Blowing up ID’iot creationism.

[scruffy]

It's clear that he's going to try to rationalize everything away, trying so hard to deny truth.

"Deny truth". lmao

No, I'm simply exposing your false statement.

It's actually very sad. Some atheists try so hard to deny truth... I think it really comes down to some people simply not wanting to be accountable for their actions, their words, their life, etc. They want to continue being their own god. I get it. I was there once, myself.

Hilarious.

Still waiting for some absolute truth.

 

[DukeU]

But what happens if I heat it to 100 degrees C and let it evaporate into the sky?

It will rain.

How about if I freeze it down to 3 degrees K, is it still wet?

It becomes ice.


Are you absolutely sure you went to school and have the ability to think and reason?

 

[scruffy]

Claiming to be wise, they became fools

Romans 1:22


^ that scripture has your name all over it.

Let's cut to the chase.

Because you won't be able to show any absolute truth.

Here's the lesson:

I want you to be be HONEST, and say this simple thing:

"It's a matter of faith".

It's not truth, it's not science, it's just faith.

I'll tell you straight up, my belief in God is a matter of faith. Anything else, would be exceeding my scope.

My faith is personal, it doesn't matter to anyone but me. And, I'll tell you that straight up. "If" you ask. Which you didn't. You suggested I was an atheist, which is not the case. I'm Christian. My wife is Buddhist. We don't argue, we find common ground.

 

[scruffy]

It will rain.

Only if there's a whole lot of it. Otherwise it'll become a gas and dissipate.

It becomes ice.

Is ice wet? At that temperature? I don't think so. It's hard as a rock. It doesn't even crack. If you take it out and put it in a tray in the room it kind of sublimes, bypasses the water stage and goes straight to gas.

Are you absolutely sure you went to school and have the ability to think and reason?

You've never seen ice sublime? That's high school chemistry, ain't it?

 

[DukeU]

Only if there's a whole lot of it. Otherwise it'll become a gas and dissipate.

Another truth statement?

SMH.

Is ice wet? At that temperature? I don't think so. It's hard as a rock. It doesn't even crack. If you take it out and put it in a tray in the room it kind of sublimes, bypasses the water stage and goes straight to gas.

Like I said then.

You've never seen ice sublime? That's high school chemistry, ain't it?

Dry ice?

 

[BackAgain]

Creationism, although false, is interesting to read.

You don’t know that it’s false.

You may believe that it isn’t logical or that it’s unprovable.

Hell; you might even be right. But you certainly don’t “know” it.

Scientists also largely believe that everything that exists came into being due to a big bang. But most scientists tend to concede that they don’t “know” it. For, among other things, where did that little speck that explosively bloomed into the Big Bang come from?

 

[scruffy]

Another truth statement?

Science. Independently observable and repeatable.

The word you're looking for.is CONFIDENCE.

Not "truth".

Like I said then.

Dry ice?

I want Christians to have a good name.

Because if you have a bad name, it gives me one too.

Faith is faith. Stand up for your faith. Don't claim it's science, because it's not.

There's nothing wrong with faith, is there?

 

[DukeU]

Science. Independently observable and repeatable.

The word you're looking for.is CONFIDENCE.

Not "truth".

How do you observe billions of years?

I agree it's not truth though.

Faith is faith. Stand up for your faith. Don't claim it's science, because it's not.

There's nothing wrong with faith, is there?

I agree.

You should do the same, stop hiding your faith behind the "science" lie.

Science is repeatable and observable as you stated.

 

[scruffy]

How do you observe billions of years?

Good question. Probably "we don't" is the short answer. We can only see the results, not the path it took. Unless the path leaves landmarks, which it sometimes does.

I agree it's not truth though.

Excellent. We're making progress.

I agree.

You should do the same, stop hiding your faith behind the "science" lie.

lol

"Confidence".

