Noah's Ark

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

I hardly have a wealth of info. Nature does. It's this abundance of natural evidence, and your resistance to it, that makes your thinking so seriously flawed. In all the dialogue I've had with you, you've made no real effort to understand it.


You see it every day. You just ignore it.


Oh really? So now you pretend to know something about all animals? One of the earliest creatures is the cyanobacteria (which left fossils around 3.5 billion years old). It has features of both animals and plants, and is a closely related to both, if not a common ancestor.

The problem with your statement about design is that cyanobacteria are not designed. They are the product of chemistry. You can no longer claim they are "designed" than to say the shape of the water molecule is "designed". It's not. It has a shape that best distributes the electrical charge, in obedience to natural law.

Is this designed? No, it's the intrinsic property of the configuration of atoms, nothing more. Waht about this:

No, it's the optimum spacing between molecules, made possible when sufficient heat is removed from liquid water to form ice crystals. Is it designed? Of course not. It's simply the intrinsic property of the individual molecules, forming a compact geometric structure in accordance with the laws of nature.

Getting from these structures to the structures that comprise the cyanobacteria above is your first step in understanding that it's not design, but merely the intrinsic properties of chemicals that permits things like a cell wall and a nuclear helix. At this level of analysis, you need only understand electrical charge and geometry. It's that simple.

The helical geometry of DNA is not designed. It's intrinsic to this polymer.

That's coming from a position of deliberate indifference about the laws of nature, not from a position of information. All life is related, and at each fork in the phenotypes (physical differences) the "relatives" owe their existence to the success of the common ancestor. There are countless examples.


First of all, evolution has little to do with how things look to you. You, of all people. Sickle cell anemia evolved in Africa in resistance to the mosquito that carries malaria. But you can't see the result. And you certainly can't see the virus that evolves every flu season, in response to the global effect of human immune systems. But when you fall ill, you are experiencing evolution in real time. The virus that infects you has survived because of the lack of immune response. Odds are, by the time you are infected, you, too, will lack immunity. This is the problem with the oversimplifications you are using to dismiss the wealth of evidence around you.


That's contradictory. Small variations in a few generations will tend to accumulate over many generations, producing the radical differences you are looking for.

So true, the chemical arrangements/responses are caused by the laws of nature, which are laws of intelligent design too, as far as I think.

This principle of nature being a response with many options, but following the paths of least resistance and probability, is overlooked by creationists who prefer a more contrived creation.

But what you have pointed out is true, regardless of ID theory or not, and a very important factor in understanding nature.

Although this places all life forms with a common ground, and I do recognise common ancestors, but as individual designs rather than a few common ancestors.

I think in another post you showed that it has taken many common ancestors to produce a particular surviving type. It is a logical argument, but nature in our world does not seem to be so careful in selecting the best, and it too, is just stuggling to reproduce at any rate to survive.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

"Made" is absurd. The growth of an individual plant or animal from a spore, cell, or from the union of male and female gametes, is completely different than the process of evolution by natural selection. You simply have no idea how things work.


Really? So the mutation that causes a birth defect doesn't affect an individual? Tell that to the person born with grotesque physical geatures, disease, or disability.

I'm not sure what your point is. 1 in 250 pregnancies produce a cyclops that aborts. Mutation is immediate. The effect of the mutation is much more complicated. You need to have some background in statistics to get your arms around this subject. Based on what you've been propounding here, I'm certain beyond a reasonable doubt that you have no idea how statistics works and how it rules over the strange and unpredictable forms that have evolved over billions of years.


Keep denying magic, and you'll be cured of most of your ridiculous ideas. But pay closer attention to the swamp. This is where a lot of nature has been at work for eons. Thus, we are made in the image of frogs, and worms, and sponges, and jellies, and indeed all forms that came before. We are made in the image of the helix, and the cell membrane, and the ribosome, and so on. We are made from the egg, that hearkens to the spores of earliest metazoans, and the sperm which resembles the the choanocytes of lowest colonial forms of life.

