Kosh

How about sources from organizations that don't
have an agenda?

THe problem is, non of the pro-Flood arguments
are posited by reputable researchers in any of
the appropriate fields. But that's just a matter
of semantics....

Incorrect. The order you get from Genesis does
not correspond to that revealed by the fossil
record. It's been brought up here before. Can't
remember what thread it was in...

Incorrect.

Because the ones that didn't work together
became extinct!

And it doesn't really work so well together.
Entire species go extinct all the time. Even
before we started helping them out. The biosphere
isn't exactly in perfect equilibrium.

If everything works so well, why is the human
eye (supposed pinnacle of God's creation efforts)
more poorly designed than that of the squid?
(we have a blind spot where the nerves exit
the eyeball, the squid does not). Oh yeah, God
works in mysterious ways. :sarcasm

Welll... I'm way out my league here, but if
all life the planet is descended from a single
abiogenesis event, then we would have to be
REMOTELY related to plants,right? Wanna bet those
genes (assuming you're correct here) are really
basic ones? Like genes that make you form cells
or something? Or maybe genes that are no longer
expressed? (although, this explains why my Mom
used ask if I had corn growing in my ears).

Can't...resist. IT'S NOT MY PLANET, MONKEY BOY!

Q: Would you consider it to be proven if we
could witness it happening before our eyes?

Hey, check this out!
<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_781000/781199.stm" target="_blank">http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_781000/781199.stm</a>

Are light photons not considered solid objects?

Kosh

incorrect.

lpetrich

Then tell us where they go wrong. Be specific and reasonably detailed.

True, Pontius Pilate was a real person, but does the existence of the city of Rome mean that it was founded by the son of a god and a virgin? Yes, I'm talking about the Romulus and Remus story, even though Jesus Christ had supposedly had that parentage.

Such long times make Genesis 2 look rather silly.

ROTFL. That's a big laugh. Fossils are abundant evidence of death.

Which meant that he would have to have been super long lived. OK, Bait, measure out the rope to hang yourself with. I'm not going to feel sorry for you.

I don't object to Genesis 1 and 2 being viewed as allegories, as long as they are considered to have no necessarily literal historicity.

I wonder if Bait had been watching too much of the Flintstones.

Which makes that book unworthy of having been revealed by an omnipotent being. Bait's other apologetic, that the Bible is very indefinite about time values, suggests something singularly shoddy about its composition.

Whatever a "kind" is supposed too be.

Evolution does not happen by such big jumps. Natural selection is a nonrandom effect, and it improves the probabilities enormously, as experience shows.

There is a trick for getting around this conundrum: to use something that can be dated by both C-14 and something else. Such as tree rings. Trees preserve a record of their history as they grow, and they also fix carbon. Dendrochronology has been very helpful in calibrating C-14 dates. And it also indicates absolutely zero evidence for a worldwide flood in the last 9000 years or so; trees have been growing all that time in the southwestern US and in Germany without any overall interruption.

It may be difficult to duplicate those conditions, however -- try creating an imitation Hadean oceanic hydrothermal vent some time.

A big semi-aquatic grass-eater -- a hippopotamus.

Here's a reasonable solution that Charles Darwin may have proposed: when an organism emerged from the primordial soup that was the early Earth's oceans, it started to eat that soup, absorbing the abundance of prebiotic molecules. One bacterium-sized organism cannot do much by itself, but since it gets well-fed, it can divide, with its two offspring becoming hungry soup-eaters, which in turn divide, until they eat up the Earth's accumulated prebiotic molecules and eat any new such molecules as fast as they are formed.

Thus, the first reasonably competent organism to emerge blocks off the emergence of any others -- and becomes the ancestor of all the life that came later. And I wonder how one can deduce evolution from the Bible.

However, finely-grained sediment layers would have been mixed up by a big flood.

And even if some sediments were laid down by floods, they can still be local floods -- and often repeated floods, as the geological record shows.

What evidence? An ice ring around the Earth would likely have evaporated into outer space.

Which strongly hints that the Bible was not a revelation, because an omnipotent being would have no trouble implanting some revelation in every human being who has ever lived, thus bypassing such transmission.

So what? That's grasping at straws.

Indeed it does, which is directly contrary to the fossil record. Fruit trees are all angiosperms, which started proliferating in the Cretaceous -- long after a lot of animal evolution.

Linguistic hairsplitting. Using a word for "reveal" would have been much better.

Although sea animals had preceded land ones, they also preceded fruit trees. They also continued to evolve even after some of their number had gone ashore.

