bigfoot, by example. ALL you can assert is that YOU haven't seen Bigfoot/sasquatch. That's it. A-sasquatch is an untenable position. It CANNOT be defended properly as a position. It is a stand on sand. Surely you and 80% of Swedes are more intelligent than making a stand on shaky ground like that?

I didn't realise that 80% of Swedes have a particular view on Sasquatch.

It's not really a matter of making assertions on Sasquatch. Each claim has to be treated on its own merits. The descriptions people give of Sasquatches seem to be somewhat like the appearance of some large mammals. So, do large mammals exist in North America? They sure do. Is it possible that an undocumented large mammal species, a Sasquatch, has survived in numbers large enough to sustain a population, while remaining undetected to zoologists? There is a low but non-zero probability of this. Could the descriptions match unclear sightings of bears? This has a larger probability. Sasquatches are not an impossible interpretation of what people have seen, but they must be considered to have a vanishingly small probability.

Now return to your point, which is that I appear to be asserting that you have not experienced a god. I do make that assertion, without evidence, because that is the amount of evidence to which I am responding. Unfortunately it does not matter how much you specially plead for your observations, there are much better explanations for them. I cannot prove you are wrong. I think the probability that you have experienced an invisible being that has created the entire universe has such a low probability that it should be called perverse. I would rank alien abduction at a higher chance, and that's obviously bonkers.

I disagree strongly on what is 'ambiguous.' Love exists. You nor 80% of Swedes could possibly convince me otherwise. Love is certainly an intangible with 5 senses. It is, however, tangible and imminent.

Even with a concept as difficult to define as love, there is still so much empirical evidence available to be observed. A casual glance here, a bunch of flowers there, a raised pulse. You can define love away from all this if you want, but I think people wouldn't recognise your usage necessarily.

Not sure why you keep mentioning Swedes. Do they particularly interest you?

Projection. We often project from our own worldview upon another.

I see, you mean like Stripe when he accuses others with the word evidence because he has none of his own.

Stuart

 

[Stuu]

This is why we keep you Darwinists around. You're always good for a laugh.

What is quite amusing, Stripe is your projection when you use of the word 'evidence' to attack others, whereas you never seem to have any evidence to share yourself.

You tell us why "six days" cannot mean what it plainly says.

Of course is says six 24 hour days, and the ancient writers meant six days because that is what their myth said.

And it bears no relation to natural history, which has existed on earth for 4.54 billion years and in the universe for 13.7 billion years, not 144 hours.

Stuart

 

[Stripe]

What is quite amusing, Stripe is your projection when you use of the word 'evidence' to attack others, whereas you never seem to have any evidence to share yourself.

:darwinsm:

Of course is says six 24 hour days, and the ancient writers meant six days because that is what their myth said.

Tell your fellow Darwinists. :up:

It bears no relation to natural history, which has existed on earth for 4.54 billion years and in the universe for 13.7 billion years, not 144 hours.

That which you assert without evidence, we are justified in ignoring without evidence.

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[Jonahdog]

That which you assert without evidence, we are justified in ignoring without evidence.

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Stripe, are you suggesting there is no evidence for an earth that is billions of years old? A universe far older? No evidence?

 

[6days]

Yes, exactly. So "day" does not always mean a 24-hour length of time.

That's what all of us have been telling you!! There are a variety of meanings. The context of the word day in Genesis 1 Does not allow for anything other than a period of time that we refer to as 24 hours.

 

[6days]

Six epochs.

Six epochs thou dost work, and on the seventh epoch thou dost rest... Ex. 34:21[/quote]

 

[6days]

Stripe, are you suggesting there is no evidence for an earth that is billions of years old? A universe far older? No evidence?

Jonah... we all have the exact same evidence.

 

[CabinetMaker]

Philosophy disagrees with you. I don't.

Where is Trad when you need him?

