Ed

Except during the Exodus, there was always at least a small minority of idol worshipers in Israel until the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests. The archaeological record is consistent with this as well as can be expected in a very imprecise science.

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Ed: Ancient hebrew terms are much broader than many similar english terms, ... lp: Pure excuse-making. Sufficiently imprecise language can be used to prove essentially anything.

I am afraid it is not an excuse, it is just a fact of the hebrew language.

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LP: I suggest that you go to some site like <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org</a> some time -- geologists are not the ignoramuses that you seem to believe they are, Ed. Ed: I never said that they were ignoramuses. Just that some of their assumptions are unproven. The order of the fossils fits a flood moving from sea to land just as well as macroevolution. lp: Ed, I wonder if you have ever seriously studied the fossil record. And the geological timescale. Remains of our species are only found in the topmost sediments, those within the last 50,000 - 100,000 years or so; there are some ancestral and offshoot species before that which look somewhat simian -- and the farther back one goes, the more simian they look. But even the oldest ones found to date are something like 4 million years old, which is a tiny fraction of the Earth's age.

"Simian humans" is a very subjectively loaded term. Many early Darwinists thought blacks and aborigines looked "simian" and therefore placed them lower on the evolutionary scale than whites. And yet blacks and aborigines are living today.

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lp: If there was anything like Noah's Flood, it would have shown up as unmistakable sediment layers -- and a mass extinction. But there is zero evidence of such a flood. Ed: Not if the flood was in the very distant past (in other words erosion could have erased some evidence over long periods of time) and its duration was only a year. The evidence may not be that great. But there is evidence of hydraulic catastrophe in many fossil beds. I am not saying that the entire fossil record is the result of the flood. lp: There is abundant evidence of floral and faunal continuity in many of our planet's landmasses that clearly indicate that a worldwide flood had not occurred in the last 100,000 years ago -- at least.

Given that the flood only lasted a year and the great resilience of living things, it very well may not have stood out in the billion year geologic scale.

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Ed: I think the ecological-compatibility hypothesis and natural dispersion support my point. lp: Ed, are you really serious about that statement?

Yes, the animals after the flood dispersed according to their ecological compatibility.

End of part I of my response.

Jack the Bodiless

No. Nobody can do this. There is insufficient data to perform such a calculation. We can estimate some of the effects of (for instance) a 1% change in the speed of light, but there is no means of determining the probability that it will have this value.
Translation: there is no evidence that anyone wasn't an idol worshipper.
It's really quite simple, Ed. In the older layers of hominid fossils, there are ONLY creatures resembling upright chimpanzees. Later, there are ONLY creatures resembling humans with apelike heads and a brain capacity halfway between humans and chimps. These are followed by a continuous range of intermediates leading to modern humans.

There was no Adam. There was no Eve.
If it happened since the evolution of humans, it would DEFINITELY have stood out. There has been no mass extinction since the demise of the dinosaurs, about 65 million years ago, when the most advanced mammal was a beaver-like critter.
Nope, they didn't. Not only is this obviously wrong even if there WAS a Flood (different creatures occupying equivalent niches on different continents), but THERE WAS NO FLOOD ANYHOW.

Ed, you have a great deal of learning to do. And, so far, you haven't shown any sign of beginning your journey. Until you do, you are wasting everyone's time.

Ed

I did, that is why I said what I did. There is no hard evidence that he is mythical.

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Ed: No, as I stated above Allah can be eliminated as the likely cause of the universe because he is a pure unity and the universe is a diversity within a unity and therefore cannot be as adequately explained if allah was the cause. lp: Actually, Allah is described by Muslims has having numerous attributes, such as being merciful and compassionate; that suggests a diversity within a unity.

No, those are just characteristics of the being's individual personality. I am referring to the being's very nature and essence. Personality is part of that, but nature and essence is deeper.

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Ed: .. In fact, empirical evidence presupposes logic. The question is how did it get there? lp: So it's possible for God to make 2 + 2 = 5 if he wants to?

No, even God is bound by logic. What I am saying is that we cannot even recognize empirical evidence without logic.

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Ed: There is no possibility of empirical verification of events in the past and yet we still make extrapolations based on logic. The same thing applies to "outside" the universe. lp: Such "reasoning" ultimately leads to solipsism of the moment.

Huh? My view is exactly the opposite of solipsism.

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Ed: Essence varies according to what the thing is. The essence of galaxies is stars and gravity, ie black holes. lp:However, Ed does not give any procedure for recognizing which objects have the same essence and which ones have different essences.

The procedure is called "science".