All of which come after land animals. Flying insects are descended from flightless ones back in the Devonian, pterodactyls are descended from Permian/Triassic archosaurs (crocodile/dinosaur ancestors), birds are descended from Jurassic theropod dinosaurs, and bats are descended from some early mammals of the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary.

If that was not apparent from the fossil record, it would be very apparent from comparative anatomy.

After the flying ones???

Thank you for contradicting yourself, O Bait; keep on measuring out rope for yourself. Either death happened before humanity had existed, or it did not.

I wonder when Bait will stop trying to present it as literal history -- and be willing to accept its errancy in that regard.

These are sequence differences -- the two species have slightly different sequences of enzymes that do the same things.

In fact, one can make family trees of various genes, and one usually gets good agreement with family trees derived with macroscopic features.

And given the preoccupation with genealogy that some of the Bible's writers had had, evolution might have been a natural for some of them. But it was never mentioned.

Many of the more "fundamental" sorts of genes are cleary related across such long distances, so that's not the reductio ad absurdum that it might at first seem. Also, human cells and corn cells have the same basic structure: they are eukaryotic and both have mitochondria.

Says who?

Which makes that part of the Bible defective -- there should have been a detailed discussion of such potential difficulties for people centuries later who might be reading it.

Is Bait willing to accept that the Bible is equally unproven conjecture?

Kosh

I think we've just determined what "kind" of
bait Ron is... a Wiggleworm!

Ron, I have to wonder if you even know what you
believe.

As the Monty Python skit goes... "This isn't
argument, it's just contradiction!"

Oolon Colluphid

Sorry folks, bit of a long one...

Yeah, course... provided you get my name right! . It’s Oolon, ie <a href="http://websites.ntl.com/~sunshine/realhhg/hhgoolon.htm" target="_blank">Oolon Colluphid</a> in <a href="http://users.milliways.mg-net.de/BSAFH/guide/hg-1-00.html" target="_blank">The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy</a>, by Douglas Adams. (And <a href="http://users.milliways.mg-net.de/BSAFH/guide/hg-1-06.html" target="_blank">here</a>.)

Since he’s around, I’ll leave the flood geology stuff in Patrick’s safe hands. Doubtless John S and others can contribute too. ’Tain’t my area! But just to throw one site back at you, try Patrick’s <a href="http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/" target="_blank">http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/</a>
Beyond this, we’re probably better off having a separate thread on flood matters.

Eh? These aren’t magically different things: Land is what all the earth’s surface is, it’s just that there’s rather a lot of water filling up the valleys and canyons too. Your aside makes no sense.

So? This just shows that iron age goatherders were no botanists. In particular “plants bearing seed” and “trees bearing fruit”... those are angiosperms. Do you know how ubiquitous pollen is in modern soils, and in the later fossil record? It’s bloody everywhere. However, the emphasis is on ‘later’. Angiosperms -- that is, most of the obvious stuff we usually think of as plants -- don’t appear in the fossil record until the late Jurassic, and they diversified greatly in the mid-Cretaceous. Before that -- no fossils of them, and no pollen either (no surprise). That’s around 140 million years ago, earliest, which is about 3,360,000,000 years after the first fossils, which, incidentally, are not plants. That’s in the last 4% of fossil time, and the last 3% of earth’s history. Bit of a mismatch there compared to them being made on the third day (however long the ‘day&#8217 , no? <a href="http://www.geocities.com/we_evolve/Plants/angiosperm.html" target="_blank">Here</a> is some more info on angiosperms.

One thing is clear though. Whether these ‘lights’ were made then or whether only then they “showed through” then, this is the fourth day. The day (or is it an aeon? ) after the plants were allegedly made. Have you heard of photosynthesis? If the ‘day’ were a 24-hour-ish one, then I guess the plants would be okay. But if not a real day, then what, exactly, kept the plants alive for anything longer than a month without light? Another (unmentioned) miracle? Oh I know, it’s from the light on the first day. Which came from...?

Hardly. These flying creatures (Young’s Literal says “fowl with wing”, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt) are made in the same verse (1:21) as the sea stuff. “Great monsters” (YLT) are specifically mentioned, sometimes translated as whales – clearly meaning things of significant size. However, the earliest multicellular fossils are around 600 million years old -- a mere 2,900 million years after the first signs of life. And there’s nothing like “great monsters” (or whatever term you choose) for a looong time after that. Again, nothing multicellular -- nothing you don’t need a microscope to see -- till the last 17% of the fossil record.