Why would you demand that life involves a 'purpose'? What do you mean by 'all there is', or 'this'? The problem 'science' would have with your questions is the same one I have. What do your questions mean? Obviously I am not naive about this, I know these questions are asked all the time, but they aren't really asking anything. Each is more an inarticulate groan of existential angst than a question.

I don't demand that life have a purpose but I find it hard to believe that it would not. Sometimes our first questions are ill formed. Newton saw an apple fall and wondered why. We ended up with differential calculus because of his simple question why. We do not have to have a well defined hypothesis to start exploring something. Things will get refined over time as knowledge and understanding grows.

Nope, that's completely wrong. Why do we have families? How does that help survival of genes? Easy so far, right? Now, why tribes of families? Still easy. Now, why would tribes attack other tribes? Easy, too. Now, why would tribes cooperate with other tribes? Because, as with international trade today, there are more ways than killing to share resources for the benefit of both parties.

Having offspring is the very definition of making sure my genes survive.

Now take the species as a whole: the more members the species has, the more genetic variation there is, and the better situation the species is to flourish in a changing environment. Reducing the size of the population is a lousy survival strategy for genes, and we had better believe that the way we behave is almost completely shaped by the selfish needs of our genes, which have learned (blindly and without any intent) how to manipulate our species. That is the power of natural selection.

Take a whole species when resources are greatly restricted. The chances of my offspring surviving to reproduce and greatly increased if I don't have to care for your tribe. A species will lay claim to a territory that can support them. This spreads the tribes out. But the tribes come together once a year a so to meet and marry before they disperse into their lands. You invade my land uninvited and I am going to defend that. Evolution is not a gentle process.

That's a bit of a slap in the fact for all those atheists who would claim that their lives changed very much for the better once the god delusion had left them. Are they wrong about that?

In my opinion, yes. What they fail to recognize is the difference between religion and God.

God works in mysterious ways, right? That is really an expression of the faith card being played. I believe it that you believe it. It's not common ground between us though.

It may never be. I hope that one day it can be.

There is no such thing as 'before' the Big Bang. That was Stephen Hawking's (rather stilted) argument, that because there was no time before the Big Bang there was no time for a god to do any creating.

True if and only if you believe that God is constrained by time as we are. I believe that time was created by God during His act of creation. Mr. Hawking's explanation is woefully lacking in any useful information. He is implying that there was nothing and then there was everything. That sounds more like creation than chance.

Well, there is a question, an hypothesis. But unfortunately you cannot use our best method of discovery, the scientific method, to investigate that hypothesis because you have put your god beyond science. Expose your god to testable claims, and perhaps we could investigate them dispassionately. But actually, christians don't want that question answered. That is the mystery that must remain, because the possibility of 'no' is a real private fear, and reality might be too disruptive in their lives and for their dreams of a thing they call 'eternity', a bank draft that is easy to write but difficult to guarantee.

"Do not test the Lord your God." God does not wish to be tested. I've said this before, knowledge does not save, faith does. If you replace faith with knowledge then salvation is lost.

Robert Powell did in Jesus of Nazareth,the 1977 film. If he was to claim today, in an unironic tone of voice 'I am Jesus', you might have to bow down. But I can see the point here: only atheists are qualified to make the diagnosis because christians have to reserve some credit for the possibility that a man who was executed by the Romans 2000 years ago might walk the earth again today.

Remind me, who are we thinking of locking up for their own good?

Jesus will return one day. I have no doubt that is return will not be missed for what it is. As to whom I would have locked up, well, there have been several cult leaders that have lead their followers into death. It would have been good if we could have prevented that.

That's not really an explanation though. It's a doctrine. Why can't Jesus just come down and say, the god's a bit upset about the way things are going, so it will be making some changes to your human nature, and you are all forgiven and now things will be better? All this vicarious punishment nonsense, what kind of a god is that?

A just God. A God who has said what will happen and stands by what He said. God does not want to change us. He gave us free will. He wants us to return to Him. He will honor your choice if you decline to do so.

