Freethought & Rationalism Archive

LinuxPup · 01-22-2002, 03:01 PM

Ok, I'll be more specific on some of my points...

You accepted the premise: "In the Bible are the claims of a beginning of space and time."

Titus 1:2 says "In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;" Many translations say "before time began" as the Greek word "chronos" is used. Now, if God was before time (a property of the universe), then he transcends it. Also, if you transcend time, you also transcend space.

The Bible makes claim of a continual expansion of the universe here:
Job 9:8; Psalm 104:2; Isaiah 40:22; 42:5; 44:24; 45:12; 48:13; 51:13; Jeremiah 10:12; 51:15; Zachariah 12:1.

You'll notice that the tense is in present, active tense. Check out this site:

<a href="http://www.doesgodexist.org/MayJun01/TheBigBangAndTheBible.html" target="_blank">http://www.doesgodexist.org/MayJun01/TheBigBangAndTheBible.html</a>

Well I'm getting kicked off this computer... talk to you later...

Datheron · 01-22-2002, 03:28 PM

LinuxPup,

I'm ignoring Ed from now on, but that doesn't stop me from silently watching and replying to non-Ed personelle.

Quote:

An appeal to "The universe just came to be..." and "Logic may not have been in effect before the big bang..." seem like cries of desperation. People who oppose the idea of a First Cause seem to be arguing not on an intellectual level, but an emotional one. To say that xians are completely irrational, and then to throw logic itself out the window in your argument is self-defeating.

How are they any more desparate than "God just came to be" or perhaps "God is not bound by our space and time"? At a certain level, axiomic principles must be established, and I have done so at the edge of the Universe; the theist does so at the existence of God.

But you tell me - by what means or ways is it possible to extrapolate beyond the edge of the Universe? Does causality work outside of time? How would we exist physically, if we went beyond the boundaries of the Universe? The only correct answer is "I don't know", for we still have no way to test or even guess at what works beyond our perception.

Quote:

As far as who this First Cause is... Could it be Allah or Brahman? I cannot say for sure... I do know that the Bible makes some claims that do jive with the whole BB/First Cause debate though. In the Bible are the claims of a beginning of space and time. That God transcends these dimensions. That God is unchangable, a quality of a being outside of time. And that the universe is undergoing continual expansion. The interesting thing about BB cosmology, is that it demands a non-physical "substance" as the cause of the universe.

Once again, you still have not established that causality even functions outside of time; heck, it would be difficult (if not impossible) for you to explain what it means for God to be "outside of time", for we can only present it as an abstract.

And interesting that you should bring up the story of creation. As I recall, Genesis screws up terribly when compared to the BB theory, and Christian apologetics are often not very convincing; it is always after the fact that Christians try, however they can, to work the story into a coherent reflection of the current BB theories. Hm....

Ed · 01-22-2002, 07:13 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Synaesthesia:
[QB]Ed:
There is something that prevents macroevolution, ie built in blocks in genetic variation. For hundreds of years dog breeders have tried to make dogs larger than the wolfhound and smaller than the chiuauhua. And they have not been able to do it. BTW, your analogy fails, 99.9% of the differences between parent and child are NOT mutations. In addition, genetic studies with bacteria and ancestral studies with cats have shown that all mutations so far studied result in a LOSS of information. If every time a mutation occurs there is a loss of information, macroevolution becomes impossible.

Syn: Hey Ed,

You might find it interesting to engage this topic in the evolution section of this BB. Although it’s a little off topic for this here section, I would like to at least touch upon the two primary points you made:

First is you cite the fact that over the (not hundreds but thousands of) years, we have discovered that it’s difficult to change some features of dogs beyond a certain point. This is most certainly true. Indeed, you will find also that we have been unable to make a mouse run as fast as a cheetah, an ant as big as a mouse or to breed dogs with IQ’s comparable to that of human beings. There are reasons for all of this but they are not, as you claim, actual blocks to genetic variation- The genetic makeup of dogs continues to change unabated.

