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Young Earth Creationists

1001 replies

PedroPonyLikesCrisps · 28/03/2013 18:57

I know Young Earth Creationists exist, I've seen them on telly, but never met one in real life, so I'm just wondering if anyone here is one or knows one or whether they are actually just incredibly rare and reserved for extreme tv debating!

OP posts:
noblegiraffe · 19/04/2013 08:48

If your 'kinds' are simply common ancestors from the ark, then isn't that the same as what evolution says? The difference being that creationists think that the kinds were created by god, where go further to say that the kinds also have a common ancestor?

noblegiraffe · 19/04/2013 08:49

I mean we say kingdom phylum class order family genus species, and creationists simply co-opt family (or whatever) for kind?

BestValue · 19/04/2013 08:53

"Also, upthread best mentioned that some scientist thinks that even billions of years wouldn't be enough for the range of species today to have evolved from single cell organisms. But the range of species today is supposed to have evolved from the few animals that could fit on the boat in 6000 years?"

Yes, NG, from what I have heard some evolutionists say, the mutation rate is too slow for evolution to go from a single-celled organism to a human in 4 billion years. But it is fast enough to go from one cat kind to several cat species in 6,000 years.

"How do YEC explain Madagascar, with its species that are found nowhere else on Earth?"

Easy. With places like Madagascar and Australia the animals had several generations and hundreds of years after the flood to get there using land bridges during the ice age. No one is suggesting a miracle or anything other than natural processes. And no one is suggesting they got off the ark and headed straight there.

The animals who live there today are simply the only ones who survived. (Natural selection got the rest.) There may have been others in other part of the world and we would expect to find their fossils. There are in fact marsupials living today in South America and marsupial fossils are found in China.

BestValue · 19/04/2013 08:57

"The fact that "species" is often hard to define is good evidence AGAINST creationism. They insist that the Bible states that nothing changes beyond it's "kind". Something so fixed and unchanging would not be hard to define"

Don't know if you even realize you changed the words mid-argument, Ellie. "Species" is hard to define. "Kind" is not. That's evidence for my side.

BestValue · 19/04/2013 09:04

"Best Did you define macroevolution for me, as I asked? You said you accept speciation, but that's "subtly different" from macroevolution."

Ellie, I acknowledge that speciation can happen. Two populations of rabbits can be separated for so long that they can no longer interbreed (although I have my doubts, now, about whether this is actually true or whether they just have different breeding cycles.) But they will still have all the bunny parts (or they may have even lost some). They might be different colours, sizes, shapes and fur lengths but they'll be recognizable as rabbits and if you cut them open they'll have the same bunny organs inside. If they had grown a new part, that would be macroevolution.

Januarymadness · 19/04/2013 09:14

Michael Johnson did a fabulous documentry about how come Jamacans and people of Jamaican decent are so statisticly improbably good at sprinting. Well worth a watch as the theory goes its a kind of forced natural selection as a result of the slave trade. It is a very good example of how evolution may have worked over millions of years.

BestValue · 19/04/2013 09:15

"People who say they are atheists but aren't... well I could counter with people who say they are christians but aren't. There are plenty of those."

Yes, there are. And I would be just as adamant that they are logically inconsistent and irrational too - which was the point I was making.

"A change is not always a loss unless you are playing semantics. If I change my dollar bill into 100 cents, yes I have 'lost' the dollar bill if you wish but the majority of people would think you had lost the plot if you described that as a loss."

I don't think this is analogous to what is going on. The information is instructions to make body parts. In your example, you traded a dollar bill for a dollar in pennies. This would be like instructions that say:

"MAKE THE EYES BROWN"

and a mutation causes it to read:

"MAKE THE EYES BLUE."

You still get eyes, they are just a different colour. Microevolution. No one denies this.

BestValue · 19/04/2013 09:23

"Is anyone else slightly worried that the news that the definition of species is not a) particularly useful b) relevant to the ability of the theory of evolution to explain the world around us, has actually caused best some sort of injury? That was that one apoplectic outburst and now it has all gone quite...."

I went to bed, ICBINEB. But I appreciate your concern for my well-being. (I tried slashing my wrists but the blade was too dull.) And as I mentioned earlier, it wasn't the species problem per se that got me. It was he defining a species by different DNA.

Can you clear that up for me? Are there any examples of animals that are morphologically identical and can even interbreed but they have been classified as different species because of slight differences in their DNA?

BestValue · 19/04/2013 09:34

"I hit a golf ball the other day and it landed on a patch of grass. One out of how many hundreds of thousands - it just couldn't happen could it. It's so statistically improbable as to be impossible."