The hollow ball (blastocoel) that forms the most primitive dermal layers in all plants and animals converges out of the mass of human cells that divide recursively after fertilization.

This mechanism for embryonic development was worked out during the evolution of the Cambrian plants and animals, when fertilization and recombination of disparate genes became the formula for rapid divergence of species. Embryonic development proceeds like this for all subsequent species. The formation of the flat dermal plate with primitive streak where the notochord will form during human stem cell differentiation parallels the flatworm in the form type comparisons you keep relying on.

Which is why you should abandon magic, superstition, legend, fable and myth and turn to the absolute - nature itself which is precisely what is happening in our world, and nothing more. Look to nature for every answer and it will reveal more than you could possibly hold in your brain if you lived to be as old as they said Noah was.

Note, mutation as we normally think of it is one of several means of altering the gene pool. Another is the mixing of genes during sexual reproduction. This includes the process of crossover. It takes place in both the father and mother during meiosis (production of sperm and egg cells). Each of us possesses two sets of our grandparents' genes.

This shows how random mixtures from the grandparents' DNA causes countless combinations of traits to vary from generation to generation. This acts in combination with mutation and/or as a source of mutation. This variation is precisely what accounts for the rise of traits that are acted upon by natural selection and which lead to evolution and speciation.

So the most functional malformation is the survivor. I would not say that a deformed human is another kind of animal, they're still human.

But with evolution a deformity cannot be that, it is an attempt for an advantage in the great subconscious goal to produce a functional creature.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

Aww, that is stupid, even for an YEC. The longer the time, the more layers.



Please try not to project your own ignorance onto others.

Hans

Let's say that the layers are 10 meters high or deep, and each layer is 10 cm, that's 100 layers.

If the whole lot is 1 billion years old each layer is 10 million years old. With each subsequent layer comes a sudden change to the next type of layer. Different animals/flora climate.

So we have 10 million years of consistency then a change and then another 10 million years of peace. Is that something like it?

 

[Captain Kremmen]

Re the sudden changes.
You are right. How could the layers change so abruptly?
The answer is that they don't.

Take this section of North East England:

http://www.j31.co.uk/strata_small_2.png

If you look at where the Barnsley seam outcrops, it looks like there are just three layers,
coal, millstone grit, and carboniferous limestone.

This is a vast simplification.
A proper survey, say for coal mining purposes, would show hundreds of layers.
At the boundaries there would be mixtures, and with climate changes, other layers might appear and disappear.
On the other hand, you would be unlikely to find coal seams in the limestone layer and vice versa.

 

[sideshowbob]

I do see elephants in every back yard!

That could be a hallucination or it could be an honest mistake. You could be misinterpreting the neighbour's cat as an elephant. If you want to convince Animal Control that it's an elephant, you'll need better evidence than your own visions. So far, all you're doing is convincing them that you're a nut.

 

[sideshowbob]

By suddenly or quickly, I mean not over millions of years.

As somebody else pointed out, lithification does take a long time. Erosion also takes a long time. Thousands of events do accummulate to a long time. There simply is no way to compress all of those events into a shorter time frame.

Now of course there would be layers with foot prints in them, the earth had local flooding, glacial activity, mud slides, erosion and deposition for 4.5 thousand years, after the flood. Some times evidence for the flood is masked by these.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either the layers came from the flood or they didn't. You're still left with no worldwide evidence of flooding. Your evidence only points to the local flooding.

 

[Dinosaur]

This thread has gotten boring and somewhat repetitive. Consider the following instead of arguing about some bible story.

Top 12 Reasons Why Beer Is Better Than Religion

1. If you've devoted your life to Beer, there are groups to help you stop.

2. You can prove you have a Beer.

3. There are laws saying Beer labels can't lie to you.

4. You don't have to wait over 2000 years for a second Beer.

5. Nobody's ever been burned at the stake, hanged, or tortured over their brand of Beer.

6. When you have a case of beer, you don't knock on people's doors trying to give it away to people who are not interested,.