So why can we not make a mouse as swift as a cheetah or a dog as big as a horse? Simple, the sheer size and speed of animals is dependent upon thousands of factors. There is no genetic sequence for speed, size or intelligence, these properties are the result of the interplay of thousands of genes in billions of different cells. We cannot manipulate them in isolation, we have to provide the physiological capacity to support that kind of size, speed or intelligence. An insect as big as your torso, for example, would be unable to absorb enough oxygen because they breath through their skin- the surface area to volume ratio would simply not permit it. In order to make them grow beyond a certain point, they would have to develop novel mechanisms for surviving at that scale, a process which in nature could take billions of years. None of this will happen, of course, if the appropriate mutants are not available and the selective pressures do not exist. Besides, human breeders have known mendel’s principles for only about about 96 years, modern genetics are only a few decades old.[/b]

Actually your examples are not the best, given that no breeder has tried to do those things. But you are partially right that some things require multiple changes in the organism to ultimately produce another specific characteristic. But the problem still stands. I am talking about only a small change in the size of the animal, a dog slightly bigger than a wolfhound and a dog slightly smaller than a chiuhahua. And tremendous selective pressure in that direction. And yet it has never occurred.

Quote:

Syn: Your claim that all mutations involve a loss of information is simply wrong. Some of the most common mutations involve the duplication or addition of a nucleotide base-pair. Doubling in the length of a genome after only a few generations is not unheard of. In fact, in many plant species, nondisjunction can produce stronger breeds of crop. Granted, most mutations don’t really do all that much, but very often beneficial ones crop up. These random, information generating changes proliferate through the population. When established in the population, any change, any additional mutation, will be added to the mutant genome. There is no way to undo this process. When the selective pressures exist, mutants are here to stay.

I guess I should have qualified my statement. What I should have said is that mutations either result in a loss of information or a maintenance of information. However neither of these things will produce macroevolution. For macoevolution to occur, especially the development of more complex morphologies, an increase in information is required. And all the experimental evidence shows that this has not occurred. In fact, if more than one duplication of a genome occurs a loss of information is likely to begin to occur. For example sentences are similar to genomes. Take the sentence "See Spot run." Say "run" is duplicated. "See Spot run run." What is "run run"? You maybe could say that you understand it as run faster. But if another run is added it eventually becomes unintelligible. And results in a net loss of information. This is what happens multiple duplication mutations occur. But usually it occurs with direct loss of information, like "See Spot". Enough info remains, but if another mutation occurs, it becomes "See". Basically meaningless with no information.

End of part I of my response.

Jack the Bodiless · 01-23-2002, 12:04 AM

Quote:

I guess I should have qualified my statement. What I should have said is that mutations either result in a loss of information or a maintenance of information. However neither of these things will produce macroevolution. For macoevolution to occur, especially the development of more complex morphologies, an increase in information is required. And all the experimental evidence shows that this has not occurred.

No, this is an outright creationist lie. There is no theoretical barrier to the creation of information, and plenty of experimental evidence that it does indeed occur. Where are you getting this claim that "this has not occurred"? From a creationist website? Such claims are invented, Ed!

Quote:

In fact, if more than one duplication of a genome occurs a loss of information is likely to begin to occur. For example sentences are similar to genomes. Take the sentence "See Spot run." Say "run" is duplicated. "See Spot run run." What is "run run"? You maybe could say that you understand it as run faster. But if another run is added it eventually becomes unintelligible. And results in a net loss of information.

You have a very strange notion of how genomes work. Each "word" codes for the creation of a specific trait. For instance, "See Spot run" could produce something required for vision, one which causes spots to appear on the animal's coat, and one which makes the legs more suitable for running: "Spot run See" would be just as good. With "See Spot run run", the creature still has the same number of traits, it's just that one is now coded twice. This can become "See Spot run rur": a meaningless change, but it's OK because the essential traits remain ("See Spot rur" would have been fatal, as the critter would be unable to run: a harmful mutation eliminated by natural selection). This can then become "See Spot run fur": a critter that can see well, has camouflage spots, can run, and has a furry coat for insulation.