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Dat: ... We notice, for example, that there is a great diversity of plants. Is this then any surprise if we theorize that they came from a common ancestor, and evolved through time in different environments? We don't need some mystical explanation muddled in some "law of sufficient cause". Ed: We do if we want to go beyond a common ancestor and on to the ultimate cause. Most people have a natural curiousity to go beyond what you seem to want to do. ... lp:Why this obsession with some supposed "ultimate cause"?

All truly great scientists want to know what the cause of things are, including the universe.

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Ed on Punctuated Equilibrium: PE was developed to prevent the falsifiability of macroevolution. It conveniently assumes speciation only occurs where fossils are not left. ... lp: However, if each species-to-species jump was the result of a special creation, then there must have been thousands, if not millions of special creations over the hundreds of millions of years of geological time. This was a common view in the early to mid 19th cy.; the last big-name biologist to support special creation, Louis Agassiz, had supported that view.

No, the gaps in the fossil record are between genuses and families. I have never denied that microevolution has occurred.

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lp: One of Charles Darwin's great achievements was to make a convincing case for evolution; this enabled biologists to say "Forget it!!!" to all those special creations. And in a few cases, transitions between well-established species have been found, so they are not absolutely nonexistent.

No undisputed transitional forms between genuses and families have been found.

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Ed: This theory IS consistent with reality and observation. There is empirical evidence that contradicts atheistic evolution. lp: Atheistic? Is there a non-atheistic kind of evolution that is supported?

Yes, evolution could have been guided by an intelligent designer, it is called theistic evolution.

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Ed: ... The law of sufficient cause just states that the cause must be adequate to produce the effect. ... lp: And how does one determine that?

Research and study of the effect.

[b] Because more complex entities require more than just natural laws.

lpetrich

I wonder what Ed would consider "hard evidence" here.

Whatever would constitute rigorous definitions of "personality", "nature", and "essence" -- how does one distinguish personality from non-personality and one nature from another and one essence from another?

And how is it supposed to be doing that?

Please list some of those gaps. If they exist, you should have no trouble listing them.

Horse manure. Look at equine fossils some time -- an excellently-preserved bit of fossil record.

However, there are lots of counterexamples. I will give only one. A homogeneous gas cloud is unstable beyond a certain size, the Jeans radius. I will now derive it in a very hand-waving fashion, ignoring the precise values of numerical constants.

Imagine a cloud with density rho and radius r. It has mass M ~ rho*r^3. Imagine that it changes size by a factor x.

Its gravitational self-energy is GM^2/r; its change with a size change is - (GM^2/r)*x

Its internal-pressure energy is P*r^3, and a change in it is (rho*a^2*r^3)*x where a is the speed of sound in the cloud.

The combined effect is (rho*a^2*r^3 - G*rho^2*r^5)*x -- if the multiplier of x is positive, then the cloud will have a "bounce" and be stable; otherwise, it will collapse under its own weight. And the minimum size for doing so is the Jeans radius, which is

r ~ a/sqrt(G*rho)

Let's see if Ed can follow this reasoning. Since we all know how supersmart he is, we expect that he should have no trouble doing so.

Jack the Bodiless

So now you claim to be intimately familiar with the "very nature and essence" of Allah? A deity who (according to you) doesn't even exist?

Ed, it's perfectly obvious that you're just making up this crap on the spot. Isn't it time to admit that this whole thread is just a joke?

Ed

It just appears random because there are so many different factors that effect the positions of stars that we cannot predict where they will end up. The same applies to the uncertainty principle, we dont know all the forces and factors that effect subatomic particles therefore we cannot predict their position, and therefore their position appears random.

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Dat:As for the laws of logic, I dunno how you manage to make these grandiose claims. Given a baby at birth, why is it that its language, vocabulary, and skills of reasoning improve with time, which is precisely the period that it needs to receive external input, i.e. sensory perceptions, observation? Can you detail which parts of logic are intrinstic, and which were expanded? Do you have any evidence for any claim that you make thereafter?

They improve with time because he doesnt know how to use his reasoning skills and also all his neurons are not fully connected. So as time goes by as his brain grows he can utilize more of his reasoning skills and abilities. I am not an expert on brain theory so I dont know which laws of logic are intrinsic and which are expanded later on.

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Ed: There is no possibility of empirical verification of events in the past and yet we still make extrapolations based on logic. The same thing applies to "outside" the universe. Dat: You're equivocating here again. Can you think of any good reason, any boundary, perhaps, that we should come to to stop extrapolating into the past? I would say the ultimate boundary is the BB, which makes sense. By the same token, is there also a boundary in space which we know signicificant differences occur (i.e. boundary)? Oh, why yes, the boundary of the Universe.