7. They don't force Beer on little children that can't think for themselves.

8. Beer has never caused a major war.

9. Beer doesn't tell you how to have sex.

10. No one will kill you for not drinking Beer.

11. You do not have to wake up early Sunday morning to enjoy beer. You can sleep in and still enjoy it.

12. You are not required to drink beer 5 times a day, but you can if you want to.​

 

[Aqueous Id]

Dino,

That's wisdom I will test as soon as I get to a stopping point, since Beer, like religion, has a way of making one pause and reflect. And Beer is guilt-free ...uh, at least for the folks who never got behind the wheel or went postal while slaking their thirst... OK, so strike that remark... Beer is just being human.

Some other things beer makes me want to do is argue in favor of common sense. (That's why I jumped the gun and misread and overreacted to your recent post by the way. I had no Beer to unwire me.)

That would be good for religions, too, to just kick back and let the words sink in, I mean to the point of clarity, like a nice crystal Lager. In this regard I would tout Beer as a model of excellence for the purveyors of religion.

Hey: in case you haven't recognized it, I think you've led us to the conclusion that Noah was the common ancestor of all Braumeisterdom. After all, he came back from his trip and got drunk. We can surmise that he might have stowed away a little Pilsner or Ale to help weather the storm, but topping his tank when it all was over is - well it's off the charts, as all of mankind had just been eradicated for reasons as simple as fumbling for the keys to the dinghy on account of too much Beer. And as he had apparently just understood,
Beer was in part the cause for entire populations being turned into pillars of salt. (I will skip the obvious connection to the Margarita, one that applies in the Latin versions of the Bible.) In any case we have direct evidence that Noah was a lush and the Head Human In Charge ( °*°* HHIC *°*° ) therefore he must necessarily be the King of Kegmaking from whence we all derived our excellent modern brewski-craftery.

This we can prove by the most elementary powers of deduction, available now at your local Piggly Wiggly in boxes of 6, 12 or 18, or the less popular but more satisying stainless steel kegs, just down the road at the nearest distributor. In my case it's a quaint microbrewery called Noah's Sink 'r Swim.

As a final note, your affinity for Beer, and your proximity in age to Noah, also a Man of the Mug, should be enough evidence for the fundamentalist denialists to conclude that God rewards the hand that lifteth the cup.

Skold, Dino.

 

[Aqueous Id]

Let's say that the layers are 10 meters high or deep, and each layer is 10 cm, that's 100 layers.

If the whole lot is 1 billion years old each layer is 10 million years old. With each subsequent layer comes a sudden change to the next type of layer. Different animals/flora climate.

So we have 10 million years of consistency then a change and then another 10 million years of peace. Is that something like it?

No, the layers are different depths, spanning different lengths of time, and different kinds of events. For more information, here is an explanation of the strata at Grand Canyon.

From a similar site for Zion Canyon:

Mineral-laden waters slowly filtered through the compacted sediments. Iron oxide, calcium carbonate, and silica acted as cementing agents, and with pressure from overlying layers over long periods of time, transformed the deposits into stone. Ancient seabeds became limestone; mud and clay became mudstones and shale; and desert sand became sandstone. Each layer originated from a distinct source and so differs in thickness, mineral content, color, and eroded appearance.

And from Bryce Canyon, which completes the span of all of geologic time.

You have an impossible task explaining the lithification of sand in only 6000 years, or of limestone, or even petrification of organic remains or the mud that encased them. But 6000 years will not produce the severe erosion in the photo above of what is laid down by sedimentation, until lithification is complete and the upwelling raises the deck, to expose the strata to the elements. The reality of Nature collides with your explanation. The photo above is just one atom in a mountain of evidence against it. But even just this one example renders your explanation absurd.

Petrified wood strikes me as another wake-up call for the YECs. There's no compression on this log, yet it's solid rock. That can't be done in 6000 years - nor does the violent upheaval you're promoting allow the crystals to grow like this inside the pores of the wood tissue, so finely and minutely, such that the colors of the bark and rings are preserved.

