Adrian Selby

"I already stated I am not a geologist so I dont know the geological evidence but there is documentary evidence ie Genesis."

I too have just waded through this thread. And this point sums it up.

Ed is clearly not able to debate geological evidence that disconfirms his creationist views, but does recommend Genesis as a source of evidence. Tell me Ed, why did you bother to comment on those geological arguments with a bunch of maybes. Why did you not conclude that these arguments have some force, or at least suspend your conclusions on the nature of the flood? I expect its because you can't suspend your conclusions because you already believe God caused the flood. You cannot however rely on this, because you're meant to be proving God's existence with reference to what the non theists are saying, and here you admit you can't sensibly address the large part of geologies evidence that seems to contradict the idea that there was a great flood.

For the mpteenth time in this thread, I'd like to ask how it is that creationism is meant to support God's existence when you use the Bible to back up your creationist points.

Essentially, you're using the Bible to back up your existence of God arguments. Doesn't this strike you as odd? It is the Bible explanations of creation that are the entire problem and cause this debate with the scientists. The point, in other words, is that non theists think the Bible's explanations are less robust explanations for the way life evolved than purely scientific theories not reliant on the Bible. You cannot therefore refer to it as evidence because you're arguing in the circular. You are not showing why it must be more right than the competing explanations. You have tried to present a case biologically, but have confessed that you can't offer a case on a geological level. Do you expect therefore that you will convince anyone of your position based on contestable biological evidence and merely, I can't stress this enough, MERELY 'maybe's in relation to the geological difficulties.

Here's the killer.

It's obvious that these difficulties you are unable to address will not provide enough evidence for you to stop believing in God. Yet you think that the same sorts of evidence, and the same tests, would force non believers to believe in him.

Can you tell me with any honesty that you would, in the face of physical evidence that conclusively disproved creationism, that you would give up your belief in God? because if not, you need to address why that is, and why a creationist's expectations are so different.

If I put this in line with all the conceptual problems with the concept of God, and the various problems to do with the inconsistencies in the Bible, which you yourself say is open to various interpretations, then you can see that the job of the creationist as theist is not done with the conclusive dismissal of the evolution theory.

On a personal note, I was interested in how you said that intelligence never came from non intelligence. Just what do you think intelligence is, because from my point of view, its just on off switches in the central nervous system of an organism. I would be keen to debate the metaphysical problems of dualism, if you think there is a link between the brain and any other non physical entity.

Adrian

nogods4me

ay carumba!

Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed.

Let me help you out here sir. I can give you three little words and all your problems with the flood, all the maybes, all the might have been, all the mental gymnastics, all the mind bending loop-de-loops you have put yourself through, will simply fade away. And it doesn't have to affect your belief in a god at all.

So here are your 3 little words that will wash away all the problems you are having trying to squeeze a global flood into the picture.

IT NEVER HAPPENED

Deal with it, and move on man, you'll feel much better.

Ed

No, incompleteness is not the same thing as erroneous.

Quote:

lp: Also, what counts as a "Christian" geologist to Ed? Would a mainstream one ever count as a "Christian" one to him? Would anyone who believes Noah's Flood to be a myth inspired by some local flood really be a "Christian" to him?

Primarily belief in the life, death and resurrection of Christ and attempting to follow his teachings and trusting in his plan of salvation. Belief in a worldwide flood is not necessary to be considered a christian.

[quote]
LP on therapsids...
Ed:
Maybe the creatures that you mention above were just dumb mammals and not reptiles at all. Or, some creatures are "mosaics" like the platypus and have characteristics of other animals but are not ancestral at all.

lp: Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe Ed doesn't really have a case, and thus has to invent lots of maybes to to appear to have a case.[quote]

No, there are many creatures that characteristics of different groups and yet are not ancestral or even descendant to them.

Quote:

Ed: (lack of fossils of older ancestors of frogs and salamanders...) lp: Says who about the fossil record of frogs and salamanders? Ed: B. Stahl in "Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution". lp: And here's a maybe for you, since you take maybes so seriously: Maybe we haven't been collecting fossils from the place and time where they had lived.

