Because the disagreement is over the finer points of the theory, not over the theory as a whole. No professional paleobiologist disagrees that evolution happened.
Cooper:
First of all, I want to preface this response by saying: I have not yet asked Rabbis that I know about this Fatima question. They may have made some statement about it; if it is at odds with what I’m about to say, I’d change my response to fit theirs. However, off the top of my head:
The Fatima thing is interesting, but even it’s not the sort of thing that happened at Sinai. The uniqueness of that event was not merely the occurrence of a supernatural miracle in public…if that were it, I would have also mentioned the Exodus from Egypt, the Manna, the battles of Joshua, etc. The uniqueness of the Sinai event was that it was a divine communication from G-d to over a million people. To sum it up, Deuteronomy 4:32:
Other miracles do happen, and perhaps the Fatima thing was a miracle of some sort. However, what the message in the miracle was is based upon the words of three children.
Tinker Grey:
Oops, I should have been more specific. How do these new translations translate Leviticus 19:19?
And, BTW, the stuff in Numbers 1 - 10 is actually the year following Sinai.
Kiatti:
If so, it’s pretty darned specific. I mean, it records the exact ages of begetting of each link in the generational chain from Adam to Abraham. If it was intended by someone who believed evolution was true to be a simple explanation for people not ready to accept that, the author (human or divine) would have been wiser leaving things vaguer.
jab1:
The Israelites outnumbered them, but Pharaoh’s bunch was an army and the Isralites were a bunch of unarmed former slaves (later Israelite wars were fought using weapons scavenged from the Egyptian army). The Egyptians had the Israelites apparently cornered at the sea. And the Israelites still had a fear of the Egyptians. Tactically, the Egyptians may very well have thought they had a chance of getting their old slaves back.
I’m not going to re-hash the arguments that went on in the other, similar threads. But what in those last eight verses of Deuteronomy necessarily deals with human decisions anyway? I don’t have them in front of me (the verses I quoted above I memorized overnight in preparation for posting; your post here I just saw this morning), but as I recall, it merely speaks of Moses dying, not knowing his grave’s location, there not ever being a prophet like him…I guess the mourning period for Moses might qualify. Still, I’d stick with the stuff on the other threads.
Cooper:
The Noah stuff has been endlessly debated on this board. The short answer, from the (Orthodox) Jewish perspective, is that according to tradition, much about the Noah story was implicitly miraculous (Maimonides is one authority who says this).
Chaim Mattis Keller
batgirl, I completely dismiss biblical accounts because there is so much subjectively biased storytelling, poetry and borrowed, bastardized mythology in the Bible that it simply can not be taken seriously by any scientist or critical thinker.
It is not scientific opinion that the Universe was an “accident”. That implies an aberrance from the norm. We can not explain the genesis of our Universe and take nothing on blind faith, even the BB.
Yet to be reconciled with the reality of the dark for a moment, I go on wandering from dream to dream.
tracer,
You stated that the disagreement among evolutionists is on “the finer points of the theory.” The difference between slow, gradual change vs. sudden, abrupt massive change doesn’t seem like such a fine point to me: it seems pretty major.
batgirl,
Stop saying that abiogenesis and evolution were “accidents.” It’s a loaded statement.
You wanna see pictures of a frozen woolly mammoth being recovered? Click here. The Discovery Channel will air a two-hour program on this expedition on March 12, from 8 to 10 PM.
The mammoth has been frozen for about 23,000 years. Counting the ice in which it was encased, the thing weighed 23 tons. They had to move it 150 miles by helicopter to an ice cave where it will be SLOWLY thawed. The thawing process should take at least a full year.
Some scientists want to see if they can clone it. They know how difficult and unlikely this is, but they’re going to try it anyway. Ya gotta admire that kind of determination!
Now, I have to ask batgirl and cmkeller how they can reconcile the existence of frozen woolly mammoths with the story of Noah. If the story is true, then how and when did these mammoths get frozen: Before or after the Flood? If it was before, how did the carcasses survive either floating or being submerged for the full year the Bible says it took for the flood waters to recede? Wouldn’t scavengers have fed on the bodies? Wouldn’t they have rotted?
So they must have been frozen after the Flood. Except that the Flood is supposed to have happened only about 5,000 years ago and this particular mammoth has been frozen for 23,000 years. So it must have frozen before the Flood, but y’all say the Earth is only about 5760 years old and… and… and…
(sound of jab1 beating his head against the wall yet again…)
Okay, I feel better now.
batgirl, you say God knows what we’re going to do before we do it and pretends that He doesn’t know. (Or makes Himself unaware of what we did in life and then remembers it after we die.) Your computer analogy is flawed because that computer is not conscious, not aware of itself and its environment. It “knows” only what’s inside its electronic brain. It’s neither good nor evil, it’s indifferent.