In logic (Bayesian) there is something called "the posterior", which basically measures how much new information you get from each successive observation. It's related to the confidence in your proposition.

So for instance, if we're talking about evolution and I'm looking at fossils, I probably don't get a whole lot of confidence if I see 5 or 10 or even 100.

But if I then discover a molecular mechanism that explains the fossil results, my confidence goes way up.

Science is repeatable and observable as you stated.

Yeah - well - some would argue that faith is that way too. But I've reached the conclusion that it's personal. Because it doesn't work for "everyone", "all the time". However in the group it does work for, it seems worthy of confidence.

 

[DukeU]

Unless the path leaves landmarks, which it sometimes does.

It doesn't leave time stamps with those paths and landmarks.

 

[scruffy]

It doesn't leave time stamps with those paths and landmarks.

True. Sometimes we get lucky and we can do some C-14 or something. Once in a great while we get "really" lucky and find a few strands of DNA. Mostly though, by the time we find the bones the kids have trampled on them and the winos have peed on them and time has taken its course. The computers help. Before computers, reconstructing a skeleton took half a lifetime. Now it's only a year or two.

In any case, evolution is definitely not a linear process. There were at least 5 gigantic extinction events, and several times when the Earth's temperature climbed to 140 degrees. Most of the animals we see today (dogs, cats) are only about 50 million years old. There was an extinction event just before that, called Cretaceous, at about 65 million years. And, the interesting thing about that is what it did to the Hox genes.

The Hox genes give body parts their shape, and their position. We know a lot about them from frogs, which are about 250 million years or so. Which would be around the time of the previous extinction event, the Triassic, when the earth was pretty warm. The interesting thing about the Hox genes is they're all together in the genome, they're all right next to each other. So we "believe" they probably evolved all at once.

If we deliberately tweak the Hox gene that codes for the head region of a frog, we can make it grow arms where it's eyes are supposed to be. They're full arms, with webbed fingers and everything. So this one single gene is directing a bunch of other genes, it's a "commander" that tells the others where and when to express themselves.

And it "makes sense", that the regular head to toe pattern of Hox genes didn't arise instantly, there must have been variations of it. But any frog with no eyes and arms instead, would have a huge disadvantage and would probably have been eaten by dinosaurs or some such thing. Which might explain why we don't find any such fossils.

The thing is, the engineering is a lot more interesting than the history. There's a ton of research right now on "homeotic transformations" where one body part looks like another. It works for internal organs too, not just limbs. Like, Hox-3.3 mice have an extra pair of ribs in the lumbar area, Hox-4 mice have ribs on their 7th cervical vertebrae and so on. Here's an example of a double homeotic transformation:

Homeotic transformations and limb defects in Hox A11 mutant mice - PubMed

Hox A11 is one of the expanded set of vertebrate homeo box (Hox) genes with similarities to the Drosophila homeotic gene, Abdominal-B (Abd-B). These Abd-B-type Hox genes have been shown to be expressed in the most caudal regions of the developing vertebrate embryo and in overlapping domains...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

This is all "genetic engineering", not necessarily evolution. But it shows us how new body plans might have developed, from mutations in a single gene. Which is something we didn't know until recently. It seems that every extinction event led to the subsequent appearance of a bunch of new species, and we really have no idea how or why at this point. But at least we know which parts of the genome were new and related to the visible genetic differences.

 

[scruffy]

Here's a more dramatic example of a homeotic frog.

Homeosis is responsible for the loss of a spinal segment between monkeys and humans, which lets us walk upright. We lost the last lumbar vertebrae and the tail.

Homeotic change in segment identity derives the human vertebral formula from a chimpanzee-like one - PubMed

The only proposed ancestral vertebral configuration for the last common ancestor of hominins and panins that is consistent with our results is the modal formula demonstrated by chimpanzees and bonobos (7 cervical-13 thoracic-4 lumbar-6 sacral-3 coccygeal). Hox gene expression boundaries suggest...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov