Your number one just gave away the illogical progressions possible in your mind which led to your number two.
I think you misspelled pathetic.
The author gives Jesus blue eyes and hair of “golden or chestnut.” While it is possible, what is the purpose of giving him features more in common with Northern Europe than the Levant?
The idiot author places Bethlehem in “Israel.” Ignoring the point that there was no entity “Israel” at that period in history, Bethlehem was never in any land known as Israel until 1948 C.E., as it is actually South of Jerusalem while the historical Israel (destroyed in 721 B.C.E.) was considerably North of Jerusalem.
The twit gives a birth date of “year 0” when no culture calls that year zero. The current Gregorian calendar (and the Julian calendar from which it sprang) both roll from December 31, 1 B.C.E. to January 1, 1 C.E. with no year zero between them. Neither the Romans nor the Jews had a zero in their mathematics and even the most recalcitrant Biblical literalist knows that the birth of Jesus is usually calculated to be four to six years earlier than where year zero would appear, and the Romans would have called it 753 A.U.B. (or some year of the reign of Augustus, although the powers of Augustus were accumulated over several years, so a single date would have been difficult).
And what would be the point of notifying the FBI regarding a person who had broken no Federal U.S. laws?
The idea of Jesus being a rabblerouser who would scare the authorities is fetching, but if one wishes to make a point, it detracts from the point to fill one’s document with ridiculous errors.
srmclauren, it is common courtesy on these boards to seriouslly respond to what people say: at length, and explaining your responses. Especially for a guest, snarky comebacks instead of reasoned, detailed arguments, are probably not a good way to introduce yourself. Why not pick a particular topic about evolutionary theory that you think it is particularly unbelievable to you, or pick one of our responses, and really explain your position and why you think ours is so unconvincing. Then we could have a real discussion, instead of just spending time trying to explain ourselves and getting back a bunch of cryptic one-liners.
No. There was no connection between my first point and my second. they are both flat (and unrelated) statements of fact.
I’m starting think you aren’t really very interested in debating, but it would have been nice if you’d told us that in the first place. You asked some questions and we answered them. You had some erroneous assumptions and we corrected them. If you aren’t willing to either acknowledge those corrections or rebut them, then what are you doing here?
Why do you think evolution is the result of illogical progressions? Evolution has made many borne out predictions. The direct evidence of speciation has been pointed out to you several times. Your claim that only microevolution has been observed has been proven false. Your refusal to read the evidence, or to read it and refuse to evaluate it is not an argument.
As Apos correctly noted, we know what evolution claims and does not claim. Creationists often argue against bullshit strawman definitions of evolution that lying Creationist writers claim to be what evolution says. The “only microevolution has been observed” argument is one of them. So is the “why haven’t we see cats turn into dogs” argument.
My request was for someone objecting to the theory of evolution to state clearly what he thinks it says. Want to try?
BTW, if Noah had a limited number of “kinds” for them to evolve into the number of species we see today would require a hyperevolution that is quite impossible based on our understanding. Dog breeds (only one species) were intelligently designed, as it were, through artificial human selection. Wild species would have changed much more slowly. So, you have evolution wrong on both ends.
I argee that new types of animals have been produced by bringing together two different animals that have never bred before. The easiest example I can think of is a mule. And I’m sure this happened before man thought of breeding them for some purpose. What I have never seen documented is the observation of two totally different species becoming something that doesn’t even resemble either, like fish or reptiles becoming birds or mammals. This is what takes a giant leap of faith. But if you throw in the factor of millions of years (which have never been observed either) you can make up any fairy tale you want from the evidence.
I am trying to help you make the connection between 1 and 2. I believe you meant No. 1 as related to my statement that evolution was designed/created by man.
It’s just that saying, “So was religion.” you are admitting that evolution was created/designed by man. How can I accept your answers and corrections if they are not logical or provable. What I’m doing here is trying to get you to see that, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding.” Psalm 111:10 I am not claiming to be better than you guys, it’s just that we are approaching these things from a totally different perspective. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.” Proverbs 1:7 Read Psalm 53:1 and see if you fit into that category. Hopefully not.
Proverbs 9:10 says again, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” According to Webster, I am cynical, but not a cynic. We have just chosen different things to be skeptical of. So please don’t give me any more of your number two. It just won’t fly. There is no observable evidence of a transitional form. I don’t know if you have read the whole thread, but how much more rebuttal do you need than the challenge to show me one “transitional” form. Darwin himself said that without those “missing” links, his theory would not be tenable.
My point has been that your understanding is incomplete. So is mine. (See the previous responses to Diogenes the Cynic.) But I do have a shred with which to begin.