I don’t think that’s what you meant. But that’s what it sounds like.
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
batgirl wrote:
The “sudden, abrupt massive change” predicted by punctuated equilibrium theory is only sudden and abrupt in terms of geological time. Punctuated-equilibrium speciation events would still take hundreds or thousands of generations to complete; and when you’re done, you still don’t have a chicken population turning into dinosaurs. You have, maybe, an Allosaurus population turning into T. Rex. Punctuated equilibrium still agrees completely with Darwinian natural selection; only the rate of evolutionary change is under scrutiny.
Lens crystallins are not homologous between vertebrates and molluscs, and odorant binding proteins are non-homologous between insects and vertebrates.
I appreciate it.
-Ben
The fact of evolution was recognized long before Darwin put forth natural selection as a theory to explain it- in fact, Lyell had to explain away the fact of evolution at least 30 years before Darwin when he presented his ideas of uniformitarianism. Would you have rejected Kepler’s ideas before Newton discovered gravity?
-Ben
If I provide you with a passage from the Book of Mormon in which God speaks to a million people, will you convert to Mormonism?
-Ben
Of course not! 'Cus that’s, you know, different! Jeez…
“He saw that there had been slain by the sword already nearly two millions of his people, and he began to sorrow in his heart; yea, there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and their children.” — Ether 15:2
Where ya been, David?
That book always put me to sleep.
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
batgirl asked:
um… batgirl, I originally intended to ignore this and consider it an obvious trolling question. I mean, you claim to have a doctorate in biology, for pete’s sake! I could see you claiming that “God created the evidence” i.e. cmkeller (and others). But to imply that the evidence doesn’t exist??!! I must confess, that confuses me.
However, upon further review, the initial ruling on the field has been overturned – I have concluded that you are either unaware of basic science, or you have discarded much of science altogether. I can’t decide which is worse, so I will try to treat them equally.
The evidence for evolution is simply overwhelming. So much so that no credible scientist today would submit a paper entitled “New Evidence for Evolution”. As a non-scientist, I will try to outline a few of the highlights that I remember, in no certain order:
[ul][li]fossil record[/li][li]introns and psuedogenes[/li][li]drug-resistant bacteria[/li][li]genetic similarities between related organisms[/li][li]Biston betularia (English moth)[/li][li]observed speciation (e.g. plants, fruit flies, cichlid fishes)[/li][li]vestigial structures (e.g. whales, snakes)[/li][li]geographic proximity of related organisms[/li][li]jury-rigged design (e.g. appendix, tonsils, wisdom teeth, male nipples)[/ul][/li]
Much more information can be found at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-research.html and throughout that site. This has been referenced to you before by Satan and others. I highly recommend it for your perusal.
Just in case you simply disregard any science that conflicts with your religion, I am very curious about your view of the following:
[ul][li]paleontology[/li][li]cosmology - astronomy - astrophysics[/li][li]geology - radiometrics[/li][li]anthropology[/li][li]genetics[/li][li]biology (egads!!)[/ul][/li]
Each of these has as a cornerstone the theory of evolution, or directly refute your claim of a 6,000 year-old earth. Do you ignore each of these fields, or do you have an explanation that fits with your worldview? Inquiring minds want to know.
Perhaps you might try posting evidence supporting your favorite theory.
jab1:
Why couldn’t they have been frozen prior to the flood? They were already dead once they were frozen. What reason is there to assume that huge glaciers would necessarily have melted in the flood?
Ben:
First of all, you’re leaving out one important element of the Jewish claim, which is the fact that modern-day Jews claim to be, and have for thousands of years claimed to be descended from those original witnesses. Is that true of the Mormon claim? Are there people who, when asked, will say “Yeah, my father/grandfather told me that his father/grandfather/ancestor saw that.” Or is it a third-person story of some lost tribe?
If the Mormon claim matches up in that regard as well, I would at least confront my rabbis with the issue and see what they have to say about it, and ask (contrary to DavidB’s ever-cynical opinion) why our claim is, in their opinion, to be accorded greater credence.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Jab asked:
Hacker hunting.
Apparently I missed a few…
How about the fact that the Bible states the ENTIRE Earth was covered in water for one hundred and fifty days (Genesis 7:24)? In 8:13, we’re told that it’s almost a full year before the waters are completely gone. You honestly think that ice would stay frozen that long? Icebergs don’t last that long. I guess you’re assuming that the ice containing a wooly mammoth would have floated in the sea for eleven months without melting. I’m sorry, but this doesn’t make sense at all.