Twaddle. Either these things all happened on the same ‘day’, which means at the same time more or less, no order mentioned, or you have to take the order of their mentioning as subdivisions within the day. You said domestic, wild and ground-crawling; 1:24 has domestic, creeping and beast of the earth; 1:25 has beast of the earth, domestic and creeping. The fossils, however, are very specific: leaving out loads, the basic running order is single cells, multicellular things (sponges, jellies etc), worms and arthropods, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals. These are spread out over enormous stretches of time, so not simultaneously; nor is the order even vaguely right. You don’t get mammals proper until the late Cretaceous; being generous, that’s still only the last 2.8% of the time there’s been signs of life. The earliest reptiles, however, appear in the Permian, 3.5 times as long ago, 250 million years before mammals.

Perhaps; but you did.


So there was death and disease in the garden, it was there from the start, not as a result of the Fall. So why did god create our own human species of flea and louse? Why is Rickettsia prowazekii, which causes epidemic typhus, found only in humans and human lice? If not the result of the Fall, why might a loving god create the living things that cause Ebola, Lassa, tuberculosis, rabies, leishmaniasis, trypanosomiasis, malaria, gangrene, diphtheria, cholera, typhoid, syphilis, gonorrhoea, Hansen’s disease (leprosy), anthrax, pneumonic plague, tetanus, influenza, AIDS, hepatitis, schistosomiasis, filariasis, and tics, bot-flies, tumbu flies, screw-worms... to name a tiny sample?

“Amongst”, as in ‘along with reptiles, amphibians, worms, arachnids, insects etc etc’ (“every creeping thing of the ground&#8221 . In other words, in complete disagreement with the evidence, and with cladistics too, come to that.

(cont...)

Oolon Colluphid

But the sequence is either completely wrong or the timescale is (it’s either in the wrong order or all at the same time), so he is deceiving us. Or irrelevant.

That he simply did it? Wow, that’s useful. Did what, exactly?

It’s not by accident. Only those completely ignorant of evolution thinks it is down to chance. And please explain what you mean by “so perfectly”. Next!

So why try to use it as one, by saying it has useful information on how life came to be?

The bible often disagrees with science. And the bible doesn’t exactly prove anything either. But since one is a book and the other is rigorously tested against the natural world, I know which I’d trust.

Sequence differences. So? Is someone claiming they’re identical? Please answer the questions.

Sorry, my fault. I meant to post the links. But your misunderstanding too. Birds do not have teeth, and their fibulas are tiny splints (when you eat a drumstick, it’s that little bone down the side of it). Evolution works by adaptation of pre-existing genetic recipes (via selection of their phenotypic expression). Genetics tells us that phenotypic effects are the result of genes being switched on or off during the making of a body, so a feature being lost during evolution does not automatically mean that the DNA has been lost too -- the genes may just be inactive.

No surprise then that surgical manipulation of a chick foetus can cause structures to grow that chicks don’t normally possess. In <a href="http://www.devbio.com/chap06/link0601.shtml" target="_blank">this experiment</a>, chick jaw tissue grew teeth in the presence of the correct hormone; in <a href="http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/Hampe_experiment.htm" target="_blank">this one</a>, the simple insertion of a piece of mica between the growing leg bones produced not only a full fibula, but also separate ankle bones, just like the ancestors had.



Thus birds possess the genes to make stuff birds do not have, and, unless you think birds and reptiles are the same ‘kind’, have never had.

See the links I provided.

(cont...)

[ February 21, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

So you mean the same as the scientific term species then. Okay. Why do mallards and pintails rarely hybridise in nature, but put them together in a zoo and they do, and the offspring are fertile? Why are hooded crows and carrion crows separate except for a band of hybridisation where their ranges overlap? What of ring species?

I suggest you do a web search on ‘isolation mechanisms’. Here’s some examples.

The American fruit fly Rhagoletis pomonella has populations that live on apple trees and on hawthorn. Earlier-hatching eggs feed on apples, which ripen sooner; the later ones on later-ripening hawthorn fruits. They do not naturally interbreed.

A hundred years or so ago there were only ‘hawthorn’ flies, because there weren’t any apple trees. They bred and laid their eggs in August, and the eggs hatched in October and fed on the fruit. Then in the nineteenth century apple trees were introduced, and the fly began to infest them. (Since then it has also started parasitising cherries, roses, pears and other members of the Rosaceae.) Now there are ‘apple’ flies too. These breed and lay eggs in July, and the maggots hatch in September. Apples ripen sooner than hawthorn fruits. Not all the flies hatch at the same time. When apple trees arrived, flies that hatched earlier were able to take advantage of the last of the apples. Over a period of time, natural selection has divided the fruit flies into two quite separate populations, breeding at different times. The two populations look the same, and they can still interbreed. But they do not, because they breed at different times.