GunnerJ · 01-23-2002, 08:47 AM

Quote:

Titus 1:2 says "In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;" Many translations say "before time began" as the Greek word "chronos" is used. Now, if God was before time (a property of the universe), then he transcends it. Also, if you transcend time, you also transcend space.

This seems something of a stretch to me. The ancients didn't really think in terms of time and space as dimentions or universal properties. It seems to me that the beginning of time could more easily be the beginning of history, or our time. I say this because the acnient conception of time was much different from ours, and they tended to put the focus on their own time, and their generation. Thus, it seems that this is not a message of god's trancendance so much as his existance before human history.

However, I will defer to you here, momentarily, in saying that this means that the Biblical god existed before time started. The question is, does this really nessesitate hid trancendence of time? this is a jumping off for a much larger debate, but I can see no way for God to not exist in some form of time if the Universe was indeed created, i.e., caused, by him: cause and effect share a successive temporal relationship. And anyway, this doesn't mean that the Biblical god could not exist in time now.

This is not idle speculation, though. There are many passages that refer to YHWH walking around on the Earth, or to his face and other body parts being seen, and he is continually refered to as existing in the sky. Now, it should be noted that the Hebrews believed the sky to be something like a dome, (although this is most predominant in Genesis, and later books refer to the Sky as a sheet or tent) and they also believed that God's throne was above this dome. Thus, we could if we tried really hard, say that the whole dome of the sky, with YHWH living above it, is metaphorical for God existing outside our universe... But this is again somehting of a stretch. It is not clear that in the ancient Hebrew cosmology that the dome of the sky was any type of limit to the Universe; rather, in Genesis, the dome is refered to as seperating to sets of water, and that much of the water still exists above the dome. Thus, we see some problems for a metaphorical Hebrew cosmology.

Thus, because the meaning of this passage could be a modernist recasting of older meaning, and because of the logical problems of something causing somehting else without a framework of time, and because of the weight of other Biblical passages affirming the non-trancendance of God, I will have to reject this claim.

Quote:

The Bible makes claim of a continual expansion of the universe here:
Job 9:8; Psalm 104:2; Isaiah 40:22; 42:5; 44:24; 45:12; 48:13; 51:13; Jeremiah 10:12; 51:15; Zachariah 12:1.

You'll notice that the tense is in present, active tense.

The biggest problem with this segment is that it tells us nothing about the properties of the First Cause, but is rather a recasting of an old text to fit modern science. This would be better relegated to the BC&A forum, if you want to talk about science in the Bible. Most of these refer to God "spreading" the sky out, but the context reveals often a past-tense usage, and this is limited to the Sky, not the Universe. Another probelm is that not all of them, and in fact only a few, are in any kind of present tense.

Job 9:8-
"Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea."

This is really grasping for it. Again, this refers to "the heavens," or Sky, which is that dome we talked about earlier. This is not the same thing as the entire Universe.

What's especially problematic is that just two lines above, in Job 9:6, the writer talks about pillars upholding the Earth. Why are we counting the hits and ignoring the misses?

Psalm 104:2-
"Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain:"

This is more of the same. Once again, this talks about the sky, but it here refers to it as a fabric, something to be spread out at night. And, again, just three lines below, there is a reference to the "foundations" of the Earth, as if it were a stationary object. This selective quoting is not helpful.

Isaiah 40:22 is especially embarasing, for it refers to the Earth as a circle, a flat disk, int he same space that the "spreadeth" line about the sky. It also refers to the sky as a tent. If this is supposed to make me thing the Bible is accurate science, then I suppose that the Flintstones TV show is an accurate documentary about pre-historic man. 42:5 doesn't even have the present tanse that would be important to establishing a tenuous, gossamer thin line between the OlD Testament and BB cosmology. Same with 45:12. And 48:13 isn't even trying; it talks abotu god "spanning" the heavens, in the same breth as it mentions the Earth's "foundations." Same with 51:13.

