Oh, no, I missed this. This is a hoot!
I do not understand the difference between science and my fanatical belief in the spaghetti monsters of materialistic metaphysics!
roam the Earth at the same time, why I am I asking why we don't find dinosaur and human fossils in the same layer of geological stratum?
Derp-derp. La-la.
Blah-blah. I'm slap happy out of my mind 97% of the time. The other 3% of the time, I'm comatose.
Since the age of the Earth and evolution are as scientifically and philosophically accepted, respectively, as gravity and photosynthesis, am I right about the age of the Earth, the existence of gravity and the processes of photosynthesis while I mindlessly follow authority regarding a biological theory of speciation that's premised on the gratuitous presupposition of a rationally and empirically indemonstrable
of metaphysical naturalism? I know. Let's ask Rawlings
First, with regard to the Creationist’s perspective, the correct term is
micro-speciation, not
microevolution. And while many millions of generations of fruit flies have undergone micro-speciation in the laboratory, not a single one of them has ever underwent macroevolution. Fruit flies remain fruit flies. There's a vast difference between the changes that occur within species and the transmutation of species. The rest is just talk, the party line of evolutionary theory. And that’s the crux of the matter, isn't it? We have before us the idea that all species evolved from a common ancestor . . . one that is driven by yet another idea, the underlying metaphysical presupposition of a materialistic naturalism.
. . . The evolutionist assumes that the paleontological record necessarily entails an unbroken chain of natural cause-and-effect speciation. There's nothing necessary about it. And given the complexity of life and the fact that the paleontological record overwhelming reflects, not a gradual appearance of an ever-increasingly more abundant and varied collection of species, but a series of abrupt appearances and extinctions of fully formed biological systems, it's not unreasonable to argue that we are looking at a series of distinct, creative events orchestrated by an intelligent being. The record would look the same.
. . . The arrows that evolutionists scratch on charts between illustrations of species that are alleged to be directly related are not found in the paleontological record. They're the gratuitous additions of a theoretical model. To characterize my interpretation of the evidence as an error begs the question and mistakes the arrows for something they're not, i.e., the artifacts of observable empirical phenomena.
. . . Pointing to a small handful of groupings of allegedly related lineages consisting of an equally small handful of intermediate forms, which is the best that evolutionists have ever been able to come up with out of millions of fossils, does not impress me. . . . The number of changes required and the degree of complexity involved, for example, in the enterprise of transforming a land animal into a sea animal, or vice versa, are immense. Just how many transitional forms are we talking about here? Such a splash didn't take place in one dive. It involved every system—skeletal, respiratory, digestive, reproductive, circulatory, integumentary, lymphatic . . . the transitional migration of a snout into a blowhole on the top of the head!
Are we talking about thousands of transitional forms? Tens of thousands? Multiply that by millions of species.
I'm well acquainted with the rhetoric that evolutionists invoke regarding the dearth of plausible intermediate forms in the fossil record, like how we would not expect "to find . . . half-bat/half-bird intermediate forms in the fossil record", as it was sardonically put by an evolutionist recently.
Oh? And why not?
The early Darwinists, including Darwin himself, certainly expected them and were perplexed by their absence. And what's Neo-Darwinism anyway, really, but a collection of attempts (including punctuated equilibrium) to explain why we don't see them.
It
was and
remains a serious problem for the theory, one which evolutionists themselves are actively trying to resolve. It's just that the theory's leading lights tend not to talk about it frankly or very often. The rest is just double-speak. In the meantime, they think to turn this problem into a smear against the skeptics who raise it, that is, against those who keep resurrecting the bone they want to keep buried. Moreover, in spite of the standard meaning of "change" in evolutionary theory, with which
I am well acquainted from a purely theoretical perspective and
do understand . . . a scheme of common ancestry necessarily
does entail transmutation.
The problem here is, that you continue to make assertions as to the bias and dishonesty of those who understand evolution. Most scientists understand evolution, and realise that it is the best explanation of the differences and similarities between all living things on Earth. It meshes neatly with other sciences, such as genetics, medicine, dentistry, paleontology, archeology, geology, chemistry, physics and any others you could name. —Labsci
Actually, anything can be brought into line with the theory. There's really nothing "meshy" about it. Anyone of those fields could do without it, especially physics. Evolutionary theory makes few predictions, and in truth the sort of predictions it makes are historical in nature. They are made in hindsight, wherein something or another is observed and then (viola!) the evolutionist proclaims that's exactly what the theory would expect or predict. (The expectations of Creationism can do the same thing, and you might see that if you were to rid yourself of certain assumptions about the nature of the biblical record and the baggage that has been piled on top of it without due consideration.) Anything can be brought into line with a tautological mechanism of "what survives, survives." Both environmental change and mutation are random; the product of two random variables is a random variable. The arguments that have been made by some, including the likes of Dawkins, to the contrary are nonsense. And that's problematical for any attempt to account for the conservation of any ensemble of genetic characteristics that might affect transmutation.