You may think, “Well, the ice pack in the Arctic Ocean never completely melts.” Not exactly. The currents in the Arctic Ocean move that ice around and eventually it floats south to melt. New ice is formed to replace it. Ships that were trapped in the ice pack have been known to voyage hundreds of miles over the Arctic before eventually breaking free. (And usually sinking. The pressure of all that ice breaks the hull apart. But the ice itself keeps the ship afloat until the ice melts and then the ship sinks. There’s a new documentary film entitled South about a turn-of-the-century Antarctic expedition that details the fate of a wooden ship trapped in pack ice.)
So I assume you’re thinking of the following scenario:
-
Mammoth stumbles and falls into water and drowns. Winter comes and ice freezes the mammoth.
-
God makes it rain forty days and nights. In the far north, ice holding the mammoth floats away or else it’s too heavy containing the mammoth to float and it stays put. And somehow does not melt, even though it’s now at the bottom of an ocean.
-
The flood is over, the water recedes and the frozen mammoth somehow manages to go back where other mammoth fossil bones and tusks and footprints have been found. Or else God made all the frozen mammoths go back where they were first frozen, just to make it LOOK LIKE there was no Flood. (If He’ll hide evidence the universe is only 6,000 years old, why wouldn’t He hide evidence of a Flood? Except for the “evidence” in Genesis, of course.)
Other problems with the Flood:
a) Where did the water go? It didn’t go underground. If it was, we’d detect it when there’s a big earthquake by the way seismic waves behave when they travel through the Earth’s interior.
b) How did koalas, kangaroos, platypuses and other land-based animals get to Australia from Ararat? How did the three-toed sloth, an arboreal animal that NEVER leaves the trees get to South America? How did blind, albino cave animals get from caves to the Ark and then back to their respective caves?
>< DARWIN >
__L___L
Hey, did we already cover how the sloths got there to begin with? Wish I could take credit for this, but it’s not mine:
Two sloths had to make the journey from South America. These creatures cannot travel to exceed three rods a day. [1 rod = 16-1/2 feet] At this rate they would make a mile in about a hundred days. They must have gone about six thousand miles to reach the ark. Supposing them to have traveled by a reasonably direct route, in order to complete the journey before Noah hauled in the plank, they must have started several years before the world was created. We must also consider that these sloths had to board themselves on the way, and that most of their time had to be taken up getting food and water. It is exceedingly doubtful whether a sloth could travel six thousand miles and board himself in less than three thousand years.
Next: how much water did that darn flood take, anyway?
Simple- megatherium went to SA and evolved into the three-toed sloth, since both are members of the sloth “kind.” The same explanation can be used for Australian fauna. The problem isn’t with any particular question, since creationists sooner or later get around to answering every popular debunking (except pseudogenes, which oddly enough they can’t create even a remotely comforting explanation for.) The problem is with whether it’s science. Take a look at:
http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
That link has a number of problems with the Flood, some of them quite subtle (how did chalk cliffs form?) Creationism is utterly unable to make viable predictions, because it’s pseudoscience- every time they answer one problem, a new problem arises. Evolution, which is real science, is overwhelmingly vindicated by its predictive power. That’s why my conversations with creationists typically go like this:
“If the Flood happened, then why does the dendrochronological record go back 7,500 years?”
“Well, maybe the weather got really hot right afterward, and that made trees grow extra rings.”
“But if it was so hot, then how did the polar ice caps form?”
“Well, maybe it was cold at the poles and hot everywhere else.”
“And why are the ice caps layered with alternating bands of different oxygen isotopes, appearing to record the climate for the past 200,000 years?”
“Well, there were a lot of storms, and each storm laid down a new layer of ice.”
“Why would storms lay down alternating layers of heavy and light oxygen? And why does the climatological data from the ice caps agree with that from both tree rings and sediment cores?”
“Sediment core analysis looks at the same isotopes as ice core analysis does, and so the storms would throw it off too.”
“But it doesn’t- sediment core analysis is also based on the chemical saturation of plankton fat.”
And so on, and so on.
-Ben
cmkeller posted 02-25-2000 01:46 PM
The claim to descent has no bearing on the claim of validity for the event on which you’ve been queried. Both books (the Torah & the Book of Mormon) were purportedly written by far fewer than a million people.
Now, if you could provide to me the written testimonies of the million or so folks at Sinai who, themselves, say they saw the event then I’ll consider consider the Torah to be on a par with any science textbook. As it is now, what you have is one person (or two) saying that a million people saw the event and an incredibly long chain of hearsay stories purporting that it happened. You do not have a million people saying they, themselves, saw the event.