Posted on 04/29/2013 10:55:17 AM PDT by imardmd1
This book describes Dr. Martin's personal journey from an evolution-trained scientist to a Bible-believing creationist. Dr. Martin examines many of the claims and theories of prominent evolutionists, comparing their often incredible, inconsistent, pseudo-scientific explanations of origins to the clear and simple description of the Creation as depicted in the Bible.
The result is the realization that evolution, just like creation, is in fact a faith system - in other words, it takes just as much faith, perhaps more, to believe in the Darwinist theory of evolution as it does to take as simple, profound truth the Bible's clear explanation of a world and a universe brought into existence by the mere thought process of Almighty God.
An additional treat in this book is a series of Marvels of God's Creation, animals whose incredibly complex design completely defies the ability of evolutionists to come up with any explanation for how the creature could have evolved to its present state.
This book is extensively footnoted and is suitable for a textbook in creation science. It gives all the glory to God for His magnificent creation and provides excellent topics for discussion and engagement of non-believers in debate on the world's origin, which can be used by the Holy Spirit to bring an evolutionist to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.
"Did you look at the slides? There were actual blood vessels w blood inside. Here’s a quote:"Yes, I read the site you gave, and the original articles describing the finds.
"Does that really sound like a 65 million yo specimen to you?"It depends what you're comparing it to. If mammoth CARCASSES are found with which one could hold a mammoth BBQ, that are tens of thousands of years old - then how old do these massive fossilized bones with microscopic protein bits protected deep inside them appear to be?
“I had not read about the Mt. St. Helens dating fiasco, but I read about a similar one. They took a sample from one of those ancient pines, I think located in CA. By tree-ring data they knew its exact age, but then they had it carbon dated. The 5,000 yo tree was dated as being between 100,000 & a million years old. Don’t hear much about that little experiment either, do you?”
It’s not possible to get a radiocarbon date of over 100k years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating
Radiocarbon dating (or simply carbon dating) is a technique that uses the decay of carbon-14 (14C) to estimate the age of organic materials, such as wood and leather, up to about 58,000 to 62,000 years
“Amazing what a well kept secret this T-Rex red-blood cell/soft-tissue discovery is, isn’t it? I wonder how many people in the whole world know about it.”
—I can’t tell if that comment was meant to be sarcastic or not.
It’s easily one of the most publicized and talked about science stories of the past 20 years.
“As one poster originally said, if such a find were genuine, it wd make for a Nobel Prize.”
—A Nobel prize in what?
In other words, "God used evolution", right? Two problems... One, God does not use broken tools and, two, as Clint Eastwood so eloquently noted ("The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly"), "God hates idiots too", meaning that there no possibility of God being on the side of an evolutionite.
>>>Why can’t evolution be part of God?
Because the idea of an intelligent designer — God — makes sense, and plausibly explains mysterious phenomenon like the linguistic code nature of DNA; the idea of small incremental changes from random causes over long periods of time — Darwinian evolution — makes no sense, and requires highly implausible scenarios to explain these same phenomena.
>>>I find it amazing that one cannot be a person of faith AND an adherent of evolution.
On the contrary, Darwinian evolution itself is a kind of religion — the 20th century’s version of a purely materialistic creation myth — and actually requires LOTS of faith.
In other words, he agrees with me.
Nothing about airplanes in the Bible, but I have used them. Lack of evidence is not evidence.
Nothing about airplanes in the Bible, but I have used them. Lack of evidence is not evidence.
Your post said nothing on topic. Actually, it said nothing vaguely cogent to the discussion.
The Bible is quite negative about some things, but nothing about evolution. You may think it is junk science, but I have a sneaking suspicion that you are not God, so your opinion on the topic is merely your opinion. It happens to differ from mine.
I am at least smart enough to know that I cannot know what God thinks about topics he has not spoken of. By the way, to alleviate any further confusion, the screenwriters in Clint’s flicks are not the authors of the Bible.
The Church and most of its adherents used to express the exact same sentiments about planetary matters. Some people who have faith are afraid of science. In the past, that attitude has been counter-productive, to put it mildly.
It is reasonable to disagree on these matters. It is asinine to be certain in these matters, especially for a person of faith.
Did you know that a feather and lead ball will fall at the same rate in a vacuum?
I suppose you are referring to Copernicus and Galileo whose chief opponents were in the scientific community of their day. The Church’s major mistake was to support the “consensus†of that community in apparent support of poetic scripture, not historic scripture. Galileo did not have proof and that was the objection to him teaching his theory as fact.