Jeremiah 10:12 refers to stretching the heavens (as a cloth) in the past tense. As does 51:15.

Zechariah 12:1 is mroe of the same "spreadeth" of the heavens, and again, in the same line, refers to the foundations of the Earth.

This is really a sloppy job. I'll remember this the next time a Xian accuses me of quoting out of context. Almost all of these are the same essential quote, and only by a very thin and shaky line of reasoning could you actually apply this talk of "spreading" the heavens out to Universal expansion. And, again, this tells us nothing about the nature of the First Cause. Please try harder next time, LinuxPup.

Ed · 01-23-2002, 02:29 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Synaesthesia:
Here is part II of my response.

Ed: I am afraid Stephen Gould would disagree with you, he says the gaps are due to more rapid periods of evolution. Leaps as it were.

Syn: Mr. (Dr?) Gould would likely wince if he heard you say that. It evidently pains him a great deal that his theory is so widely misconstrued. That gaps exist in the fossil record is due only to the relative rarity of the fossilization process. Punctuated equilibrium (Gould’s theory) explains not the existence of these gaps, but the commonness of certain kinds of fossils and their sequence. That is, it explains not the absence of fossils, but the way in which they are distributed over time. Indeed, the more fossils we find of animals, the better his theory fares. We can refine our idea of how fast, and when, various animals have changed.[/b]

Fraid not, read "Opus 200" in Aug. 1991 Natural History Magazine. But anyway you just confirmed my point. Your statement "the way in which they are distributed over time", is exactly what I and Gould said about PE, ie the speed of evolution.

Quote:

Ed:
Possibly, but it also fits the effects of a global flood as it successively sampled from a biogeographically zoned distribution of organisms.

Syn: The picture that the fossil record presents to us (leaving aside the enormous amount of other geological evidence) is quite diametrically opposed to a massive global flood. It is simply too astounding of a coincidence that the morphological record is so precisely laid out. I suggest you do a bit of reading in this area, flood geology is truly on par with flat earth geology.

No, the sea to land hydraulic burial of organisms fits the fossil record quite well.

Quote:

Ed:
We may not know how a honeybee brain represents that information, but we are talking about the retrieval and communication of navigational information, this hardly takes abstract reasoning.

Syn: Since we know virtually nothing about the most prosaic of reasoning, it is impossible to understand the distance from abstractness to “instinct”.

Given that it is generally believed that behavior equates to what is generally going in the brain, most animal behaviorists believe they can get good idea. You may want to believe that a parrot is ruminating on physics while he fights his image in a mirror and theoretically that is possible but all the evidence of the birds behavior points against it.

[b]

Quote:

Ed:
You just contradicted your little honeybee scenario. You say that even an insect brain is beyond our understanding and yet next you say that a much more complex organ, ie a monkey brain, has definite analogies to the human mind. How do you know this given that we can't even say anything definite about how the honeybee thinks(according to you)? 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.

Syn: I said we know nothing about the internal representation. That is quite as true for primates as for insects. I agree, however, that we can know a great deal about what cognitive processes a animal needs to be able to do in order to perform the tasks that it does. My point is that this is only the tip of the iceberg and we are still very often mislead by our human chauvinism.

Whether bees' internal representation is incredibly complex is basically irrelevant given their behavior. If they cannot act on their representations then such brain power is basically meaningless.

Ed · 01-23-2002, 02:35 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Rimstalker:


Hey, at least he's replying to you! What's really frustrating is when he replies to comment son you arguments (LP, I'm looking at you!

) rather than the arguments themselves!

Anyway, here'a something for Ed's education on the Flood and geology:

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html" target="_blank">Problems with the Global Flood</a>

Most of those problems can be easily explained, but I didn't come here to debate websites. Why don't you present the problems in your own words and then I will respond?