This is easily verified by attempting to grow crystals in a lab. You will discover that it's exceeding slow. Now imagine doing it at such a sustained pace that every pore in the wood has individually crystallized. It would takes eons. It's oversimplifications like these that make your assumptions about Nature completely ludicrous.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

No, the layers are different depths, spanning different lengths of time, and different kinds of events. For more information, here is an explanation of the strata at Grand Canyon.

From a similar site for Zion Canyon:

Mineral-laden waters slowly filtered through the compacted sediments. Iron oxide, calcium carbonate, and silica acted as cementing agents, and with pressure from overlying layers over long periods of time, transformed the deposits into stone. Ancient seabeds became limestone; mud and clay became mudstones and shale; and desert sand became sandstone. Each layer originated from a distinct source and so differs in thickness, mineral content, color, and eroded appearance.

And from Bryce Canyon, which completes the span of all of geologic time.

You have an impossible task explaining the lithification of sand in only 6000 years, or of limestone, or even petrification of organic remains or the mud that encased them. But 6000 years will not produce the severe erosion in the photo above of what is laid down by sedimentation, until lithification is complete and the upwelling raises the deck, to expose the strata to the elements. The reality of Nature collides with your explanation. The photo above is just one atom in a mountain of evidence against it. But even just this one example renders your explanation absurd.

Petrified wood strikes me as another wake-up call for the YECs. There's no compression on this log, yet it's solid rock. That can't be done in 6000 years - nor does the violent upheaval you're promoting allow the crystals to grow like this inside the pores of the wood tissue, so finely and minutely, such that the colors of the bark and rings are preserved.

This is easily verified by attempting to grow crystals in a lab. You will discover that it's exceeding slow. Now imagine doing it at such a sustained pace that every pore in the wood has individually crystallized. It would takes eons. It's oversimplifications like these that make your assumptions about Nature completely ludicrous.

Those processes described can take a hundred years. Fence posts have petrified in that time.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

This thread has gotten boring and somewhat repetitive. Consider the following instead of arguing about some bible story.

Top 12 Reasons Why Beer Is Better Than Religion

1. If you've devoted your life to Beer, there are groups to help you stop.

2. You can prove you have a Beer.

3. There are laws saying Beer labels can't lie to you.

4. You don't have to wait over 2000 years for a second Beer.

5. Nobody's ever been burned at the stake, hanged, or tortured over their brand of Beer.

6. When you have a case of beer, you don't knock on people's doors trying to give it away to people who are not interested,.

7. They don't force Beer on little children that can't think for themselves.

8. Beer has never caused a major war.

9. Beer doesn't tell you how to have sex.

10. No one will kill you for not drinking Beer.

11. You do not have to wake up early Sunday morning to enjoy beer. You can sleep in and still enjoy it.

12. You are not required to drink beer 5 times a day, but you can if you want to.​

A man is never greater than what controls him.

 

[origin]

Those processes described can take a hundred years. Fence posts have petrified in that time.

Do you have any evidence of this? Oh yeah, you make up stuff to support your beliefs so never mind.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

Do you have any evidence of this? Oh yeah, you make up stuff to support your beliefs so never mind.

Google; petrified fence post.

 

[Aqueous Id]

Do you have any evidence of this? Oh yeah, you make up stuff to support your beliefs so never mind.

Worse, he's relying on Creationist spin doctors who collect garbage other people make up.

Those processes described can take a hundred years. Fence posts have petrified in that time.

Among the fossils Creationists can not explain are the petrified forests dating back hundreds of millions of years. Ancient volcanoes sometimes felled entire forests, covered them in ash and mud. Anoxia preserved the wood from decay as Silicon in the ash leached into the cellulose, substituting itself for Carbon over tens of thousands of years. Over tens of millions of years the Silicon metamorphosed from amorphous form to amorphous Opal to paracrystalline Opal to microcrystalline Quartz.