I'm sure mathematicians could figure out the probability of that happening and the odds are a lot better than they seem. I know you're trying to get me to say it must be possible because it happened. But you only know it happened because you witnessed it. When you make that argument for something we haven't witnessed, your argument fails.

Mathematicians say that anything with odds greater than 1 x 1050 is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. The odds of the fine-tuning without God or a multi-verse (and of life arising from non-living matter) have been calculated at much higher. Atheist Fred Hoyle's estimate for the protein of an amoeba was 1 x 1040,000. It drove him to embrace design.

BestValue · 19/04/2013 09:40

"Once again you appear to be saying it's a miracle that a universe intended for humans is just right for humans. But it wasn't 'intended' for anything."

The fine-tuning evidence indicates otherwise. It is evidence of purpose and design and it is exactly the type of evidence an atheist should embrace. They often say if they witnessed a miracle, they would believe in God. But "miracles" can be magic tricks. We can write them off as hallucinations. The mind can be fooled. Don't rely on miracles. Rely on the scientific evidence.

BestValue · 19/04/2013 09:50

"A winner isn't chosen in the lottery, otherwise someone would win every week. Are you thinking of a raffle?"

Yes, you're correct I suppose I was. But they still choose numbers so the odds are almost certain that someone will win. If no one chose the numbers one week what are the odds that anyone would win? Zero. With fine-tuning, you don't have anyone choosing the numbers.

Plus, what you are proposing fits the multi-verse hypothesis. The constants are the winning numbers and the various universes are the lottery players. If you only had one player (i.e. one universe) how likely is it that that person would win the lottery? Next to zero. If they did, you would rightly conclude that the game was rigged. A lot of physicists are concluding that the universe is rigged.

BestValue · 19/04/2013 10:01

"best your YouTube video is dismissing some study from 1997, my link was referring to something completely different from 2010."

He mentioned that one too. Right at the end before he switched topics. He said, "the article homed in on the EPAS1 gene but they did not know what the connection was between the gene and living at high altitudes."

BestValue · 19/04/2013 10:10

"best So I gave you a solid example of a beneficial mutation in a protein motor. Is that not enough? What about the fast twitch muscle mutation we heard so much about during the olympics? Are you looking for something more dramatic?"

Can you give it to me again? And the fast-twitch muscle one too? (Note that I did not say there were no beneficial mutations, just that they don't generate new information.)

"best what makes you say the universe isn't infinite?"

Depends on what you mean by infinite. If you mean infinite in size, see here:

www.redorbit.com/news/space/1112787040/universe-not-infinite-after-all-021913/

If you mean infinite in time, meaning no beginning and no end, see the big bang. Incidentally, infinity is an abstract mathematical concept but an actual infinite number of things cannot exist in reality.

PedroYoniLikesCrisps · 19/04/2013 10:13

Don't know if you even realize you changed the words mid-argument, Ellie. "Species" is hard to define. "Kind" is not. That's evidence for my side.

No isn't.

BestValue · 19/04/2013 10:18

"Isn't there a half bird half dinosaur fossil too?"

Archaeopteryx. We covered that earlier. But notice your bias even by the way you describe it. It is a bird with some reptilian features. A duck-billed platypus has the bill of a duck, a tail like beaver and feet like an otter but no one claims they are directly related to those animals. God apparently has a sense of humour and wanted to confuse atheistic evolutionists. ;^)

People say to me, "Whales have vestigial hind legs." No they don't. They have little bones where muscles attach to aid in reproduction. They're not vestigial and they were never hind legs. But you can make it sound like evolution is true just by what you name things.

PedroYoniLikesCrisps · 19/04/2013 10:27

The odds of the fine-tuning without God or a multi-verse (and of life arising from non-living matter) have been calculated at much higher.

I'll ask again then, seeing as you ignored me last time. Please explain a situation where we living beings could sit here and discuss the universe in a universe whose laws of physics don't allow the support of living beings.

And how can you possibly know that's statistically unlikely anyway. It's possible that the set of physical laws we experience in our universe are the only set of laws which it's possible to have. In that model, the chances of 'fine tuning' are 1.

But regardless of how unlikely things might be, they happened. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. And who's to say there aren't or haven't been 10^40,000 universes anyway?

This of course doesn't tell us why or even how we came to be here, but it certainly doesn't support a creation theory either. It merely demonstrates that you don't have to make a supernatural assumption.

EllieArroway · 19/04/2013 10:31

You've misunderstood me, Best - I wasn't talking about definition on a words basis, I was talking about the actual organisms, and how to group them together.

The Bible says the classification is easy - all things after their own kind. One species cannot give birth to another. This is fixed and unchanging.