Yes, that is possible.

Quote:

Ed: Using them is not a problem but glossing over the major differences is. For example, there is no example from fish to amphibian of a fin changing into a forelimb, the skull had to change from two parts to a single solid piece, the hip bones had to enlarge and become attached to the backbone and a multitude of other changes in the soft tissues. lp: Except that such intermediates have actually been found. See, for example, <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1a.html" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1a.html</a>

Sorry, your website contains no examples of the above transitions that I mention.

[b] This makes me wonder what evasion is to lp. How is honesty, evasion? You are not making any sense now. When your wife is honest with you about something you disagree with her about do you accuse her of evasion?

lpetrich

However, if something is incomplete when it ought to be complete, it has an error of omission.

So why not consider the possibility that Noah's Flood is a myth inspired by some local flood? Ed, for someone so fond of considering maybes, this is one maybe that you resist considering. Why?

That's not the same thing, because it isn't seeming to advocate something and then denying that you are advocating it when it is expedient to do so.

Ed

No fossils of coelecanths were found for 65 million years and yet their population was large enough to survive to the present. So a time period of 200 my is not totally out of reach.

Ed

I answered this question on the Noah's Ark thread.

Ed

No, your analogy fails because the key elements for making the certain conclusion are missing when comparing similar fossils, ie heart structure, reproductive organs, respiratory systems, etc.

Quote:

Ed: It is similar to comparing placental and marsupial dogs. OC: You think that, given just the skeletons of a wolf and a thylacine, anatomists would put both in the canidae? No dog has a tail that tapers from the hind quarters. Would there be no sign, skeletally, of the total absence of the webbing that hold a dog’s toes together for running, nor of the fusion of the thylacine’s interdigital pads? Would the fact that a thylacine’s limbs are more similar in structure to cats such as leopards have no bearing? That a dog’s limbs are lengthened in the wrist and ankle, unlike a thylacine’s? Would the thylacine’s dozens and dozens of similarities to marsupials be ignored?

A dog's tail does taper from its hindquarters. No there would be no sign of webbing or fusion of pads because those are soft tissue characteristics that are unlikely to fossilize. Some slight differences in leg structure may just mean it is a different species of dog. What skeletal similarities do marsupials have?

Quote:

Ed: Also, if you are referring to James Hopson's Therapsid Series, his series is problematic. OC: Really? Please explain how. I’ve found his e-mail addy, I’ll happily ask him for clarification.

The first three in the series are contemporaries from two separate orders. And rather than older the fourth is more recent than the fifth and the final therapsid is more recent than the mammal presented as its descendent.

Quote:

Ed:that the mammal-like reptiles which have left no living representatives OC: What about the ones that do have living representatives, like your good self?

Uhhh, it may surprise you to learn that humans are not mammal-like reptiles.

Quote:

OC: There is also the possibility that you are an arrogant whatsit for thinking that a trawl of the internet means you know better than people such as James Hopson. Maybe you do. Perhaps you’d like to ask him about it?

So now you begin the ad hominem attacks. Very intelligent of you.

Quote:

Ed: possessed features in their soft biology completely different from any known reptile or mammal which would eliminate them completely as mammal ancestors OC: Have you ever heard the term ‘irrefutable hypothesis’? This is a non-argument. Sure, it’s possible, but we can’t tell about that. Based on what we do know, there’s no reason at all to doubt that the therapsida were the reptile-mammal transition in action.

Not to those with a career stake in it and other life choice stakes in it. But you are entitled to your opinion but I think future studies in this area will confirm my comments above.

Quote:

OC: Is it not odd that the jaw-joint to ear-bones sequence in them is mirrored in modern mammalian foetal development?

Not if the designer used the same blueprint to deliver the message that there is only ONE designer. Also embryological recapitulation is no longer considered valid.