So, are they now two species? What is the difference between this ‘one’ species and two species that can sometimes hybridise? Unless any hybrids between them are better adapted, natural selection will favour any further genetic changes that reinforce the separateness of the two . . . species. (Eg better adaptation to one or other particular fruit.) Some taxonomists would class them as two species already. Why not? Remember that with artificial insemination (and that’s only the mechanical putting together of sperm and eggs), even creatures as different as camels and llamas can still produce viable offspring.

Another: the hybrid between northern and southern leopard frogs doesn’t develop normally, apparently because the two sets of genes are adapted to different temperatures, and development gets out of kilter when one set instructs the embryo to develop quickly and the other instructs it to develop more slowly.

Bishop pines (Pinus muricata) and Monterey pines (Pinus radiata) grow on the Monterey peninsula in California. They look quite different, but are capable of interbreeding to produce fertile hybrids. The hybrids are, however, not as well adapted as the parent species and do not survive. The two sorts of pine trees breed at different times of the year, Monterey pines shedding their pollen earlier in the year (mainly February, and a little in March), Bishop pines shedding theirs later (some in March but mainly April). So the two trees do not normally interbreed, and are considered to be two different species.

But there could be a different ending. Here in England we have two species of hawthorn, which can be easily distinguished by their leaves. Common hawthorns (Crataegus monogyna) have leaves rather maple-leafy in shape, and live in open places; midland hawthorns have leaves more like beech trees in shape, and live in dense woods. As woodlands have been cleared for agriculture, the habitat of the midland hawthorn has gradually been destroyed, but common hawthorns can grow in the clearings. So the two species now often grow near each other and can, it transpires, interbreed. The hybrids are fertile, and can be distinguished by their intermediate style leaves. These hybrids are better adapted to the new intermediate habitats than the other hawthorns are, and are becoming more and more widespread -- they may eventually entirely replace the parent species. Would they be recognised as a new species?

If they cannot interbreed, variations in forms can become more and more different. For sticky potentillas, shrubby plants that grow in California, altitude is a reproductive barrier. They are classed as one species, but not all potentillas are potent wherever they grow. On the coast, in sheltered habitats with temperatures moderated by the sea, they grow tall and bushy, but high on the mountains, where it is cold and windy, they are short and stunted. Both are adapted to their environments, and the differences are heritable, not just environmental -- if a coastal plant is planted on the mountains it soon dies, and so do ones germinated there. (Need I bother to mention that the two types have therefore evolved to fit their habitats?)

Many other plant species have mountain and lowland or coastal and inland forms. White bark pines, Pinus albicaulis, from the Sierra Nevada mountains, seem to have gone a step or two further. They come in two types – low bushes, adapted to the upper slopes of the mountains where strong winds dry plants out and frozen ground often prevents roots obtaining water, and tall slender trees, which are found on lower slopes where mild conditions allow them a regular water supply; the trees shelter each other from the wind -- but their shade stops smaller trees getting much light. The two pine types can interbreed to produce hybrids of various shapes. But hybrids are very rare; most pines are one group or the other. The halfway house is less successful where either of the other two already are.

In several small bodies of water in Death Valley, California, there exist related species of pupfish that differ in such characteristics as the presence or absence of pelvic fins -- a characteristic that distinguishes some whole families of fishes. These species have developed since the last glacier receded ten to thirty thousand years ago, when the area became a desert. It is clear that when new species evolve, they can differ from each other to a great extent, or hardly at all. Some species of desert pupfish are almost identical, and share many of the same genetic variations that are revealed by studying their proteins; others differ in size, tooth shape, coloration and the presence or absence of pelvic fins. Among these pupfish, there is a complete gradation from species that can hardly be distinguished to those that are as different as other genera or families. And the best bit – every characteristic that can be used to distinguish families or orders is known to vary among closely related species, or even within the species. And don’t even get me started on <a href="http://tilapia.unh.edu/WWWPages/malawi/Malawi.html" target="_blank">African cichlids</a>.

A 1991 issue of Nature presented a study of the mitochondrial DNA of the endangered red wolf, Canis rufus. This species, once extending over a large range in the south east of the US, is now extinct in the wild. The paper’s authors examined the mtDNA sequence of red wolves (zoo animals and from DNA obtained from museum pelts, dating from 1905 to 1930), as well as that of grey wolves and coyotes. (The red wolf occurred only in regions where grey wolves and coyotes also ranged.) When they analysed the red wolf sequences, they found that the mtDNA was either of the grey wolf or coyote type. This, along with geographic information, led them to conclude that the ‘species’ red wolf is (or was) actually a hybrid between the grey wolf and the coyote. But it gets better. Grey wolves and coyotes have overlapping ranges in the northern US as well, but the hybrids there are not of the red wolf type. In other words, the red wolf ‘hybrids’ are the product of evolution as well as hybridisation -- the phenotype is probably not recoverable by cross-breeding alone.

