Because it presupposes that the beleifs of Christians & Jews are flat wrong and that evolution, with all of its holes, is dead on. It is arrogantly written. It is meant to be a support in a debate but it does not acknowledge that evolution, or the bang theory, or that the universe is 14 billion years old, or any of the stuff in the article is theoretical. that's why.
Well, the last paragraph was somewhat arrogant, I agree. Your use of the word 'theoretical' probably isn't the same as the science community's meaning of theoretical. A theory is a very strong argument for an idea. Very strong. Your use of the word equates a theory to a guess, which a theory definitely is not.
I followed the article and I must say, nice drawings. I've also looked up about five of the science articles the report references and I again must say, nice illustrations. Those fossil fragments were found in a riverbed alongside numerous other land based creatures, and to create a missing link to current dolphins doesn't require a lack of knowledge, but instead an avid imagination. I'll have to answer your question with a question.(since both basically were asking the same thing): If they were 'fatal' flaws, why are dolphins thriving today?
Sorry, but you sounded dismissive of the scientific theories as if they didn't have mountains of evidence backing it up. It is quite a pet peeve of mine when people misuse and misinterpret data, information, and science.
Just to prove to the ID side that I look critically at all ideas and not just ID I just wanted to point out that Nuclear Fission isn't the collision of subatomic particles but the separation of subatomic particles.
Actually they're not thriving because many die from drowning in tuna nets. They've thrived at one time because they had few natural predators and while they had some good adaptions but at the same time were left with a few major flaws. Makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint where features are a process of gradual adaption from a different morphology and there are many holdovers. Makes terrible sense from a design standpoint to leave in such potentially dangerous relics.
Very good point, but I'm not actually seeing anybody out there who is arguing inteligent design in this thread. It seems to be really creationists vs evolutionists(?). Max is a little vague in his stated position, but other than that I don't see anybody who isn't a pure Genesis creationist or a supporter of evolution. If you're out there, please raise your hand...
I don't believe its an accident that the most ardent proponents of ID on this thread are also some of the most ardent Christians.
Just to be perfectly clear, you I.) a.)Deny that the account in the book of Genesis occured as stated in 7 days and that the world is about 6,000 years old. (young earth creationism) b.)Deny the old earth creationism belief that the "7 days" in Genesis occured in the order as listed, but that "days" should be taken to mean epochs instead of actual days. (the position of the Vatican & the majority of protestant faiths) c.)Deny that God might have used evolution as a tool to create mankind(evolutionary creationism). and instead II.) Believe in the troika of Irreducible complexity, Specified complexity, and a Fine-tuned universe? I simply want to make sure of this because many people unite under the Intelligent Design banner, when they in fact believe something else, and are using Intelligent Design as a proxy.
Without those "design flaws" they wouldn't be dolphins, they would be fish and our little dolphin tangent would have never begun. From a standpoint of an unintelligent designer or natural selection, it would be more believable that no dolphins exist today and only dolphin precursor-only fossils were found. Yet the opposite seems to be true. Also, dolphins having few natural predators throughout their history is purely assumption based on the fact of their current existence. But to now tie this tangent back into the thread, isn't there the slightest possibility that belief systems, from both sides, can play a significant role in data interpretation as can be seen in this discussion of dolphin bones?
Somebody help me out here. Where did Jesus say *evolution* is wrong? About 500 years ago, the *conventional wisdom* was that the universe revolved around the Earth. (In 1514 Nicolaus Copernicus published his "Commentariolus", a short, handwritten text describing his ideas about the heliocentric hypothesis and the rest was history ). We can look back now and see the folly of the church, scientific community, and laymen believing in the geocentric universe theory. With our hind sight, we can also see the arrogance of the belief that humans (and earth by implication) were the center of the universe. It is easy to see how humans who were ignorant in astronomy filled that vacuum with an anthropocentric belief. There is also an underlying arrogance in the evolution and ID "debate". The arrogance stems from our assuming we know more than we do about science in general and evolution in specific. The ID crowd point to the holes in evolution theory as if that in itself were meaningful. Both sides do not embrace our ignorance. Until we know more, all we will have is theory which in all likelihood will see changes as time goes by. The pro-evolution crowd should just say that the currently state evolution theory is our best hypothesis given what we know. Nothing more or less. The ID crowd should stop trying to box up evolution and to have the final word on it. Religious IDers see their faith as a set of absolute, unchallengable "facts". Applying this perspective to evolution show their lack of a need to be grounded in scientific thinking. The religious crowd also have some seriously unreasonable expectations about the bible wrt explaining the underlying science of the world in which we live. The Old Testament was written by and for a bunch of uneducated goat herders (no offense meant). God could have explained the Big Bang Theory, evolution, dinosaurs, etc. but it all would have been lost on his/her audience. To expect more scientic teaching from the bible is untenable.