And you don't??

Yes, I do. His name is God. He is without beginning and without end.

Well the Big Bang is meaningless then, for the reasons I gave above. You can't have both of those things together. It doesn't work. Why don't you just say it's all magic? That's pretty much what you are saying anyway.

But look at what He did. He created a universe that we can understand. He made it work in ways that allow us to manipulate it to our advantage. He created four molecules that have virtually limitless ability to create and modify life. His first act, the Big Bang, was miraculous, and the wonder that that released is staggering.

So, we need to investigate this god gene finger hypothesis, don't we. Is it definitely a finger, or could that be a metaphor for your god using radiation to change a gene? And what plan has been enacted by this method, and is the change as is observed, a random mutation, or is this intelligent finger/radiation theory? And if that is the case, what is the mechanism for a gene being changed by a finger, or a specific mutation with intent being induced by a random act of radiation damage?

You see the problem? Now you have inserted a divine finger, you instill a claim for which there is no evidence whatsoever, it's just what you reckon. Obviously it is a grade above the usual things people just reckon about what gods do, but nonetheless this is something about which you have 'no doubt'. You can at least appreciate that others might have some doubt on your behalf.

I'm surprised you took a literary illusion so literally. I do not know exactly what form God's finger took, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. A solar flare at exactly the right moment. A walk across an area with unusual radiation. God can make it happen according the systems He designed.

Ha. Even if I accept the impossibility of a human being born of only one human parent, I did nothing 'with your son'. Had I been alive at the time of Jesus's execution I would have done whatever I possibly could to prevent it. I would have worked hard to convince the crowds to appeal for Jesus's release, and possibly incitement of insurrection against the execution of anyone. Then, had I succeeded, where would you be now? No dead Jesus, no salvation, burning sulfur for everyone. What a miserable death-cult.The good news of Jesus is that none of this is true. He was just some bloke, maybe a simple preacher, maybe not.

You would not have succeeded. Had Mary said no to God then Jesus's mother would have had a different name but He would been born none the less. God had a plan for salvation and no one man could thwart that plan.

I can see what you mean about your god not always acting logically.

I think that He always acts logically according to His plan. I think that we as humans fail to understand His logic.

Is that what they told you.

Stuart

It is what I have learned from reading scripture.

 

[KingdomRose]

It also doesn't always mean an epoch of time.

No one who is a young earth creationist says it's always one definition or another. We say the definition is defined by the context.

"Two days ago during the day, I talked about back in the day."

KR, did you have any trouble at all understanding which definition I was using for each "day" in the above sentence? Did every word "day" mean an epoch of time? NO! That would be silly.

Yet you're trying to apply that same silly logic to Genesis, attempting to claim that every word "day" in Genesis MUST mean an epoch of time. That's wrong and dishonest.

Genesis 1, Exodus 20:11, the word "day" means 24 hour period. Genesis 2:4, etc, means an epoch of time. To say otherwise is foolishness.

I agree that we must take context into consideration. I do that. If you were fair, you would concede that what I am saying about a "day" is completely sound. You admit that the "day" in Genesis 2:4 means something OTHER THAN 24 HOURS. Why not agree that the "days" in the first chapter might ALSO mean a time period other than one of 24 hours?

 

[KingdomRose]

That's what all of us have been telling you!! There are a variety of meanings. The context of the word day in Genesis 1 Does not allow for anything other than a period of time that we refer to as 24 hours.

Why does it not allow for anything other than 24 hours? Please explain.

 

[JudgeRightly]

I agree that we must take context into consideration. I do that. If you were fair, you would concede that what I am saying about a "day" is completely sound. You admit that the "day" in Genesis 2:4 means something OTHER THAN 24 HOURS. Why not agree that the "days" in the first chapter might ALSO mean a time period other than one of 24 hours?

Because of CONTEXT!!!

