THE CREATIONISTS WIN THIS ONE

I was led to this wonderful written debate because somebody just started a debate ABOUT this debate at EvC limited to four participants. But the original debate, between Australian creationists and evolutionists, is great stuff, at least the Creationist side is. The Evolutionist side is the usual abstract obfuscations, misrepresentations and ridicule.

FROM THE CREATIONIST INTRODUCTION:

Modern historical geology was built on philosophical assumptions which excluded the biblical notion of a recent global watery catastrophe—by definition, rather than observation. (p. 10)

EXACTLY! By DEFINITION, NOT OBSERVATION. OBSERVATION DOES TURN UP EVIDENCE FOR A GLOBAL FLOOD, BUT YOU DO HAVE TO OBSERVE.

On page 12 the creationists outline my favorite biological argument:

Textbook examples of adaptation by natural selection (first described by the creationist Edward Blyth, pre-Darwin) always involve loss of genetic information. Mosquitoes may adapt to a DDT-containing environment by becoming resistant, because some already have the genes for DDT resistance. But overall the population loses genetic information (any genes not present in the resistant ones are eradicated from the population, since the non-resistant mosquitoes killed by DDT cannot pass on genes).

EXACTLY! EVOLUTION DEFEATS EVOLUTION. They say "genetic information," I say "genetic diversity" or "genetic potential" -- same thing only their term is probably clearer.

Mutations cause several thousand human diseases. Even where a mutation is beneficial (e.g. wingless beetles on windy islands), biological complexity is virtually always destroyed, not increased. (p. 12)

Oh, these guys are good! This essay is SO clear too. I'm tempted to copy out too much of what they say.

This observed downhill trend of heritable changes in living things (mutations, selection, adaptation—even to the extent of speciation17—and extinction) is consistent with the concept of original created gene pools (with high initial variety) being depleted since. To suggest that the informationally downhill ‘micro’ changes one observes (routinely but erroneously used as ‘proofs of evolution’) can accumulate over time to give the required (uphill) changes for microbe-to-man evolution is like a businessman arguing that many small losses will produce a profit, given time. The observed changes do, however, fit a Creation/Fall model well.

SO well said.

5. The age of things The evidence for a ‘young’ earth/universe is, by definition, evidence for biblical creation, because naturalistic evolution, even if possible, would require eons. There is much evidence consistent with a relatively young age of the universe, such as the decay of the earth’s magnetic field, including rapid paleomagnetic reversals; fragile organic molecules in fossils supposedly many millions of years old; too much helium in deep zircons; not enough salt in the sea; carbon-14 in coal and oil supposedly many millions of years old; polystrate fossils23 that extend through strata supposedly representing many millions of years; inter-tonguing of non-sequential geological strata; the small number of supernova remnants; magnetic fields on ‘cold’ planets; and much more (see What about carbon dating?). Elapsed time extending back beyond one’s own lifetime cannot be directly measured, so all arguments for either a long or a short age are necessarily indirect and must depend on the assumptions on which they are inevitably based.

Young-earth arguments make sense of the fact that many fossils show wellpreserved soft parts. This requires rapid deposition and rapid hardening of the encasing sediment. Observations of e.g. multiple geologic strata and canyons forming rapidly under catastrophic conditions in recent times indicate that the entrenched slow-and-gradual, vast-age thinking may well be markedly in error. (p. 14)

The immense complexity of the human brain—its consciousness, creativity and power of abstract reasoning, with capacities vastly beyond that required for sheer survival, is perhaps the most ‘obvious’ evidence for intelligent creation.

We have seen that life is characterized by incredibly complex information-bearing (programmed) systems. No spontaneous physico-chemical process is known which could have generated such programs in the first place, without outside intelligence. And as information is transmitted, it is overwhelmingly observed to degrade, not build up. (p.15)

The most reasonable inference from such observations is that outside intelligence (vastly surpassing humanity’s) was responsible for an immense original store of biological information in the form of created populations of fully functioning organisms. Again, this is powerfully consistent with the Genesis creation account.

I'm just going to post this as is. It's a great statement. You can read ahead to the evolutionist introduction and then the follow-up arguments. I think the creationists blew the evolutionists out of the water throughout but of course that isn't going to be so obvious to the evolutionists.

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And here they go. The opening post at EvC for the debate-about-the-debate is the typical evolutionist litany. Many of the points in the creationist introduction I've appreciated above are dismissed as PRATTs -- "Point Refuted A Thousand Times" -- but of course just because they've come up with something they consider to be a refutation does not mean the point has been refuted, or even slightly dented by their argument, and that's why the same arguments keep getting repeated. Factually and logically the creationist points still stand after the evolutionists have done their worst, and all they are doing in the end is claiming victory without having accomplished victory. But what do you expect from an evolutionist site like EvC?

I considered doing my own answer to the poster's debunkery but decided no, I'll wait to see if a debate actually gets going there.

Why can't those people THINK? Excuse me, but that IS the problem here. Most of his "refutations" on his long list of the creationists' arguments (it's a good list but I'm unable to reproduce it here because of a nightmare of formatting problems) are flat out denial of the OBVIOUS.

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Sat Nov 21. Here's one of the evolutionists wondering if the list can be pared down:

I'd like to suggest that we see if we can pare down the list of items to discuss. We can remove those that we can all agree on (there must be some)...

For removal could we look at those that are marked as PRATTs in the OP? Even one or two of them? Some of those (e.g., salt in the oceans IIRC are even rejected by some major creationist organizations.)

ABE
Sigh, nope, they don't even reject the ocean salt one. Let's see if we can be smarter than that here.

Of COURSE they don't reject the one about ocean salt, IT HASN'T BEEN REFUTED. And why don't YOU sketch out the refutation if you think it has? Good grief. The polystrate trees also haven't been refuted. They CAN'T be refuted. They indisputably falsify the evolutionist interpretation of the strata.

How about removing those from the evolutionist side?
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11/23: So I'm not going to be very interested in this debate, it appears. If they're going to dismiss my favorite irrefutable point (microevolution always loses genetic information) as a PRATT and not even try to produce some refutations for me to laugh at it's not worth my time.

It's painful to be accused of lying, which is a common accusation evolutionists make of creationists. There's no lying involved. Why can't they just get it through their heads that we do not trust their "science," that most of it is imaginary, that what facts they can produce don't undermine our own theories which have a lot more than a few facts going for them, that we do not see their "evidence" as evidence for their theories but as open to interpretation, that in fact they don't HAVE evidence as they think they do, and we are quite legitimately pursuing our own interpretation of the information we have. This level of accusation amounts to a form of violence.

This is from EvC forum, a poster who calls himself Coyote:

I've read a lot of those articles, particularly in the fields of radiocarbon dating and fossil man, two areas with which I am familiar.

I've seen some real whoppers passed off to the willfully ignorant as TRVTH. One prime example:

The relevant evidence clearly shows that Homo sapiens sensu lato is a separate and distinct entity from the other hominids. No overall evolutionary progression is to be found. Adam and Eve, and not the australopiths/habilines, are our actual ancestors. As pointed out by other creationists [e.g., Lubenow9], Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis can best be understood as racial variants of modern man–all descended from Adam and Eve, and most likely arising after the separation of people groups after Babel (Source).

Now I can go into the details if you wish, but among other gems this little paragraph has macroevolution, which creationists deny occurs, happening several hundred times faster than paleontologists propose and in reverse! And then, for some unknown reason, stopping abruptly and all traces of these critters suddenly burrowed down into geological layers tens to hundreds of thousands, or millions, of years too old.

Without knowing more about the specimens they have identified as homo this and that, it seems to me that "racial variant" is usually the best interpretation of any such skeletal remains as they find that really are from human beings, in keeping with CREATIONIST assumptions.

Why after the Flood though? If they're fossilized (it doesn't say) they were most likely pre-Flood.

This kind of thinking is not a "whopper" and evolutionists need to get some basic civility into their arguing style. They interpret everything in terms of their own assumptions and we in terms of ours. Lies have nothing to do with it.

Here's Coyote again in Message 72 of that same thread:

Lies

It does matter to the creationists because as christians we find it important not to lie. To lie is to sin against God which is the opposite of the way that christians are trying to live their lives.

But the web is full of creationist lies; when creationists argue a point of belief (e.g., the "global" flood) and the facts are pointed out to them time after time, but they still come back with the same argument time after time--that can only be called a lie (although possibly it is self-delusion, i.e., lying to one's self).

That's because your "facts" are NOT convincing, and somehow this has to be gotten across better than it has been. You do NOT have proper evidence for the claims you make. YOU are convinced, YOU think it's all sewn up tight. WE DON'T.

About the global flood, your "facts" are NOTHING BUT SPECULATIONS, I've been there and I know that's all they are. You come up with ideas about what would have or could have happened that you say defeats the idea of a worldwide Flood but it's nothing but your own speculation. Meanwhile we DO have facts we can point to and we're not giving them up for a few speculations from you.

I want to check back to this thread to see if he goes into the details he says he can go into. This is necessary if he's to make any sense at all.

Scientists have often expected to find evidence of the Flood in hidden places, at the bottom of deep digs and embodied in isolated bits of buried stuff like this one skeleton, found in 1725 and declared to be a pre-Flood human being, and they made many mistakes of this sort that eventually led to the overall rejection of all ideas about the Flood.

But those piecemeal notions of what the evidence for the Flood should look like are a very strange way to go about it once you recognize that a worldwide flood would have affected EVERYTHING. ALL the fossilized remains everywhere on the planet are the record of pre-Flood life that died in the Flood, ALL the strata of the "Geological Column" were created by the Flood. It's everywhere, there should never be a find that "at long last" demonstrates the Flood. Flood effects are one of the most obvious characteristics of this planet. Satellite photos show huge areas of the planet with ridges and swirls that are characteristic of the effects of water, and overall the planet just LOOKS like it was once drowned. Ponder Google Earth from a good height for a while.

The continents split apart not long after the Flood, probably as a result of volcanic action released in the Flood; the high mountains were formed after the Flood, because of the movement of the tectonic plates that split the continents; and overall the Flood was the cause of devastating destruction. But the animals from the ark spread out to all parts of the Earth before the continents separated, developing endlessly interesting and useful varieties, and what was left of the sea life repopulated the oceans; the trees grew again, and grass and every kind of plant, the high mountains are majestic and beautiful, and we tend to look at the refurbished surface rather than the structure and miss the obvious marks of the Flood.

Allele Frequencies

Here's a discussion of changes in allele frequencies at Wikipedia

Population genetics studies the different "forces" that might lead to changes in the distribution and frequencies of alleles -- in other words, to evolution. Besides selection, these forces include genetic drift, mutation and migration.

In other words, Richard Dawkins' repeated refrain, "Evolution by Natural Selection" isn't current any more, as I'd thought.

Famous model for different types of speciation:




I'll be back to discuss it.

While I'm gone, ponder it. Don't just accept the evolutionist idea of it.




Wikipedia Reference

No, those aren't Transitionals.

(Not yet getting to the topic of the ape and human genomes. I'll get there eventually. Meanwhile:)

On that video that was the topic of the previous post, Kenneth Miller is discussing how they have all kinds of transitional species so the constant complaint that they don't is ridiculous. But they don't have transitionals. What they have is complete creatures, not transitionals or intermediates in the sense the theory needs in order to validate it.

They have something they claim is a whale with feet for instance, Ambulocetus Natans. (However, there's an article at Talk Origins that denies that it's a whale at all, says it's rather some sort of land animal.)

But the question about transitionals is really a question about transitional FEATURES, not whole animals, however nicely they may seem to fit between other types of animals, but features that were passed on (according to the theory) because they conferred some advantage even in their undeveloped condition, and then developed further as they continued to be passed on.

I think always of antlers. Doesn't evolution imply that they would have started as hardly recognizable small bumps on the head, which for some reason were passed on and which then grew over time into some of the very impressive kinds we see on some deer, moose, elk etc.? The problem is that there's no reason to think anything in such vague beginning stages would confer an advantage so there's no reason to think it would be passed on and develop into the full-grown result we see today.

But of course if the idea of incremental acquisition by natural selection IS the theory, then MANY features of all creatures SHOULD be found in various stages of vague underdevelopment by the bazillions, shouldn't they? Some of no value -- or harmful effect either -- to be eventually discarded, some to be passed on and developed further? In fact ALL creatures should ALL be "transitional," and all appear "unfinished" in some sense or other, shouldn't they? Should there ever BE a clearcut Species at all? Each stage is supposed to be functional, however, MUST be functional if it's to be passed on or selected, isn't that the rule? In reality how is that going to happen?

I think this idea of incremental stages to completed function describes the missing transitionals creationists are always referring to, a fact that keeps getting lost as evolutionists respond with a completely different idea of what a transitional is that confuses things.

That is, there shouldn't be a whale and a whale with feet, there should be thousands of whale-type skeletons with all sorts of half-developed appendages, perhaps some tending to adaptations for land, some for water, but some utterly unrelated to either -- this last category is necessary if we are really to take seriously the idea that evolution is blind and goal-less and that mutations come up with experiments that natural selection may potentiate or completely ignore as it were. There should be things perhaps that look like antennae in the bud, or antlers even -- on a whale? why not if evolution is blind? -- or budding wings or whatnot, it seems to me, in keeping with the expectations that evolution theory raises as it is often stated.

ALL creatures should be found in similar stages of experimentation, with many features in various stages of change all at once.

Actually, isn't the unlikelihood of there being such transitional features -- not to mention the observed nonexistence of them -- the reason some have postulated great leaps in evolution -- "punctuated equilibrium" -- as opposed to incremental development? But that defies explanation on any known rule of genetic transmission, besides which, why should neat adaptations suddenly appear by great leaps either, if evolution is blind?

In spite of themselves, evolutionists DO think teleologically about how evolution works, that is, they assume change is all tending toward a particular goal that they have in mind even if they aren't aware of it. Then they'll rear up when you point this out and inform you that no, it doesn't have any goals at all and deny their own tendency to think as if it does.

Go back and look at the ring species example. There you have a series of subspecies that are completely whole and functioning creatures in themselves -- there's nothing transitional about any of the designs, no features that suggest something in the process of development. They form a series so that each type may be intermediate between those before and after in appearance but not intermediate in the sense of there being anything unfinished about any of them. In fact they aren't even necessarily intermediate in appearance, they are independent designs unto themselves.

Clearly all variations are already present, are BUILT INTO the genome from the beginning, they do NOT appear by experimentation or mutation. The rules of genetics allow for wonderful variations, they do not allow for transitionals, AND, of course, I repeat for the hundred-umpteenth time, selection processes ALWAYS reduce genetic diversity even as they produce new subspecies, and that means the very processes evolution supposedly depends on lead to a dead end for evolution.

Evolution defeats evolution.

Kenneth Miller, Intelligent Design, Constitution Twisting and then maybe some science Part 1.

Kenneth Miller on the Collapse of Intelligent Design

He's showing [24:00] how the Kansas Board of Education rejected naturalistic definitions of science. Obviously they want to preserve the supernatural component. But it seems to me they are misjudging the problem here and making their own situation harder. The problem with evolution is that it doesn't STICK to naturalistic assumptions and methods, although it happily embraces the concept as if it applied to evolution theory. But that's an illusion. Evolution theory relies on imaginative speculative homological/analogical and other nonscientific methods which it mistakes for evidence. We should ALL stick to the naturalistic ground rules and we should insist on identifying every deviation from them, because evolution doesn't hold up on that basis. We should keep hammering away at this fact. So the school board's attacking naturalism unfortunately undercuts their own strength and adds credence to the illusion that evolution is supported by tons of evidence from naturalistic science.

By the way, I'm not a follower of Intelligent Design, I'm a Biblical Creationist who takes Genesis literally, but ID's proposition that design implies a designer is indisputably true, it seems to me, axiomatic, and there's nothing about that definition that goes outside naturalistic assumptions: Look at nature, recognize design, conclude it must have a designer. We don't have to get into the nature OF the designer at that point. Likewise I appreciate their formulation of Irreducible Complexity as evidence against incremental evolution of complex living systems such as the flagellum-propelled bacterium. Evolutionists of course knock themselves out answering these claims and assert with a great deal of heat and elaborate cogitation how it's wrong wrong wrong and wrong again, but WATCH HOW THEY DO IT, watch carefully, learn not to take their reasoning as uncritically as people do. It's all smoke and mirrors. It's all speculative hypothetical imaginative reasoning about how it COULDAMAYBEPOSSIBLY happened by natural selection, with very little that even comes close to being ACTUAL EVIDENCE.

But Miller's next topic is what I want to think about now.

However, I am still reeling from Miller's reminder that the verdict in Kansas was that Intelligent Design is "Unconstitutional." This is nuts but I'm going to have to take up the political side of all this at some other time. Well, maybe I should give a hint here:

I'm not for creationists trying to change the public schools, because it's a huge hassle that only makes for hostility between separate parts of the community and this is not going to go away as long as evolution is as entrenched as it is. I do believe that IDers and creationists are acting on their rights under the First Amendment and that these very rights are denied by such a verdict as came down against ID in Kansas, which was a classic case of government prohibiting the free exercise of religion which the First Amendment specifically disallows, and interfering with their citizen rights to have a say in their community. Citizen concerns unconstitutional indeed! It's the citizens the Bill of Rights were meant to protect from government but they're knocking themselves out these days protecting government from the citizens, things are that upside down.

BUT this particular conflict has many tentacles, and one of them is the whole question of whether we should have public education in the first place. There's some good thinking on this going back to the 19th century I should dig up whenever I get around to this discussion, but the gist is that you can't have uniform education for both believers and unbelievers -- the unbelievers will always win and the right of believing parents to instruct their own children will be taken out of their hands. A scriptural expression of this is the command not to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers (I Cor. 6:14).

So what we need is for Christians to remove their children completely from the public schools and find other methods of education. This should be Number One Priority, with committed energetic focus on inventing ways this can be done with minimal problems, and no compromising. Leave the public schools to the evolutionists and take pains to give Christian children a much higher level of education than the public schools can give anyway. Christianity was the inspiration for universal education in the first place, so we need to get back to that concept. Ultimately the unbelievers should benefit from whatever solutions we come up with too.

Anyway, NOW I want to get to Kenneth Miller's next topic, how the number of chromosomes in the ape and human genomes shows we're related.

Next post.