Ed · 01-23-2002, 02:42 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Rimstalker:
Ed, you may as well not begun part one of your response. All you did was repeat the same fallicious arguments that I've already shot down. What the hell is wrong with you? I mean, really, are you that dense? I do not care how many people agree with you, how important these people are, or how long they've agreed with you. This is not evidence, they are appeals to authority and polularity, as well as tradition. Just saying that your assertions are only backed up by "intense" scholarship and the word of many "intellegent" people, or that your reasons for disagreeing with the JWs is because many theologians disagree with them is simply conceding the point to me. Come up with a logical argument or your posts will be ignored by me on this thread.

There are numerous books written and some hundreds of pages long explaining the Trinity and its biblical evidence in the original languages. Contrary to the JWs translation. I will provide you with some titles if you want but otherwise I dont have the time or the inclination to write a huge thesis on this site distilling that research done by much more learned men than I.

GunnerJ · 01-23-2002, 02:48 PM

I know I promised to break my habit of responding to (Dead Head) Ed, but this is juct to good to resist...

Quote:

There are numerous books written and some hundreds of pages long explaining the Trinity and its biblical evidence in the original languages. Contrary to the JWs translation. I will provide you with some titles if you want but otherwise I dont have the time or the inclination to write a huge thesis on this site distilling that research done by much more learned men than I.

I shall now procede to use the very words Ed did right before this post in order to respond.

"Most of those objections to JW theology can be easily explained, but I didn't come here to debate other people's books. Why don't you present the objections in your own words and then I will respond?"

Jackass.

Jack the Bodiless · 01-24-2002, 12:21 AM

Quote:

No, the sea to land hydraulic burial of organisms fits the fossil record quite well.

Again, repeating this claim doesn't make it true.

Ed, let's see how your theory addresses the following issues:

1. The complete separation of dinosaurs and modern mammals. No dinosaur, not even the fastest of them, made it past the 65 million year point. With the exception of a few rodentlike critters, not a single mammal failed to make it: not a single cow, sloth, rhino, anteater, elephant. Even GRASS managed to run to higher ground: not a single blade of grass or spore of grass pollen was left behind with the dinosaurs.

2. The extension of this separation into the oceans. Where the dinosaurs stopped, so did the great marine reptiles: plesiosaurs, icthyosaurs, mosasaurs. Not one of them got past this barrier, and not a single marine mammal failed to make it: not a single whale, dolphin, manatee, walrus.

3. The faking of the geological evidence. An unbroken series of annual ice layers in Greenland and Antarctica, and sediment layers in lakes (varves), undisturbed for hundreds of millennia. No trace of the massive runoff channels which the waters of the Great Flood must have carved out. Delicate structures carved by millions of years of wind erosion in places like the Grand Canyon, which couldn't possibly survive in torrents of water.

4. From the Bible's genealgies, the Great Flood happened around 2500 BC. We have written records from civilizations before and after this date: civilizations unaffected by the Flood (and written in languages unaffected by the Tower of Babel incident a few centuries later).

There's more, but that will do for starters. If you want more, why not go to the Evolution/Creation forum?

Thread Tools	Search this Thread
Show Printable Version	Search this Thread: Advanced Search

01-22-2002, 03:01 PM	#231
LinuxPup Regular Member Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Seattle, WA Posts: 248	Ok, I'll be more specific on some of my points... You accepted the premise: "In the Bible are the claims of a beginning of space and time." Titus 1:2 says "In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;" Many translations say "before time began" as the Greek word "chronos" is used. Now, if God was before time (a property of the universe), then he transcends it. Also, if you transcend time, you also transcend space. The Bible makes claim of a continual expansion of the universe here: Job 9:8; Psalm 104:2; Isaiah 40:22; 42:5; 44:24; 45:12; 48:13; 51:13; Jeremiah 10:12; 51:15; Zachariah 12:1. You'll notice that the tense is in present, active tense. Check out this site: <a href="http://www.doesgodexist.org/MayJun01/TheBigBangAndTheBible.html" target="_blank">http://www.doesgodexist.org/MayJun01/TheBigBangAndTheBible.html</a> Well I'm getting kicked off this computer... talk to you later...

Freethought & Rationalism Archive

The archives are read only.