Not just of the verses surrounding a word's use, not just the chapter, the book, or the testament it's in, but the entire Bible. Genesis 1 uses the word "day" DIFFERENTLY than Genesis 2:4.

THEREFORE:

The meaning of the word "day" in Genesis 1 is DIFFERENT than Genesis 2:4. Things that differ are not the same, and you're still insisting that both chapters are using "day" the exact same way, when they are clearly not!

Jesus said, and I quote Him directly:

[JESUS]But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’[/JESUS] - Mark 10:6 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark10:6&version=NKJV

Day (literal 24-hour period) 6 of Week 1 is for all intents and purposes at the beginning of 7000 years.

Day (epoch) 6 of however many millions or billions of years is NOT at the beginning of a 13.4 billion year old universe (or however old you think the universe is).

There are only two options, KingdomRose, either call Jesus a liar by saying that the word "day" in Genesis 1 means "an epoch of time," or you accept what Jesus said, that He created man at the beginning of creation (on Day (literal 24-hour period) 6, and not 6 epochs of time later.

 

[Jose Fly]

When you say we see things evolving, you don't specify that we see things evolving into other things.

Because "things evolving into other things" is too vague to be meaningful.

Thus, to shift back and forth between "things are evolving" and "everything has a common ancestor" is a bait and switch.

Well then it's a good thing no one said "populations evolve, therefore universal common ancestry is true".

I don't think we've ever seen a bacterium evolve into something that wasn't a bacterium. And I don't think we've ever seen a reptile evolve into something that wasn't a reptile. That's merely an extrapolation of seeing a bird with a big beak "evolve" into a bird with a little beak, or some such.

So when we think we see a bird with a big beak evolves into a bird with a little beak, and then the bird with a little beak evolves into a bird with blue feet and another with red feet, that's very interesting, and there may be some common ancestry conclusions we can reach based on those observations. But saying that "it then follows" that everything had a common ancestor, is poor science, but great evolution theory. How could something be poor science and great evolution theory, if evolution IS science????

Again you seem to be operating with a very poor understanding of evolutionary biology. No one says anything like "bird traits vary, therefore universal common ancestry". And that brings up several points...

First, the Science Daily article (and the work it describes) you cited is not about universal common ancestry of all life on earth; it's about the early evolutionary history of birds. That's what was so amusing about how you were trying to use and cite it. I'm not sure exactly how your train of logic went, but it seemed to me to be something like "Here's this paper where they redraw the early evolutionary history of birds, therefore universal common ancestry should be rejected". As I've noted several times now, that makes no sense at all.

Also, your version of universal common ancestry and the history of life on earth that it describes is cartoonishly simplistic. If you really are interested in this subject, you should take the time to actually learn it before trying to debate it. But in general, the history of life on earth is merely a series of speciation events...it's existing species giving rise to new species. And each one of those new species is very similar to the one it evolved from. So to keep things very simple, it would be species A giving rise to species B, which gives rise to species C, and so on and so on, with each new species being not very different than the one it evolved from. It isn't until you compare species Z to the original species A that you notice the sorts of transitions that you're referring to.

Again, that's very simplistic and as the paper we've been discussing shows, the actual pattern of these speciation events can be quite complex. But it's most certainly not the "a reptile turns into a bird" straw man that creationists keep attacking.

It also takes us back to the point I raised earlier....the fact that in all the centuries we've been studying living organisms, the only way we've ever seen new species arise has been via evolutionary mechanisms. So just like the geologist is justified in concluding that an ash layer is the result of a volcanic eruption, paleontologists are justified in concluding that the species they see in the fossil record are the result of evolutionary mechanisms.

And finally, if you want to talk about universal common ancestry (UCA), then you need to understand how that conclusion does not stem from a single data point, and as such is not going to be overturned by a single data point. UCA extends from an enormous variety of data, collected over centuries from a wide variety of fields. So simply pointing to a paper that describes a modified model of early bird evolution as somehow justification for rejecting UCA is ridiculous.