There is in nature a complete range of gradations, from varieties, races, subspecies, semi-species to full species. They are divided by a range of isolating mechanisms, from ‘don’t want to breed with each other, and nothing comes of it even if they do’, to ‘don’t get the chance to breed with each other’; from hybrids (and we are all hybrids of our particular stream of DNA) of varying degrees of fertility, all the way to simple variation within species. This is as we would expect with evolution.

Erm, who was the one trying to derive timescales from it? Who said that it “establishes very clearly that either 1. In God’s time, one of his days is equal to 1 thousand years of 24 hour earth days, or 2. God’s time does not count time…one day to God could be thousands, millions, etc. of years...i.e.: eons”?

Archaeological stuff, yeah, possibly. Just as with the Iliad. Science? You’ll be telling me next that Apollo’s arrows in Book 1 are a scientific description of a typhus outbreak.

Leviticus 11: <a href="http://bible.christiansunite.com/search.cgi?version=all&passage=Le+11:13" target="_blank">13</a> to <a href="http://bible.christiansunite.com/search.cgi?version=all&passage=Le+11:19" target="_blank">19</a> (where the word is).

<a href="http://skepticfriends.org/dawnflatearth.asp" target="_blank">Apparently.</a>

No idea. All but one of <a href="http://bible.christiansunite.com/search.cgi?version=all&passage=Le+11:6" target="_blank">these translations</a> think so (and the other simply leaves it out).

Oh I’m sorry. Take it up with all those translators. They obviously don’t know their job. I see you’re going to tell them it...

Okay... but rabbits eat a wide range of plants, including grasses, cereal crops, root vegetables and young shoots of meadow plants, and will eat tree bark when snow covers other food sources. Not grain, not berries (though doubtless they could, they don’t normally).

What? God couldn’t give them adequate digestive enzymes to digest it first time? He’d rather have them eat their own shit?! If bacteria can break down cellulose, why not the interiors of animals? Wonderful design, that.

It’s actually called ‘refection’. Reingesting one’s own poo is not the same as regurgitating it to chew it again, which is what ruminants do.

Yeah right. Unknown to whom? And such as...? See also <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1994/4/4chew94.html" target="_blank"> here</a>.

No answer?

Good. Then how come you don’t seem to know that the intellectual differences between us are, as far as we can tell, a matter of degree, not qualitative differences?

<a href="http://www.indiana.edu/~origins/teach/A105/lectures/A105L12.html" target="_blank">Chimpanzee intelligence</a>

<a href="http://www.saga-jp.org/coe_abst/matsuzawa.htm" target="_blank">Chimpanzee intelligence in the laboratory and in the wild</a>

<a href="http://www.rnw.nl/science/html/chimps000703.html" target="_blank">Chimps can count!</a>

<a href="http://culture.st-and.ac.uk:2000/chimp/index.html" target="_blank">Chimpanzee cultures</a>

Are irrelevant. I can and do read, and watch David Attenborough. My links are still better than your links .

No, you don’t see, let me repeat: NOTHING is ever proven in science. Proof is a luxury of mathematics, where you are defining the universe you're operating in to start with. With science, we are trying to find out what sort of universe we're operating in, so we have to make do with merely all the evidence there is and any more we can gather.

So if nothing is proven, what is a fact? I’ll go with S J Gould: something “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” Common descent is such a fact; natural selection, genetic drift and so on are the theories used to explain this data.

“Unsubstantiated hypothesis or conjecture”!! You do understand those words, right?

Oh really? Funny how we know where to drill for oil and make better antibiotics then! Some hypotheses have an advantage over others: when you apply them to the world to make predictions, they work.

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Yup, as has evolution.

Yeah, so? Of course there’ve been some remarkable paradigm shifts within mainstream science; but that is irrelevant. A paradigm shift invariably involves a new idea which wins out on the basis of empirical support. For instance, Alfred Wegener’s ‘continental drift’, which took from 1912 to the late 1950s to become accepted as plate tectonics, as the evidence built up in its favour. Similarly, the ‘molecular clock’ dating of the chimp / gorilla / human divergence at four to seven million years BP: Ramapithecus as a hominid around 20 mya meant the clock couldn’t be accurate, but more and more fossils found since have confirmed it to be reasonably correct. But we never go back to the ideas that were ejected because they were inadequate explanations -- creation being an example.

Apart from radiometric dating as guesswork (page 1), some comment on those skulls, why something can’t change into something radically different by numerous incremental changes, and saying when death started...