No, why should we stop at the boundary of the universe? I dont believe in any boundaries when it comes to science. The only boundaries to knowledge I believe in are in the areas of morality. There is no reason learn about immoral behaviors.

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Ed: Essence varies according to what the thing is. The essence of galaxies is stars and gravity, ie black holes. Dat: Ergo, you have proven my point at just how meaningless your definition of "essence" is.

How is that meaningless?

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Ed: We do if we want to go beyond a common ancestor and on to the ultimate cause. Most people have a natural curiousity to go beyond what you seem to want to do. This curiousity was also a common characteristic of great scientists of history like Galileo, Newton, and Pascal. Dat: Curiosity? Sure - but does that prove or even provide evidence that such things beyond what we know really exist? What if I'm curious as to who made God? Suddenly, God isn't God anymore!

How do YOU KNOW that such things are beyond what we can really know? Since there is only one primary effect, ie the universe, there is no need for more than one primary cause. Also since God is a cause and not an effect he does not need a cause.

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Ed: PE was developed to prevent the falsifiability of macroevolution. It conveniently assumes speciation only occurs where fossils are not left. Presuppositions and intent often color the interpretation of data so Darwin's intent definitely is not independent of its validity. Dat: Then we can attack those interpretations of data, if we can indeed show a link of bias and invalid interpretation. Note that with all science, once we leave the data, we must spectulate; we then strive to find further evidence to support that spectulation, which makes it into a hypothesis.

And extrapolative theories into the past are the most susceptible to speculations, biases, and presuppositions.

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Ed: This theory IS consistent with reality and observation. There is empirical evidence that contradicts atheistic evolution. Dat: Atheistic evolution...wow. Any chance of explaining where that came from, your reasoning, and your "evidence"?

Well there are two main types of evolution atheistic and theistic. Atheistic evolution is guided purely by random mutations and natural selection, while theistic evolution is guided by an intelligence utilizing some natural selection as long as it is moving in the right direction. The evidence against atheistic evolution is that neither random mutations nor natural selection have been shown to be able to produce all the characteristics of living things especially DNA, a complex languagelike code.

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Ed: No, the effect is not the mirror image of the cause. The law of sufficient cause just states that the cause must be adequate to produce the effect. Since God is a personal being with a moral will. So the personal beings that he created also have a moral will that unfortunately usually chooses evil. Dat: Not so simple, I'm afraid. God has a moral will, but within that moral will lies both good and evil. It is impossible for God to be wholly good, and still have a "will", for then he would have no ability to do evil, which violates the choice necessitated by what we mean by "will".

No, God's moral will only contains good. So while he has a moral will, ours is in some ways more free, because we can choose evil, God cannot. A another way of looking at it is that free will is the ability to choose what we want to do. Since sometimes we want to do good and sometimes we want to do evil, we sometimes choose either one. Since God only wants to do good, that is all he ever has chosen or will choose.

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Ed: Once you go beyond the formation of stars, everything is pure speculation and goes against the laws of logic. Dat: Oh, so now it's the formation of stars. Fine, you can play this little game of ignorama with someone else, as I'm bored with educating you on the BB anyway. Care to show how they contradict the laws of logic? Ah, thought not.

Mainly it is the theories regarding the origin of life that go against logic, ie complex languagelike code coming from non-intelligence and etc.


[b] No, we are seeing that the firing squad missed because we are still alive. If it didnt miss then we would not be here. The question is why did they miss? If given the odds against us being here, something happened so we are meant to be here. Just like the firing squad missing on purpose.

[ February 13, 2002: Message edited by: Ed ]</p>

Ed

Maybe, but wolves are larger than those dogs and they dont get CHD. And dogs are basically domesticated wolves. But there are other examples of built in blocks to variation with other organisms besides dogs.

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Ed: Also given that so far all mutations studied result in a loss of information it is unlikely for that to occur. lp: A load of dinosaur dung. Many mutations are changes in a nucleic-acid base, which keep the original amount of information. And while some larger-scale mutations are deletions, some others are gene duplications and even whole genome duplications. Gene duplications allow both the original and the copy to evolve in different directions, thus increasing the effective amount of information. And gene-sequence research has uncovered an abundance of evidence of gene duplications.

Gene duplications result in either maintaining the status quo or a loss of information. Please provide an example of the original and copy evolving in different directions.

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lp: As to how this can happen, consider the process of cell division: the chromosomes have to be duplicated before the cell can split in two. If, by some accident, the cell goes back to normal without splitting, it will have two copies of all its original genetic information, becoming "polyploid". And "polyploid speciation" is considered an very common mechanism for the the emergence of new species of plants.