Let's talk about what "evolution" means, now. You are quick to point out that evolution is just change. But we don't rest all of biology on the idea that species change. Evolution, as a theory, is about changes that are much more pronounced that a big beak bird changing into a little beak bird.

See above.

Yet our evidence is limited to 2 things--birds becoming birds (different beak size, for instance) and stories made up about the fossil record.

No it's not. Don't assume that your level of understanding of a subject is all there is to it.

And do you honestly think paleontologists just sit around making up stories? Funny... [MENTION=6696]Lon[/MENTION] can't seem to figure out why Christianity is increasingly associated with anti-science and anti-education attitudes, yet here we are....

The article is trying to combine the two things, wanting to say that birds becoming other birds is tantamount to bacteria becoming birds.

Where does it say anything like that at all? Be specific.

But what would you do if you were designing birds that needed to fill different ecological niches?

Basically, "it could have been designed that way" is another way of saying "maybe God just made it that way". And yes, it could be that instead of all these bird species arising the same way we see species arising today, in the past everything was completely different and God created them all individually, kept replacing older versions with slightly different newer versions, and stopped doing all that as soon as we started looking.

But you see, we can say that about absolutely anything. That ash layer the geologist thinks is from a volcano? Maybe God just "designed" it there. Those images of a spherical earth? Maybe God is just making it look that way. We already see various creationists here making these sorts of arguments with the "mature universe" beliefs....maybe God just made the universe look billions of years old.

See the problem? No matter what, someone like you can always come in after-the-fact and declare "that's just the way God made it". But from a scientific and explanatory standpoint, it's meaningless.

Thus, the study really has very little to do with evolution, the theory, but might have much to do with evolution, change, within bird species.

So why did you cite it in an attempt to justify rejecting evolution (as you were using the term)?

The tree of life was envisioned by Darwin to show that all living things developed from a single thing. His conception of it was that each time there was a branch, it either continued on until another branch occurred, or the branch terminated.

I suppose you could say that a bush is really just a small tree, but I don't think that's what the authors were getting at. What I think they were getting at was that the branches don't either terminate or branch again, but sometimes they come back together and branch again. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I don't think so. That may be just another idea added to Darwin's within the larger scope of evolutionary theory. But it wasn't what Darwin envisioned. Darwin made a prediction with his tree--species diverge. The authors found that that prediction was not always true--sometimes bird species converge, too.

What does that mean for our conclusion?

It means exactly what I said earlier....the early history of bird evolution was more complex than previously thought. That's it.

 

[Apple7]

Six epochs thou dost work, and on the seventh epoch thou dost rest... Ex. 34:21

[/QUOTE]


Exo 34 is not a sequence as mandated in Gen 1.

Use CONTEXT like YEC's claim...

 

[Derf]

Why does it not allow for anything other than 24 hours? Please explain.

I'm in agreement with [MENTION=15431]6days[/MENTION] on most of the creation narrative, but the 24 hours thing is a tautology.

How long is a day? 24 hours. How long is an hour? 1/24th of a day.

The best i think we can get from scripture is that however long God took to accomplish each day's activities, it took no more than an evening and a morning sequence, and we don't really know how long those evening/morning (darker period/lighter period) combinations took in today's time.

If God had not yet established the rotation of the earth with respect to its light source as the same as today's 24 hours, it's actually adding to scripture to say it was a 24-hour day.

Even better, since we have for the last 50 years or so defined a second as "9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom", making an hour, at 3600 seconds, to be 2553508.825 of those periods, it depends on the speed of light and other characteristics that we might assume were established pretty early on in creation, but we have no way of knowing for sure.

 

[JudgeRightly]

Exo 34 is not a sequence as mandated in Gen 1.

Use CONTEXT like YEC's claim...

6days IS a YEC. He's mocking KR...