No problem!

ATB, Oolon

Mr.Kitchen

I think a better example of poor design in humans and other mammals is the fact that we breathe and eat through the same hole. If our wind Pipe were instead placed away from our esophagus then we would never choke.

So why would an intelligent, caring designer make it possible for babies to choke to death?

Oolon Colluphid

Now now, don't jump the gun, I'm hoping to reel Bait in with that bait... er...

Oolon

Bait

Hi all,
Ok…on with the debates. Have to write this kinda quick, so sorry if it seems a mismash. I’m trying to address as many as I can.

First, I admit, I got caught so to speak. You guys are sharp...I like that!!! When I was talking about Adam & Eve, I made mention of “no death and suffering”, not saying exactly what I meant (thinking ya’ll would understand/read between the lines). My bad. I was talking about Adam & Eve…only…in that THEY did not yet know death and suffering according to the Genesis account. I was not clear enough, and well deserved the shots I got. (I kept wondering where you were coming up with the “no death and suffering” thing) The Bible is actually mute about the animals except for hinting that the food chain was indeed present. In fact, at the fall of man, God gave them (Adam & Eve) coverings made from animal skins. (yes, God probably killed...ooooohh)

As to Oolon…from what I saw of your examples…all of the interbred animals you presented appear to be after a “kind” in that the ligers (for instance) were of the cat (big cat) family, the pintails, etc. of the duck (bird) family, etc., a fly is a fly, etc. Maybe I missed it, but I did not see any reptiles crossing with mammals, or mammals crossing with birds...at least not any that were not manipulated by scientific experiments, as in...in the wild. If I missed that, then show me where, I just missed them, and still need to review more. I do not dispute the fact that new species appear all of the time either. I agree that that’s part of natural selection, which in general I’m not disputing.

But part of the evidence you have given also states that a lot of that type of breeding would never occur in the wild…naturally. In other words, we humans had to force the unnatural. What my point also was, is that from empirical evidence, there appears to be some type of mechanism(s) that caused “kinds” of animals to appear the earth (apparently) separately from each other, ie: canines, cats, other types of carnivours, camels, llama’s, other types of similar plant eaters (btw, deer and goats are in the same general family).

You yourself defined it…you said ”They are divided by a range of isolating mechanisms, from ‘don’t want to breed with each other, and nothing comes of it even if they do’, to ‘don’t get the chance to breed with each other’

This is not in disagreement with Biblical accounts IMHO, and the Bible does not say that natural selection does not exist either. The difference between the two of us I think on this subject is how the “species” the “kinds” began to start with…and of which neither of us can absolutely prove.

Kosh,
Hahahaha…monkey boy…hahaha, …like I’ve never heard that before. (snerk)

On that subject though, I did notice that even though I answered Oolons challenge as to the qualifications of where my knowledge of chimps came from…he did not (saying it’s not relevant)produce his, though asked. My point is, he seems to be talking from (apparently) only what he has read, I was talking from first hand knowledge. I know full well what intelligence a chimp has…and though they can count, make rudimentary tools, and can be easily trained, they are still no where near the intelligence of man. And though SOME scientist THINK dolphins may have high intelligence, they have no substantiated proof that they are even close to us.
Other news (back to Kosh)
Ok…St. Peter had an agenda (duh?), so therefore what he says doesn’t count (even though the verse is in the bible, which is generally accepted by the Christian religious world as scripture), and Psalms (old testament) says basically the same thing (but he wasn’t talking about that?) ICR has an agenda, so that doesn’t count either (ok, I’ll give you that one, some of his stuff is debatable)…so your saying that if someone has an agenda, what they say don’t count? Yea, like many of you on this forum don’t have an agenda?? Riiiight.

I gave you three instances in the Bible to support my claim as to why I personally think that before the “fall” perhaps the Bible was speaking using a different time scale, biblically speaking. 2 Verses that flat out says what the time table was…and (examples) of all of the people listed before the story of the “flood” lived in the 900 year range…just under 1,000 years (one of Gods days), which followed exactly Gods admonition that if they ate of the fruit, THAT DAY they would die..further evidence to support the claim Yet you won’t even recognize the reasoning, probably because if you do, then some of your arguments against the accuracy of the bible goes out the window. You can’t claim “YEC” with me, or use the 6,000 year argument…because it then would not apply to my arguments, since I do not necessarily go along with all of the young earth ideas. (The Bible and science could agree on that one point, that the earth could be old, as an example).