There is not a shred for (forgive the repetition for the sake of my simplemindedness) reptiles and fish turning into birds and mammals. You can have faith in your long ago and far away, but you can’t prove it by solid evidence. Show me the true transitional forms. They will have to show a slow process of changing from one species to another. All I have seen are giant leaps. Speciation, which scientists have observed, produces a new species that looks a lot like the other two that came together as a result of geographic, physiological, anatomical or behavioral factors that prevented previously interbreeding populations from breeding with each other. What they haven’t observed and are trying to fabricate from the fossil record is what Darwin himself said his theory would be untenable without.
As for hyperevolution, it was rejected by my spell checker. If you weren’t there, how do you know what happened? All you can do is put your faith in they guys who think they are putting it all together. I just choose to have faith in the Creator who put it all together. I know, I’m just like talking to a wall. How many walls are there in this thread?
What you are talking about is known as hybridiaztion. However, hybridization only works because the ancestors of two different species were once the same species, and this unity was not too long ago for their lines to have diverged so much that they are completely incompatible.
That’s because that’s not how evolution works. Modern fish never turn into modern mammals or birds. The descendants of a species always stick pretty close to the basics of that species and diversify from there: but they never become like some other form of life. They are always more like their ancestors than they are like the cousins of those ancestors.
The idea that something has to be physical observed to be proven certain is simply false. It’s a creationist’s defense, but its absurd, and even they do not really believe it or its implications.
The fact that both the fossil record and the comparison of the genetics of all living things both indepedently imply an ancestry, and that both of these indepedently derived ancestries match each other in fine detail AND that this ancestry fits quite precisely with what we know of geographical and geological constraints is thunderously telling. If you don’t understand why, then you don’t understand enough about how evidence works in science.
Yes, I thnk we all knew that from the start. You have a pre-concieved belief system which has total disdain for things like logic and evidence. Yet, for some reason, you want to both keep to that belief system, but at the same time argue evidence and science with us. I would suggest that this is a confused attitude. If you wish to deny evidence and stick to faith in a particular dogma, then do so, and no one will bother you for it. Just don’t also pretend that your views are good science or that good science is bad science just because it happens to conflict with your beliefs. That’s where you get into trouble, and you start making all sorts of false statements that demonstrate not only ignorance, but a real lack of interest in whether or not your claims are ignorant or not.
I am willing to bet that you do not know what a transitional form is, and could not recognize it if you saw one. There are countless transitional forms.
Tiktaalik is transtional, just to pick and example of one that’s been in the news lately.
Science is not like the Bible. It doesn’t rest on any one person’s opinion, not even one as historically important as Darwin’s. Of course, I’d really like to see a citation for this claim about what Darwin said, because Darwin didn’t believe that the fossil record would be much help at all: in his day, no one ever expected that we’d actually find the amount of fossisls that we have. In his work, he mostly only uses fossils to show that there are many many lines of life that are extinct and that they are quite different from the life on the planet today.
Likewise, modern day biology doesn’t really even consider “missing links” to be an informative term. There is no search for “missing links” in the sense that anyone doubts the basic general taxomical ancestries, and no need to find any to establish them, especially now that we have genetics. And that’s just relevant to finding the specific ancestries: doing so is not necessary for evolution to be well established. If fossilization were impossible and never happened, it might have taken us longer to realize that evolution had taken place, but we would still be able to figure it out and demonstrate it everyone’s satisfaction.
Just for anyone without a Bible to hand, this is what srmclauren is suggesting we are;
Psalm 53: 1 - “The fool says in his heart, “there is no God.” They are corrupt, and their ways are vile; there is no one who does good.”
Might I suggest that, this being an insult, srmclauren be warned? I don’t think he should get away with it merely by using the Bible as his medium to insult.
You can claim this, but it only undermines the fact that you a) do not understand how evolution is claimed to work, and b) don’t know much about the evidence or how it is used.
Would you like me to explain? I’d be happy to do so, if you want.
Can you make up your mind? First you chide us for not having evidence, but later you imply that we can’t have evidence because to you, it involves being there. Which is it? Can we do it by evidence, or must we have a time machine?
How can one form show a process? That’s not what a transitional form is, and the fossil record does not preserve every single creature that ever lived. Luckily, it doesn’t need to.
What other two? Speciation happens to populations: entire breeding populations. Two species that can interbreed is called hybridization, which is a special case, but not really the general case that’s important to understand.
And, though I know you aren’t going to get this right away: speciaton ALWAYS produces something that looks “a lot” like its parent species. In fact, generally all modern species belong to the same exact taxonomic groups that all of their ancestors belonged to. That you can complain that fruit flies only speciate into fruit flies is just a sign that you don’t understand how it works. One could just as easily complain that mammals only speciate into mammals, or eukaryotes only speciate into eukaryotes.
There is nothing fabricated about the fossil record. It is consistent with evolutionary change in virtually every respect. The fact that it doesn’t preserve every animal that ever lived just makes it consistent with everything we know about how rare and happenstance fossilization is.
If you don’t believe that we can ever conclude anything without directly observing it with your eyeballs, then do you think it’s just sheer coincidence that Hawaii’s more westward islands have things that look like volcanoes on them, since no one was around to see them as active volcanoes?
Nope: we look at the evidence and judge its quality.
The problem still is that you are debating under false premises. You have a faith belief that is immune to evidence, and yet you still want to pretend to argue about what evidence shows. Except that, since you could care less what it shows, you are incredibly sloppy about how you go about approaching it.
Observing the life cycles of amphibians (tadpole to frog) is something tangable to think about, Srnclaren.
Er, what? Why?
As Apos said, you’re confusing speciation with hybridization.
Reptiles, birds and mammals are not species, they are classes of species (actually classes of families of genera of species). Enough speciation leads to a divergence from a genus then a family then a class but that doesn’t mean that one entire class (or even one entire species) will ever magically transform into another. That’s a gross oversimplification of the process. However we do know that some classes are descended from other classes (birds from reptiles, for instance) and that other classes are commonly descended from something else. This is not taken on faith but is an unavoidable conclusion from empirical evidence.
Clearly, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny! 
It’s worth noting that biologists don’t really use terms like repitles as anything other than a glurge for popular readers, and this still causes no end of confusion. There is no taxonomic group which just contains “reptiles,” all reptiles and only reptiles. If there was such a class, then birds and mammals would have to be called reptiles as well.
No. I shouldn’t have said “so is…” I was being flippant. As I tried to make clear in my second point of that post, evolution was not* created by humans, it was observed by them.
But they are provable.
This kind of thing is meaningless to me and has nothing to do with the discussion. Quoting the Bible is not a substantive response to the evidence. This is not a religious debate and evolutionary theory (contrary to the beliefs of many on either side of the theistic question) has nothing to say about the existence of God.
I don’t know why Creationists keep perpetuation this myth. First, the word “transitional” in itself is a bit of a misnomer. In a manner of speaking all fossils (and all living species) are “transitional” in that evolution is never static. No species is ever “finished.” Evolutionary pressures and adapations are always in motion.
Haviing said that, there are lots and lots of fossils showing transitions between species, genera, families and orders. Knock yourself out.
The fossil record is not complete and is not expected to be. Fossilization is a flukey process which requires certain conditions to occur. We are never going to have fossils for every single generation of every single evolutionary pathway (which means that no matter how many “gaps” we close in the fossil record, some creations will always just yell out, “but what goes in between THOSE steps?” This is coomonly called the “God of the gaps” argument).
Fortunately, evolution can be proven without a single fossil. It’s just a bonus that we have any at all.
Of course my understanding is incomplete. I’m not a biologist, only married to one, and no one know yet, for instance, just how many levels of indirection there are between DNA and protein synthesis - since it seems that there are unexpected intermediate steps. Not surprising since DNA got understood just over 50 years ago and the human genome got decoded only a few years ago.
But my understanding is a lot better than yours. Speciation does NOT happen when two unrelated animals mate. Mules are possible since horses and donkeys are still in the process of diverging. Speciation happens when a population changes enough so that its members can no longer breed with the parent population - and it is sometimes not a clearcut thing, as the horse/donkey example shows.
Never seen the feathered dinosaurs? The intermediate form of the whale? Are you familiar with the great similarities between bird and dinosaur anatomies?
Do you think for some reason that evolution says a snake will suddenly sprout wings?
A ton of intermediate forms have been discovered (and all are intermediate forms or dead ends.) Fish with legs, for instance. Elephant seals spend all their time in the water, except when they mate, and then they are incapable of eating on the land. Great design, that. It makes sense if they are on their way to becoming totally aquatic, and someday, if they make it, will learn how to breed and give birth in the ocean - like the whales. Of course there is no direction here, they may learn to eat on land, or may go extinct. But they are a perfect example of a potential intermediate form.
As I said above, this is a completely ignorant definition of speciation. And of course the spin off species looks very similar, since change is slow.
Darwin, ever cautious, did say that much was missing from the fossil record 150 years ago. Happily, a lot of fossils have been found since then, and they all support his theory. I trust you are not accusing archeologists of making up things - that would be a very slimy thing to do.
Hey, you’re the one claiming that a few species on the ark 4,000 years ago became lots more species very shortly later. Plus, no one needs faith in evolution. We got DNA, we got fossils, we got lab experiments. You got nothing except a bunch of Bible thumpers wailing “don’t confuse me with the facts! I got my myths!” Pretty poor company.
Have you ever read a real book on evolution, or are you going with tracts by creationist liars. You don’t seem to have a clue as to what speciation really is, just to start.
The usual reply to this verse is
“the wise man proclaims it aloud.”
One more thing to ask our friend - did he personally see the Bible being written under inspiration? Did he see the creation? Did he see Adam and Eve?
While no one has seen a dinosaur, we’ve got bones, skin, and eggs. What do you have? Nuttin’.