Yes, but these species only differ in minor ways, ie such as larger flowers and fruits. They are not members of a new genus or family. This is just an example of microevolution not macroevolution.

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Ed: How? It fits very well with a flood moving from sea to land. Slow moving invertebrate organisms would be buried first and faster moving and more intelligent land mammals and humans would be buried last. lp: This is absolutely worthless sauropod dung. Shellfish are found in all ages of strata; how was a Cenozoic clam capable of moving to higher ground while a Carboniferous dragonfly was not?

There are freshwater clams living in mountain streams and lakes so it is expected that they would be found at all levels. Dragonflies are found at all levels, there is basically no difference between a carboniferous dragonfly and modern dragonflies.

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lp: Furthermore, there is a steady turnover of species over geological time, which is apparent from their neat layering in the rocks. If nothing else, all this layering could not have been produced in a single flood, unless it was an extremely contrived flood.

I never said that all of the strata was produced by the flood.

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Ed: Actually, there are definitely some things that animal minds can not do. They cannot reason abstractly, and they do not have a true will or a moral conscience. lp: What makes you so sure of animals' mental capabilities, Ed?

I am not certain but all the evidence points to my statements being correct.

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lp: Social animals certainly act as if they have a conscience; consider how bees in a hive don't indiscriminately sting each other. And their heads can't contain much gray matter.

There is no evidence that bees can choose to do otherwise, which is required for a moral conscience. The evidence points to them being preprogramed not to sting each other.

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jtb: And yet humans evolved from apes, which evolved from monkeylike critters, which evolved from critters resembling modern lemurs, which evolved from critters resembling rodents (yes, we have the fossils, and the DNA analyses showing how the modern examples are related to each other). Therefore your statement that "only persons can produce the personal" is false. Ed: Such a sequence has never been empirically observed occurring. lp: Have you ever observed God creating anything, Ed?

No, but we HAVE observed persons creating the personal. And my view is just a rational extrapolation of that fact.

[b] It's called scientific curiousity!

lpetrich

First, I'm disappointed that

Although that interpretation is reasonable for the random positions of stars, that is simply not the case for quantum phenomena; there have been efforts to test for the presence of "hidden variables" (essentially what Ed proposes), and there is no sign of them.

Pure assertion. And if everything has a cause, that includes Mr. G. In fact, there must be a super-God to cause God, a super-super-God to cause that super-God, etc. ad infinitum. Furthermore, God looks like a very complicated entity, and according to the Argument from Design, must have been designed. Thus implying the existence of a super-God. And a super-super-God. Etc.

Such as the theory that the Bible has an abundance of literal truth?

I don't see how CHD is an impenetrable barrier, because if enough generations pass, some mutations will appear that help dogs be large very easily. As an existence proof, consider felines. A full-grown domestic cat is about the size of a lion or tiger cub. Yet lions and tigers don't show much evidence of troublesome hip disorders or similar diseases. So if the common ancestor of the felines was the size of a domestic cat, as is likely, then the ancestors of lions and tigers had grown larger over time, with maladjustments being smoothed out as the animals grow.

Ed shows gross incomprehension. Gene duplications INCREASE the amount of information available; it takes more bits to describe the genes after copying than before copying. Ed, try this experiment: take a file, measure its total number of bits, copy it, and then measure the total number of bits in the resulting two files. Did that number increase or decrease?

Having gotten those two files, notice that you can manipulate them separately, with changes in one not being reflected in the other. Ed, if you choose to do this experiment, you'll be teaching yourself a bit of genetics, so why not?

And there are big loads of evidence of gene duplication in the history of life. I will give only a few of them:

Most vertebrate hemoglobin consists of a protein tetramer containing two "alpha" subunits and two "beta" subunits; all of them have one iron/porphyrin (heme) group each. One can find molecular family trees with the alpha and beta sequences -- and one finds that they diverged from a common ancestral sequence not long before the divergence of the shark and a group containing the bony fish and the land vertebrates. So some long-ago fish had suffered a duplication of its hemoglobin gene, with the two copies then evolving to produce the familiar tetramer.

Hemoglobin-gene duplications have happened more than once; human fetuses have a special variety of hemoglobin that is recognizably related to the adult variety.

Also, homeobox genes, which specify front-to-rear patterning, are likely duplicates of some ancestral gene; comparison of fruit fly and mouse homeobox genes indicates that mice have 4 sets of homeobox genes, each of which corresponds with the fruit-fly set, though the mouse genes have some drop-outs.

Ed, what would make you conclude that some new species represents a new genus or a new family?