(Back to Oolon? I'm getting confused, sorry if it's not you)
As to bats, rabbits, etc…the rabbits part, “Youngs Literal Translation” translated as I told you. But even leaving them out, as usual, your missing the message the verses were trying to relate. They were laws being given pertaining what is allowed (clean) and not allowed (unclean) to eat. When rabbits chew, their method of chewing resembles animals that chew cud, readily recognizable by the Jewish people of that time. In addition, it could then also be categorized as not having a hoof either. BTW, part of my translation said “of little value”…referring to an object (not just berries, etc.), which the writer could have been explaining WHY the rabbit was to be considered as unclean (eating dung to extract nutrients that had a little value). Same basic idea with a bat….it (the verse)was talking about flying animals (fowl) in general that were “unclean” to eat (usually meat eaters, that ate animals including the blood)…the bat was probably added there as a convenience, recognizing that it flys (like fowls), and that some drink blood as nourishment …and since it is really in a group of it’s own, it was added (almost as an afterthought) to the “fowls that eat blood”list. Eating blood, or something else unclean on most of these was the reason for the “unclean” grouping. The reasoning for their inclusion where they were then seems sound. on an off thought, Do you not wonder though, is that if this (these laws)did not come from the creator, how did the Jewish know exactly which animals were the most likely to carry diseases transmitted by blood thousands of years before the causes of deseases were known? And if they did not know about the diseases, then why forbid these particular animals? These, I think, were among (if not the)first health laws.

As to the “flat earth” stuff you mentioned….again, I thought we weren’t going to do the straw stuff. Your picking “evidence” from someones dream …obviously not literal, and the other “evidences you mentioned, were obviously metaphorical in nature, and were not describing a flat earth.

Kosh told me that he thought the Psalms verse meant “seems like a long time ago” or something of that nature, although it specifically mentioned yesterday was to God like a thousand years. He was saying the verse was meant to be methphorical. Now here, where a prophet is trying to relay very strongly,Gods displeasure by saying something to the effect of “I’m going to shake the earth at its foundations”…and like verses, you somehow (and I don’t really know how) extrapolate it into meaning the Bible says the earth is flat. Boy, talk about a stretch!!! If I would tell you I'm going to shake your cage....does that mean you actually have a cage attached to you???

Ok, now I’m to define “What is life”? Scientist haven’t figured out how to define that yet, to my knowledge. But, ok, you need more ammo, so to ME, the best explanation I can come up with is something that (eats) digests, then expels the waste, and biologically reproduces offspring. But I cannot definitely define life anymore than you can, and there will always be things not alive that will fit the definition, and those that are alive, that do not fit the definition. Not really a fair, or relevant question if you cannot answer it yourself.

I said before about a primordial ooze…and was lamblasted, but then one of you mentions a “primordial soup”…from which you propose that the “life” forming from it “eats” up the entire soup, making it impossible for the “soup” to form again. So are you saying that this first primitive life destroys (eats) all of the chemicals that made up the “soup” in the first place, everywhere in the world? If not, then why couldn’t the chemicals form elsewhere, and conditions, again just combine to make up another batch? If that is what you mean, then you are saying that those chemicals no longer exist at all on earth?? NOW who’s not making sense? And this is easier to believe than me believing that there is a “supernatural intelligence” called God, making those primitive life forms to begin with, or even making that “soup” you refer to, by design?? Lets get off this particular subject now…ok? (we'll both need tylonol from banging our heads).

Varves, ok…I see your explanation, but you still haven’t answered how could there be fish that penetrates several layers. Why did they not rot? If the layers were slow (6 months, etc.) in forming, why did not the fish disintegrate? And the varves, by themselves, do not refute the stories of the Bible. Remember, I stated up front that I’m not a YEC, I believe it is entirely possible for the earth to be old, and still match the wordings of Genesis. I’m a Christian, yes, but I don’t necessarily believe the earth is only 6,000-10,000 years old. This "old earth" belief would mean the time frame of the varves COULD BE post-biblical flood (without getting into a flood debate)as an example. Yes, during a flood, the water would have been turbulent, but after a flood, when the waters were settling down, giant ponds could have formed, and the varves COULD be the results of that settling…or not. No one knows for sure, but it does not explode the meanings of the Bible.