Karowe and Jefferson (1987) investigated the initial stages of silicification by examining trees buried by Mount St. Helens lahars or mudflows dated at 1980, 1885, A.D. 1450-1550 and 36,000 years B.P. Wood samples were examined using scanning electron microcopy and energy dispersive X-ray analyses. Wood buried in 1980 showed no significant mineral deposition. Wood buried in 1880 and A.D. 1450-1550 exhibited traces of silica on cell walls as well as cell wall decay. Wood buried 36,000 years B.P. showed silica impregnation of cell walls. Decay in these older specimens affected the secondary wall and removed the middle lamella (pp. 198-200). Karowe and Jefferson concluded that the increase in silica deposition as well as decay associated with the age of these trees supported the model of silicification proposed by Leo and Barghoorn in 1976.



Of course we're still talking about a silly myth propped up by rubber earth under a cosmic washing machine. What's really absurd is the problem your nutty scheme has in the Pennsylvanian. Here there are layer upon layer of successive decimations of forests by ancient volcanoes, amid seams of coal. These forests are laid one upon the the other like pages of a book. Each stump in the diagram represents an entire forest. In each eruption, these are the stumps left behind when the trees were knocked down.

And we still have the most egregious fallacy of Creationism, which is the denial of geologic dating. There is this mountain of evidence that the Earth is at least 4.55 billion years old. What makes Creationists liars is that they pretend to play scientist and simply issue edicts on Nature to conform to their demands, rather than to actually do any science. This is why I keep referring to the dishonesty of Creationism. At least in science we have principles not found in religion, for example:

Thou shalt not lie.

 

[sideshowbob]

Those processes described can take a hundred years.

You're almost right but you have to learn to be more precise with language. What you should have said is that SOME of those processes CAN take a hundred years. The problem for creationists is that some of them can NOT happen in a hundred years, for example lithification and erosion which have already been mentioned. And some that "can" happen in a hundred years DO NOT in most cases, as proven by absolute dating of the layers above and below.

The only way the flood can be made halfway plausible is by picking and choosing which evidence you look at and ignoring anything that doesn't agree with your preconceived conclusion. That's either lazy science or out-and-out dishonesty.

 

[Aqueous Id]

So true, the chemical arrangements/responses are caused by the laws of nature, which are laws of intelligent design too, as far as I think.

My intent was to begin showing intrinsic properties of nature. They can't be invented or designed. An equilateral triangle has to have exactly 60° at each angle or the sides won't be equal in length. That can't be designed, caused or created--which is what we mean by intrinsic (or inherent). Atoms are like this. They tend to bond at specific angles that equalize the electric charge. The direction toward equilibrium is just a law of nature. Effects can't be suspended. The book can't be left hanging in mid-air, it has to fall. That's equilibrium. This is all intrinsic to matter, not designed. And since the bond angle is driven (usually) to a standard geometry, the molecules that form will have to have certain fixed shapes. That's intrinsic, not designed. Building on this, if you had a kit of pieces that let you build out a DNA molecule, it would become evident to you that there are certain ways that it will be predictable (not designed) and there are certain ways (like the ordering of codons) that have flexibility and allow for random ordering. This also can not be designed. It's all simply a matter of geometry, the way the blocks fit together, and exactly for the same reason that the equilateral triangle must have 60° angles.

What may be hardest for you to accept is that, given all the intrinsic and random causes to rise of a DNA molecule "out of nothing", it happens to have phenomenal properties--the thing that invoke the notion of God--the ability to clone itself, and the ability to clone subsets of itself--like proteins, enzymes etc.--that become--for all the creatures farther up the tree--the seemingly miraculous factories for causing higher order in structure--like assembling those proteins into a kidney or heart, all under massive amounts of indirect steps during the embryonic development--through stem cells--and which is staggering to the human mind in complexity. However, if you jump back to the cyanobacteria and inch your way along the branches, then the changes are less mind boggling. All you need to complete the picture, is to stitch together the entire natural history of humans from the information available--using evolution as the thread that links the steps (the type of creature) and then the jigsaw puzzle all begins to fall into place.