Nothing visible is going to happen in so short a time as 200 years in the laboratory. If a fly changed into anything other than a fly, it would blow evolution out of the water, and falsify it completely. —Labsci
Actually, we're talking about millions of generations of accelerated speciation. The origin point of generational experimentation on fruit flies
was to achieve an observable instance of transmutational speciation. In any event, the thrust of my point regarding fruit flies had to do with this statement: "[m]any microevolutionary steps equals macroevolution." At various points along the way, evolutionary theory entails a common ancestry of branching transmutations. You imagine a biological history consisting of an unbroken chain of natural cause-and-effect, mostly driven by the mechanism of natural selection, and believe that this scenario provides the "best explanation of the differences and similarities between all living things on Earth." I see a biological history consisting of a series of creative events and episodic extinctions, and believe that this scenario provides the best explanation for the abundance and vast variety of life, and expect that all forms of terrestrial life would necessarily share certain genetic and morphological characteristics, including the inherent ability to affect adaptive variations within.
The evidence would look the same either way.
In accordance with your confirmation of my point about fruit flies, we can't observe speciation beyond the microevolutionary steps and, also, we don't see an abundance of obvious transitory forms in the fossil record, so what's Darwinism (the gratuitous insertion or extrapolation of a common ancestry) ultimately based on, if not a materialistic naturalism? There's nothing in the observable and quantifiable compositions and processes of biological systems that is at odds with the fundamentals of Creationism. Hence, as for the regnant scientific community's
a prior bias, what is the substance of this "sand" you claim Creationism is built on?
In my opinion, it follows that the post-modern Catholic Church prematurely and unnecessarily conceded
creatio ex essentia, just as the prescientific Church errantly adopted Aristotelian cosmology. (The Bible does not recommend a literal geocentric cosmology, by the way.) While the latter is understandable, the former is not, and neither of them are biblically justifiable.
There is no need to "modernize" the Bible. The ancients' pre-scientific conception of the universe is not relevant to biblical inerrancy, much less the prescientific expositions of empirical phenomena that might be attributed to the Bible by misguided believers
and non-believers alike. God's word stands and stays; it's surety is not subject to the passing conceptual fads of imperfect and half-blind creatures.
While the Bible does make some scientific claims, it's not a scientific treatise and never has been, except in the minds of some. I've never thought of Creationism as being anything more than a general exposition of origins against the backdrop of original sin and the problem of evil. Beyond that, God has simply left the details of scientific inquiry to us. Learned, post-scientific hermeneutics has no problem with the idea that Creationism is not a scientific system of thought, but merely a general set of guidelines by which we may properly understand the essential meaning of the empirical data.
And there's no ideological tension between the Bible and the Big Bang theory, if that's what you're implying. On the contrary, it is more suggestive of
creatio ex nihilo than steady-state theory, though as Lemaître himself rightly observed the appearance is not necessarily conclusive of anything in that regard.
. . . evolutionists are playing a game of conceptual hide-and-seek when they claim that the classical construct of irreducible complexity in and of itself has been debunked. Refuting Behe's ill-considered application of it to biochemistry—a half-baked version that fails to anticipate the obvious possibility of degraded systems or their isolated components performing less efficient or alternate functions—is of no consequence. (Incidentally, I wrote Behe about that possibility back in '96 after reading his book. Sure enough, well, you know the rest. . . .) Properly rendered, irreducible complexity does not dispute the plausibility of diminished systems, it illustrates the implausibility of complex systems arising by blind luck. That has not been debunked by anyone. Behe should have paid more attention to the essential quality of Paley’s formulation and the prerequisites of Kant's.
In other words, in the classical tradition, irreducible complexity obtains to the rise of organization from chaos, not to any potential degradation of function. The former entails an uphill battle in the midst of a chaotic collection of precursors vying against conservation. It has to do with the problem of anticipatorily formulating the overarching function of an interdependent system of discretely oriented parts, each contributing to the sum of a whole that could not have orchestrated its own composition from the ground up.
Further, and now comes the slight-of-hand that impresses no one but bleating sheep, evolutionists themselves do not refute Behe's straw man with the paper biochemistry of evolutionary theory. The theoretical mechanism of natural selection does not compose complex machines by systematically stripping them of their parts. Instead it must build them without a blueprint and do so in a sea of competing precursors, once again, vying against conservation. It's not the other way around. Miller can illustrate the alternate functions of degraded mousetraps all he wants; that does not demonstrate that the mechanisms of evolutionary theory are the cause of the comprehensive functions of complex integrated systems.
But the sheep go "bah, bah, bah."
Debunked?
What kind of scientific term is that anyway? The matter cannot be resolved syllogistically or analogously. It's a matter of experimentation and falsification.
Now you see it or maybe you still don't.
In other words, ultimately, it's not even a matter of morphology. It's a matter of accumulating information, not only against a tidal wave of difficulties that rebuff conservation, but against the whims of a genetic material whose sequences are not arranged by any chemically preordained bonding affinity, but by extraneous forces. And to my mind that means nothing of particular interest could arise in the first place without the intervention of an intelligent being. I trust that we at least agree on that point, given that you are a theistic evolutionist. Why would you recommend the prattle of atheist savants who must necessarily override the putative distinction between the vagaries of abiogenesis and the calculi of evolutionary theory?
The Majorana fermion violates the law of the excluded middle, the third law of organic/classical logic.
over something embarrassing, trying hide some dirty little secret we all know but you can't bring yourselves to say out loud. 