And people, stating that I believe that according to the Bible the earth could very well be old means I’M AGREEING WITH YOU ON THAT POINT. Quit pulling the YEC stuff on me then, ok? I’m not arguing that the world or universe could not be old, quite the opposite, it probably is IMV.

to Dinosaurs…I said I believe that it is possible that “humans” could have been present at the time of dinosaurs…and the “Flintstones cracks” began. Real scientific way of looking at things…neh? But lets look at the evidence, even from just written history alone. Usually when a myth prevails over several diverse cultures and civilizations, then they usually have some basis in fact (however little). Dragons are well known in myths all over the world, in almost every culture. Europe has the knights and dragons, Chinese has their dragons, even the Aztec’s has creatures resembling dragons. Even the Bible describes a behemoth. Yes, someone said a Hippo…but a hippo does not have a tail as large as a cedar tree, which lies under a tree for shade (neither does an elephant btw). Do you not see some resemblance of the mythical dragons, with some of the predatory dinosaurs? Remember these myths were formed BEFORE people began to dig up dinosaur bones for archeology, so how would they know without seeing it? It would then be reasonable to assume that there may be a possibility of the existence of dinosaurs when men were around, and reason enough to form a hypothesis, and a theory to explore. This means (or presents) anthropological evidence of that theory (generally accepted by anthropologists - any disagreements here?).
Using the same logic, every major civilization in the world, the Chinese, the Aztecs, Sumerians, Hebrews, Biami, Aboriginese, Havasupai Indians, and many others all have “world wide flood” stories. Most have these same features, told in slightly different ways:
1. A world wide flood that destroys all breathing creatures, except for the few chosen saved in/on a ???.
2. An diety angry because people had become evil.
3. A boat/ark that the people and animals stayed in during the flood.
4. Usually (not always)a Noah like patriarchal figure, a father, a king, a leader, and his family taking care of the animals and building the boat/ark/etc.
5. A rainbow as evidence that no more total earth destruction by flood.

Again, this is anthropological evidence of an event, a possible world-wide flood of some sort sometime in the ancient past. Again, generally recognized by anthropologists world-wide. Since there is no absolute proof that there was NEVER a worldwide flood sometime (unknown how far), in our ancient past, how can you, from a scientific standpoint say “what flood?” and still call it science in the face of such empirical anthropological evidence? I can understand where you could question whether the Bible is “the authority” or “the true” account of the event, but not how you can honestly say there never was one.

Einsteins theory: The URL you gave actually said that they were not sure that the experiment is truly valid. According to Einsteins theory, anything faster than light would violate the “causality principal” which states causes always precedes effects. The experiment seemed to indicate that they got something to go faster than light (by 5%) which would mean that the pulse would leave the far side opening of the experiment BEFORE it entered the near side opening…time travel??? So if this experiment DOES prove successful, then Einsteins theory is proven incorrect, and it would be possible for something to be in the future BEFORE the past, or to move back and forth in time. Say like…um, …the things you dismiss that describes actions of uh, GOD???
But really, they pointed out that it seems to be an illusion, and nothing physical is traveling faster than c (speed of light), and Einsteins theory is safe…for now.


&gt;&gt;&gt;Oolon said: Yeah, so? Of course there’ve been some remarkable paradigm shifts within mainstream science; but that is irrelevant

But it is not irrelevant….you currently have evidence on a lot of things, but major paradigm shifts do happen, even in the presence of massive empirical evidence. That's my point. You cannot absolutely say that there is no...whatever...because even if you have empiracle evidence, it cannot always be relied on TOTALLY.

Mr. Solum, first, thank you…you actually said better what I was trying to say as to the material in the universe, and reminding me of the law of conservation of energy. And I stand corrected as to the meaning of radiometric age.

As to aquifers, no, they are not usually vast open lakes in the sense of huge caverns underground (though there are a couple that has caverns, but not huge in the geological sense), but in that the aquifers are usually in a definable area of length and depth, and quantity, they are in a sense “lakes”. I also do not dispute how they are formed, either. However, the amount of water, and the pressures sometimes present in these aquifers COULD lend evidence of the possibility of a layer of water below the earth crust (or mantle) at one time. There is a current scientific theory (non Christian BTW) that is being explored, indicating that such was the case. Another theory along similar lines I put into an earlier post. As I recall, the theory of water below the mantle states that some event (meteor, earthquake, volcano) could have started a “crack” in the mantle, sending into the stratosphere super pressurized (and probably superheated) water, which in turn either caused, or contributed to a global flood. Date is unknown, and it may, or may not be the flood described in ancient writings, including the Bible. However, if one would extrapolate some of the current theories, such as the earth having a canopy of water, with the one I posted, and this one…one could have caused the other, and a domino effect could have occurred. Notice though I said COULD…because all three are theories, and also may not be related to each other at all. Thank you though for pointing out my errors in how I had expressed myself.

Hey guys…don’t go getting mad over this stuff…it’s only a debate, a little light hearted fun. If I offended you, t’was not intended. Oolon, I even am trying to get your name right …

Well folks, gotta run…have fun with this (as I know you will). See ya Monday.

Ron (the wiggle bait) 