I think this may be hard to arrive at independently without a little science training. But this is not a reason to fear science. If anything you should look into it and see if you are able to reconcile for yourself which aspects of nature are intrinsic properties or random ones that you may have mistaken for design.

This principle of nature being a response with many options, but following the paths of least resistance and probability, is overlooked by creationists who prefer a more contrived creation.

If you begin from the standpoint that there was a Big Bang, and here we are, aware that that the world around us came from a source, a source that has set matter in motion, and if you simply winnow out the laws you see being followed like clockwork - the book will fall if you let go, the sun will rise in the morning, your car will crash if you don't hit the brakes, these also arise out of the instrinsic properties I mentioned, plus the matter and motion imparted by the Big Bang. With these two ingredients (provided you suspend judgment on whether the Big Bang was created) you will find there is no scientific basis for associating intelligent design to the world around you. At least not the physical world, because all of these properties and all of this matter in motion is accounted for, just following those laws. Random processes may seem created, but obviously, they're not. When all of the things I mentioned are further altered by random outcomes, it just tends to give the illusion of intent. But it's not intent at all.

But what you have pointed out is true, regardless of ID theory or not, and a very important factor in understanding nature.

This would close the gap, if creationists would come around to embracing science, to reconciling their assumptions about how things work with just the basic principles applied. This is why I think it's so important that they leave science education alone. Everyone needs to have a fighting chance, as a youngster, to catch on to what the textbooks are trying to explain. (Actually, I think that battle is nearly won. I think the resistance lives mostly in the older generation.)

Although this places all life forms with a common ground, and I do recognise common ancestors, but as individual designs rather than a few common ancestors.

The idea is that there was a first cell. More than likely there were many first cells, but there was probably only one that initially acquired the ability to divide. This would have wiped out all competition immediately. The one that sticks out in my mind in terms of success is the cyanobacteria, because it left massive fossils where the the cells had accreted and clumped together. One theory is that they carpeted the oceans over hundreds of millions of years. They may have converted the atmosphere from a some original mixture (methane and ammonia for example) to our present mix, and, in so doing, began to suffocate. This could have been the first crossroads to opening a new niche for an alternative form, an oxygen breather. If so, then that gives us a common ancestor, perhaps between animals and plants. It depends on where the fork occurs. Whenever it splits into two lines, there you have a common ancestor between the lines. But the adaptation, over hundreds of millions of years, would not require design either. For the same reason that the first cell could arise simply out of the geometry of bond angles, a variation could arise - a mutation - out of some randomizing effect (temperature--a lightning strike--anything) and, if it happened to produce a superior trait, then the new population would rise into the new niche (breathing oxygen) while common ancestor is able to survive in smaller numbers on the limited CO[sub]2[/sub] it breathes. This would happen automatically just as a consequence of cell replication and the lowering of the threat. That is, not designed.

I think in another post you showed that it has taken many common ancestors to produce a particular surviving type. It is a logical argument, but nature in our world does not seem to be so careful in selecting the best, and it too, is just stuggling to reproduce at any rate to survive.

The subject of a common ancestor comes up most often when discussing the creationists' fear that humans evolved from lower animals. It's not that this is what produces a surviving type, it's just that there are many forks in the tree of life. If you think about it, it took every single ancestor you have to produce you. If any one of them magically vanished from the tree of life, the entire line or their descendants would vanish including you (or me, or us both). Where you say the world is not taking care to select the best I think you are mistaken about what "best" means. In evolution, it's any trait that improves the odds of survival. As Darwin noted, most creatures produce much more offspring than will survive. And once in a while one of the offspring will carry a mutation. It only takes one "right" mutation to produce some new trait that will overcome some impending threat. (The arrival of a new predator may be overcome by the mutant that carries a trait for camouflage). So there will always be a new definition of "best". Just looking back at the evolution of humans, it's pretty clear that the "better" trait was upright posture and a larger brain.