Quote:

Ed: just as the discovery of the living coelacanth revealed features in its soft anatomy which were unexpected and cast doubt on the ancestral status of its rhipidistian relatives. OC: Are you referring to the mitochondrial DNA analyses (Roush 1997, Science 277:1436)? You know what that did show? That lungfish are our closest gilled relatives.

But lungfish have virtually no structural fins. How could tetrapods evolve from something whose four "limbs" are even less like legs than the coelancanths?

Quote:

Oc: In the 1980s, paleontologists began finding hints that the dogma [Coelacanth as ancestral type] might be wrong. For one thing, features of fossil and living lungfish such as their external nasal openings--important for any animal that needs to breathe and chew at the same time--pointed to lungfish, not coelacanths, as the closest sister group to the tetrapods. At the same time, molecular biologists such as the late Allan Wilson at the University of California, Berkeley, had begun to examine the evolutionary relationships of species by comparing similar fragments of their mitochondrial genes, which are often simpler and easier to analyze than nuclear genes. That allowed Wilson and Meyer to announce in a 1990 paper that tetrapods arose from the branch of the evolutionary tree leading to the lungfish, not the coelacanth. Later, Hedges and two colleagues reported similar findings. [...] That means that traits seen in the lungfish, such as external nostrils and modifications in the circulatory system and blood chemistry, may well provide the best clues to what the earliest land animals looked like. But to settle the issue once and for all, says Meyer, biologists will need to examine the more complex nuclear genes of coelacanths and lungfish. "It's an important question," Meyer says, "and of course I would like to be the one to answer it."

I think this conclusion produces more questions than it answers, see above about lungfish limbs.


[b] This is just one area of problems for evolution.

lpetrich

So what? Coelacanths survived in the deep oceans, where they can escape being fossilized. It may well be that there are some live trilobites living there also, but none have ever been found.

lpetrich

Ed, how do you come to those conclusions about career choices and life choices?

And Ed, what makes you so sure about their supposedly different soft biology? Give reasons, not maybes.

WHAT blueprint? I've never seen any such thing.

And Ed misunderstands recapitulation. The stronger versions are definitely false, but weaker ones are still valid. Later embryos may not resemble earlier adults, but they resemble the embryos of those adults -- which do less reorganization to get to their adult form.

Thus, amniote embryos have gill bars and blood vessels to go with them, which then get turned into various other blood vessels. Interestingly, of one of the sets, one of the two drops out, the left one in mammals and the right one in (living) reptiles and birds. The survivor becomes the aortic arch.

That is something that could easily have happened later, though it would have to have happened before 100 myr ago, when Gondwana was still one continent. Lungfish nowadays live in pieces of Gondwana, suggesting that distribution. Nevertheless, there was plenty of time for lungfish to evolve

(a lot of stuff about lungfish nostrils opening into the mouth, like land-vertebrate ones and unlike other fish ones...)

Ed, why don't you make a list of all the problems that you see?

And also make a list of all the problems you see in creationism.

Quetzal

[Lurk mode off]

Ed: You're either seriously confused or deliberately obfuscating the issue, here. NO ONE (let me repeat that in case it wasn't loud enough) NO ONE involved in vertebrate evolution ever proposed that lungfish, especially modern ones, are ancestral to tetrapods. Where on earth did you get this one? Lungfish (both Protopterus spp. and Lepidosiren paradoxa) are modern organisms - not somebodies ancestor. What they can show us is an analog for the air/water breathing adaptation. Modern lungfish are Sarcopterygians - fleshy finned - rather than the probable tetrapod ancestor from the Actinopterygian - ray finned - teleosts that ultimately became tetrapods. Here is a good photo of a modern Antenariidae (frogfish or angler fish) showing a ray-fin adaptation for support and locomotion:



I thought you said you were a fisheries expert? Surprised you could make such a simple error in anatomy. All you need is a lungfish-like breathing apparatus on a ray-fin body, and voila: instant proto-tetrapod (sort of).

[Lurk mode on]