Ed, your hand-waving is totally unreasonable. Freshwater clams are usually relatively small compared to many marine clams.

Ed, all I've seen from you are evasions and contradictions. You claim that essentially all fossils are sorted hydrodynamically, and then you claim that Noah's Flood yielded only a small amount of the sediment in the geological column. Do you have a real position, or do you prefer to jump to whatever position it is expedient for you to take?

So what? You are conceding that it is possible to be programmed to act virtuously.

By Eddian standards, we have not even observed that, since we do not create new members of our species in the way that we create many of the objects around us. Instead, what happens is that new members of our species grow from single cells -- fertilized egg cells -- that are produced from the merger of some special body cells (sperm and egg cells). And these cells show no signs of mind or will or conscience or whatever other attributes that Ed is likely to consider "personal". Thus, a certain kind of non-personal entity can produce a personal entity, simply by growing.

And why should a bunch of semiliterate goat herders be supposed to have the final word on this subject?

Ed

All of these examples have the earmarks of instinctive behavior that is built-in or programmed into their brains. They were not developed by abstract reasoning except by the Person Who programmed them!

Ed

The Christian God is unified in his divine nature but diversified in his person.

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Ed: From what I have read, the Brahman is ultimately all there is. It appears as though there are other beings and things but ultimately they are just an illusion. All is One. All is a unity, the diversity is an illusion. Ask your local hindu scholar. Jack: The unity isn't uniform, or there wouldn't be anything within it. Even illusions are really illusions, they partake of reality. In Hinduism, the apparent complexity of the Universe may mask an underlying unity, but the appearance of complexity is still there, just as the appearance of complexity is obviously real in the physical Universe despite everything consisting of a handful of different types of particle and only three forces at work between them (strong, electroweak, gravitational: physicists are still trying to reduce these still further).

The non-uniformity is an illusion if ultimately everything is One. And they cannot partake of reality because there is no reality if all is just the manifestation of one entity. In a universe created by a Triune God the diversity and complexity are not an appearance, they are real and that is the how it is in this universe.

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Ed: Yes, but there are huge differences stylistically speaking between the gospels and mythologies. See my earlier post to lp above describing the differences. Jack: I thinkit would save everyone a great deal of time and frustration if, rather than trying to reply to every person here as if the others hadn't said anything, you try to follow the flow of the debate and address the issues. It should not be necessary for me to reply to this, because another poster has already done so. Here is what turtonm has already said: "I don't know what gospels you're referring to, but in the gospels I know, all sorts of mythological nonsense happen. In Mark; people walk on water and feed crowds, cast out demons...in Matthew; a star shows the birth of the messiah, the mother is a virgin, jesus dies and is resurrected, tombs open and the dead walk about; in Peter, the Cross talks; in the Apocryphon of John, a youth changes into an old man and then into a slave, and so on. Of course, in John, a Jewish crowd tells a Roman governor that he'd better execute a jewish man so that he'll be a friend of Caesar (that to me is probably the weirdest thing in all the gospels)." Jack:So this issue has already been addressed, and the claim that the Bible does not include "childishly exaggerated events" is refuted. I could also add much of the Old Testament: the parting of the Red Sea, just about everything relating to the Great Flood, and so on.

Read a real myth or one of the apocryphal gospels and the differences becomes obvious.

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Ed: There is a Law of Biogenesis, read "Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology" by P. Medawar and J. Medawar. Actually YOU ARE claiming that bacteria came from thin air, with maybe a little soup mixed in. jack: Pasteur's principle is nothing more than the common-sense observation that complex organisms (and a bacterium is a relatively complex organism) don't just pop out of thin air. It simply does not address the formation of self-replicating molecules in the primordial soup. It isn't some sort of "anti-abiogenesis law".

It may not be a law but it is evidence against abiogenesis, given that abiogenesis claims that life can come from non-life.

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Ed: Actually the chimps that use sign language have a very limited vocabulary and do not use syntax, which is required for abstract thought and true language. Also chimps show no signs of a true will or a moral conscience. jack: Define "true will". Even dogs have a "moral conscience", it's a characteristic of social animals. For that matter, define "abstract" thought.

A true will enables one to overcome natural needs and desires such as food. Only humans can choose not to eat when they are hungry. Dogs do not have a moral conscience. Dogs cannot choose to not attack fellow pack members, they just do it instinctively, ie they are programmed not to. Abstract thought is the ability to reason about things that may not exist in the physical universe or that you may not have experienced and yet you can still reason about it and make logical deductions about it.

[b] I didnt say he was required to produce anything, but we can study the effect, ie the universe, and make rational deductions about what could bring about such a universe with personal beings in it. And that is what I have done.