I haven't really decided yet, but I probably fall into either camp II or camp I c. The troika that you mentioned seems mostly to be evidence in support of the concept in I c, and not so much a complete idea in and of itself. Basically, I think that the species did evolve, just that the process that made them evolve was not random mutation and natural selection, but rather a guided evolution. Whether that qualifies me as a believer in ID I will leave up to you.
Since when was evolution factual? Small changes do occur yes, but have you ever seen a half-man and half-ape? Evolution is specualtion. Something cannot come from nothing, but evolution teaches the opposite.
The sun creates 4.0E023 kilowatts of energy per second. Of course, only 1 100th of 1,000,000th of that reaches earth. Assuming the same has produced the same amount of energy for the last 4.5 billion years of it's existence you are left with the following equation: (4.0E023 kilowatts) * 4.5 billion years * .000000001 = 5.68024668 × 10<sup>34</sup> joules That's a whole hell of alot of nothing to make something out of. This doesn't include alternate energy sources, such as the energy produced from the pressure of gravity which heats the earth's core, or the random natural flux of cosmic rays or even the microwave background radiation. Perhaps you might try looking into causes for the extinction of Homo sapiens neanderthalensis if you really care to have your question answered perfectly rationally in a framework consistent with evolution. I've never seen a dinosaur walking around, but given the wealth of fossilized remains, I can say that either they really existed, or someone/something has really gone to a lot of trouble to **** with my mind. Scientists don't believe something simply because they want to. The whole history of science is full of people discovering that evidence points to a truth which conflicts with orthodoxy, and orthodoxy giving way to the truth in the face of the facts. Case in point is quantum mechanics. The people who invented quantum mechanics either thought it was stupid and ugly and wanted to get rid of it or they took perverse pleasure in the fact that it was incomprehensible and almost treated it as a joke. Nevertheless, evidence fits the model, and so people held their noses and accepted it as true or at least an approximation which makes reliable predictions about the truth. As a result you get plastics, CD players, TV's and a million other things that you use every day. Nobody had ever seen an atom on August 6th 1945, but that didn't save them from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. They couldn't say "I don't believe in atoms, because nobody's ever seen one." and magically survive being nuked. Things exist whether they are proven or not. The truth exists even if you don't like it. We’re working on the experiment right now to prove evolution, but you’ll have to wait awhile, like several million years for the definitive evidence. Until then “unproven” doesn’t equal “wrong”, and claiming so is a red herring.
So in otherwords bad design is a proof of a designer? The opposite isn't true as there are dolphin precursor fossils. While you are correct in noting that the consequences they are found leaves room for doubt but again there's a high plausibility that they are given similar morphogenic features. As far as they being found with terrestial animals that makes perfect sense since dolphins descended from terrestial animals. Why else would they breathe air. As I've said all along though that is a misunderstanding of science. The point of science isn't a matter of embracing bias but of weeding out bias. I've never said that ID is absolute untrue or Evolution is absolutely true only that the scientific method shows Evolution to be the most plausible. To the extent that I'm biased is that I'm biased in regard to Occams Razor and empiracism over the metaphysical. How this works is that it seems more likely that speciation occured by random mutation and adaption because there are independent supports to those process apart from Evolutionary theory. OTOH I see no independent evidence supporting an intelligent designer(s) other than merely stating that because we have complexity it must be the work of a designer. That's a circular argument. I'll repeat the same criteria I have to every other ID proponent. Show me independent empiracal evidence of a designer(s) and their methods and I will consider ID to be scientifically plausible.
For creationists - Answers in Genesis, a young earth creationist site, has a page of Arguements we think that creationists shouldn't use. You might want to use them as a source to vet the value of your arguements from the point of view of strict Genesis 6,000-old universe adherents before you make them.