 

[Rhaedas]

Have to tweak what you said there, Aqueous. Many times mutations are passed that have nothing to do with the survival rate. Many times bad mutations get passed out of sheer luck, as all the organism has to do is breed to be successful. Hence the idea of a "designer" makes one wonder what that designer was thinking, as there are numerous bad designs in nature, either in function or in dead ends. But for evolution, breeding the next population is all you need, so you get some very odd solutions for problems that a designer would have never bothered with.

 

[Photizo]

What makes Creationists liars is that they pretend to play scientist and simply issue edicts on Nature to conform to their demands, rather than to actually do any science. This is why I keep referring to the dishonesty of Creationism. At least in science we have principles not found in religion, for example:

Thou shalt not lie.

"You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor...by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned."

As the accuser, you're the one lying and pretending...believing data gathered by rube goldberg contraptions 'created' by arrogant simpletons...this over against the God implanted witness within to His activity without.

"Let their lying lips be silenced, for with pride and contempt they speak arrogantly against the righteous."

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

You're almost right but you have to learn to be more precise with language. What you should have said is that SOME of those processes CAN take a hundred years. The problem for creationists is that some of them can NOT happen in a hundred years, for example lithification and erosion which have already been mentioned. And some that "can" happen in a hundred years DO NOT in most cases, as proven by absolute dating of the layers above and below.

The only way the flood can be made halfway plausible is by picking and choosing which evidence you look at and ignoring anything that doesn't agree with your preconceived conclusion. That's either lazy science or out-and-out dishonesty.

You are quite right, but the statement is "can take a hundred years" does not mean "only will take a hundred years", dear English scholar!

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

My intent was to begin showing intrinsic properties of nature. They can't be invented or designed. An equilateral triangle has to have exactly 60° at each angle or the sides won't be equal in length. That can't be designed, caused or created--which is what we mean by intrinsic (or inherent). Atoms are like this. They tend to bond at specific angles that equalize the electric charge. The direction toward equilibrium is just a law of nature. Effects can't be suspended. The book can't be left hanging in mid-air, it has to fall. That's equilibrium. This is all intrinsic to matter, not designed. And since the bond angle is driven (usually) to a standard geometry, the molecules that form will have to have certain fixed shapes. That's intrinsic, not designed. Building on this, if you had a kit of pieces that let you build out a DNA molecule, it would become evident to you that there are certain ways that it will be predictable (not designed) and there are certain ways (like the ordering of codons) that have flexibility and allow for random ordering. This also can not be designed. It's all simply a matter of geometry, the way the blocks fit together, and exactly for the same reason that the equilateral triangle must have 60° angles.

What may be hardest for you to accept is that, given all the intrinsic and random causes to rise of a DNA molecule "out of nothing", it happens to have phenomenal properties--the thing that invoke the notion of God--the ability to clone itself, and the ability to clone subsets of itself--like proteins, enzymes etc.--that become--for all the creatures farther up the tree--the seemingly miraculous factories for causing higher order in structure--like assembling those proteins into a kidney or heart, all under massive amounts of indirect steps during the embryonic development--through stem cells--and which is staggering to the human mind in complexity. However, if you jump back to the cyanobacteria and inch your way along the branches, then the changes are less mind boggling. All you need to complete the picture, is to stitch together the entire natural history of humans from the information available--using evolution as the thread that links the steps (the type of creature) and then the jigsaw puzzle all begins to fall into place.

I think this may be hard to arrive at independently without a little science training. But this is not a reason to fear science. If anything you should look into it and see if you are able to reconcile for yourself which aspects of nature are intrinsic properties or random ones that you may have mistaken for design.