The historical distortions of the Church’s role in science are nothing more than secular myths to discredit and suppress any interpretation of evidence that may suggest the existence of God. People of faith are not afraid of science but have a healthy skepticism when beliefs pose as science. It was the Church that kept science alive during the Dark Ages and was certainly not counterproductive. If the Church erred, it was generally in support of the scientific consensus of the day, not very different than we see today with believers in evolution and global warming for example.
While I agree with you that it is reasonable to disagree, that does not extend to an agreement that I must believe subjective interpretations of observations to comply with a secular worldview.
But in your blighted calculus, "Christian Americans" are free to do the same to fellow citizens with whom they disagree.
Sorry, but Homey don't buy your line of thought.
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a system for pivoting flight feathers so that they open on up strokes and close on down strokes, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through lungs and a high efficiency heart, a specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters, a beak (since you won't have hands any more...) etc. etc. etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening at once (which is what you'd need), best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. For the pieces of being a flying bird to evolve piecemeal would be much harder. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now:
OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
Maybe, but they certinly nailed the thing about God hating idiots dead to rights. Stupidity is the one crime/sin in the universe which is punished the most unfailingly, and you might view the 200,000,000+ dead bodies lying around from all the ideology and grief (and the two world wars) derived from belief in evolution as punishment for such stupidity.
Yes he does.
Examine the thread, as spaced out as you appear, you should be able to do that.
Taliban is your word, no one has called you taliban on this thread, although you don’t seem to be a Christian yourself, it is only you attacking Christians as being Muslims and taliban who we are at war with.
As long as you refuse to learn to read, then nothing I write can possibly educate you.
I’m done.
>>>The Church and most of its adherents used to express the exact same sentiments about planetary matters.
Historically, that’s incorrect. The people who most blocked the progress of the modern scientific method (hypothesis + experimentation + revision of hypothesis) were the Aristotelians — the hardcore geocentrists — who dominated academia, not the Church. The Church simply sided with what the academics assured them must be the truth about planetary matters.
The phrase “planetary matters” is pretty vague. The fact is, there are still “planetary matters” that cannot be explained without reference to concepts such as “design”, “goal”, and “purpose.”
For example, that stars produce carbon — the essential chemical building block for life — by a double nuclear resonance process whose probability of occurring is close to zero, proved to an atheist astrophysicist (Sir Fred Hoyle, who discovered the process) that stars are intelligently designed objects. Hoyle eventually asserted that the entire structure of the universe appears to have been “deliberately monkeyed with” by a “super-intellect.”
Isaac Newton believed that almost everything about “planetary matters” had to be explained by reference to a designing intelligence, including universal gravitation.
Regarding biochemistry: Current research from the ENCODE project has shown that almost all DNA is functional (even though most of it has nothing to directly with coding for amino acids and protein synthesis), and statements from ENCODE researchers claim that they expect to find 100% of DNA to be functional, meaning the evolutionary hypothesis of “junk DNA” has to be thrown out. Additionally, a company called Agilent has successfully used the nucleotide sequences on DNA to represent, in the form of code, things other than amino acids — such as pixels to recreate JPEG images, or text to recreate the sonnets of Shakespeare. “DNA data storage” proves beyond any doubt that the molecule itself is simply the molecular equivalent of a hard-drive + operating system.
Hard-drives and operating systems, whether microscopic or macroscopic, do not appear in nature from incremental processes involving random changes over long periods of time. What happens over long periods of time is that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics always increases the entropy of a system: vinyl records become MORE scratched, not less; sturdy brick walls turn to rubble (piles of rubble never turn into sturdy brick walls by themselves); and chemicals always reach “equilibrium”, which is the opposite of what’s needed for life to occur.
>>>Some people who have faith are afraid of science. In the past, that attitude has been counter-productive, to put it mildly.
Ever since Karl Popper, we’ve been aware that science itself is founded on metaphysical assumptions about the universe that are held on the basis of pure faith; the assumptions themselves can never be scientifically proven.
Darwinian evolution is simply a creation myth in which matter, energy, randomness, long periods of time, and a mysterious “ratcheting-up” process called Natural Selection, miraculously defy the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and the laws of probability. That’s why evolution has never been observed and never will be.
But, of course, it’s generally pointless to argue with someone else’s faith.
Why don’t you educate us to any other post on this thread attacking people as “taliban” besides yours.
We are at war with Muslims who are taliban, a war fought overwhelmingly by Christians from Christian America, so you choose to attack Christian American conservatives on freerepublic, as “taliban”.
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