If you begin from the standpoint that there was a Big Bang, and here we are, aware that that the world around us came from a source, a source that has set matter in motion, and if you simply winnow out the laws you see being followed like clockwork - the book will fall if you let go, the sun will rise in the morning, your car will crash if you don't hit the brakes, these also arise out of the instrinsic properties I mentioned, plus the matter and motion imparted by the Big Bang. With these two ingredients (provided you suspend judgment on whether the Big Bang was created) you will find there is no scientific basis for associating intelligent design to the world around you. At least not the physical world, because all of these properties and all of this matter in motion is accounted for, just following those laws. Random processes may seem created, but obviously, they're not. When all of the things I mentioned are further altered by random outcomes, it just tends to give the illusion of intent. But it's not intent at all.

This would close the gap, if creationists would come around to embracing science, to reconciling their assumptions about how things work with just the basic principles applied. This is why I think it's so important that they leave science education alone. Everyone needs to have a fighting chance, as a youngster, to catch on to what the textbooks are trying to explain. (Actually, I think that battle is nearly won. I think the resistance lives mostly in the older generation.)

The idea is that there was a first cell. More than likely there were many first cells, but there was probably only one that initially acquired the ability to divide. This would have wiped out all competition immediately. The one that sticks out in my mind in terms of success is the cyanobacteria, because it left massive fossils where the the cells had accreted and clumped together. One theory is that they carpeted the oceans over hundreds of millions of years. They may have converted the atmosphere from a some original mixture (methane and ammonia for example) to our present mix, and, in so doing, began to suffocate. This could have been the first crossroads to opening a new niche for an alternative form, an oxygen breather. If so, then that gives us a common ancestor, perhaps between animals and plants. It depends on where the fork occurs. Whenever it splits into two lines, there you have a common ancestor between the lines. But the adaptation, over hundreds of millions of years, would not require design either. For the same reason that the first cell could arise simply out of the geometry of bond angles, a variation could arise - a mutation - out of some randomizing effect (temperature--a lightning strike--anything) and, if it happened to produce a superior trait, then the new population would rise into the new niche (breathing oxygen) while common ancestor is able to survive in smaller numbers on the limited CO[sub]2[/sub] it breathes. This would happen automatically just as a consequence of cell replication and the lowering of the threat. That is, not designed.


The subject of a common ancestor comes up most often when discussing the creationists' fear that humans evolved from lower animals. It's not that this is what produces a surviving type, it's just that there are many forks in the tree of life. If you think about it, it took every single ancestor you have to produce you. If any one of them magically vanished from the tree of life, the entire line or their descendants would vanish including you (or me, or us both). Where you say the world is not taking care to select the best I think you are mistaken about what "best" means. In evolution, it's any trait that improves the odds of survival. As Darwin noted, most creatures produce much more offspring than will survive. And once in a while one of the offspring will carry a mutation. It only takes one "right" mutation to produce some new trait that will overcome some impending threat. (The arrival of a new predator may be overcome by the mutant that carries a trait for camouflage). So there will always be a new definition of "best". Just looking back at the evolution of humans, it's pretty clear that the "better" trait was upright posture and a larger brain.

For a while here I thought I was reading a magazine on ID.

What you are saying is absolutely right, and you have a good grasp of the intrinsic relationships in nature from the atom to the whale.

Now if you were only looking for an answer about nature, from natural causes only, that would explain why science has gone down that road.

But as efficient and consistent nature is, it cannot be correctly appreciated or understood unless their is an acknowledgement of ID, and a supernatural power that caused it and maintains it.

The aim of evolution has always been to get rid of God. And it has succeeded. But it is a little harder to get rid of basic human rights that are carved in stone in the law of God.

What I find interesting, is that all the ten simple laws of heaven are not only moral but necessary for life, and more so, quality of life. When we study these, we find those principles obeyed in nature, from the atom to the whale. That's why animals are half decent even though we have ruined their world.

It takes intelligence and commitment to see all the connections, even as presented in evolution, and it often seems like I don't want to recognise that at all, because I see it differently.

What causes animals - that have developed from many common ancestors to become incompatable with DNA, even within a species, so that a crafted limb is rejected, and why the inability to interbreed?