If this was what we see in nature, then a species would be very easy to determine. It's not what we see in nature, so it's consequently difficult to determine. And we would expect it to be difficult, giving the shifting sands situation evolution predicts.

What we see is in line with evolution (proven, indeed, by YOUR acknowledgement that science struggles to clearly define it), not creationism and it's Biblical "kinds".

Hope that's clearer.

PedroYoniLikesCrisps · 19/04/2013 10:34

They're not vestigial and they were never hind legs.

Actually they were. The whales' ancestors came to the land and went back to the sea. On land, they had legs, back in the sea, they didn't need the legs, so they were repurposed.

But of course, your response will be that God decided with his witty sense of humour to make an animal that lives in the sea which can't breath underwater because he thought that would be fun to watch (but he loves them all the same).

backonlybriefly · 19/04/2013 10:51

I know you're trying to get me to say it must be possible because it happened.

You've misunderstood me too, Best.

Those saying it's statistically possible to hit a millions to 1 chance are right too, but that isn't my point. Those saying that perhaps the way universes work it had to go a certain way may be right too and that isn't my point either.

Mine is that it wasn't aimed at all - there was no desire to get a particular result. Now I know you won't agree with me because you are sure god wanted a particular result, but you should be able to understand what I'm saying and THEN disagree with it.

Consider a spin-the-wheel game with the numbers 1 to 99 round the outside. Spin it and you can work out the odds of getting the number you want and it's much MORE likely that you will NOT get the number you want.

Ok so far, but that only matters if you want a particular number. Suppose you don't care which number comes up? Spin it and you get a 5. So what? you could say "wow it came up as 5! how impressive is that!" but if you hadn't picked a number in advance that you wanted to come up - well some number was going to. It's not impressive then is it.

You have decided after the wheel was spun that the number that came up is the number that you want and you say that is impressive, but it isn't impressive at all.

ICBINEG · 19/04/2013 10:53

best the article you cite talks about the universe not being infinite in time...so is not really a good example of it not being infinite in size.

The consensus of scientific opinion is currently that it is both infinite in size and time, but it is still in debate.

ICBINEG · 19/04/2013 11:01

best best I would like to think some more on this issue of 'information'.

There are problems in discussing it due to the different usages of the word 'information'. I did a graduate course on information theory and so I am very aware that I might mean a different thing when I use it. So I will try to be as explicit as I can be in the following - and please lets not all go nuts over the semantics if we can possibly avoid it. I will use quote marks when I realise I am using a term that might be misinterpreted / has a different technical to layman meaning.

The key thing I would like to talk about is that information is present at very many different levels in biological systems. These levels are often about length scales / time scales.

There are several sets of information contained in DNA, and many of them are 'overloaded' (perhaps interleaved is a better layman word for this).

The main information content is in the 'words' comprising 3 base pairs that code for amino acids.

You can code for the same amino acid in different ways. It is possible for a mutation in the DNA to produce exactly the same protein when transcribed. This 'redundancy' in the system means that the DNA is carrying another layer of information in the specific coding of each amino acid currently present. This is often a control for rate of mutation as some base pair combinations are more frequently

There is also information on where to start and stop transcribing.

The same sequence can sometimes be read in different frames. Imagine reading this sentence but with each work starting with the last letter of the previous word and losing its last letter to the next. Or sometimes read in the opposite direction. So you can code for completely different things in different 'reading frames'.

There are chunks of code that are used to give a volume dial determining the rate at which a particular sequence is transcribed. This is the beginning of the next level in the hierarchy of information.

In a very real way there is no single part of the DNA code that says 'make a leg'. This is a process organised at a scale above that of individual cells. It is determined by cells communicating with each other and organising, and moving in response to chemical gradient they are setting up themselves.

This is why it is both easier and harder than you might expect to add an extra leg. It is easier because you just have to change some very small levels of specific chemicals and you can fool the organisation process. It is hard to do it in a controlled way because it depends on so many fine balances of different process all of which are coded for in all the cells involved.

You cannot give a dog wings by putting in the bits of bird DNA that code for the proteins found in wings. You have to also persuade the whole organism to 'express' wings in its development.

It is almost certain that one day there will be an ancestor of todays dogs that has wings. It will have gotten them by the slow small steps approach that currently gives us squirrels and fish that can 'nearly' fly. Flaps of skin that get bigger and bigger and then more feathery....

BestValue · 19/04/2013 11:12

"1: How do you know this, then?
2: Not true. A winner is never "chosen", quite often no one wins at all so it's goes to a roll over next week. If the lottery "chose" a winner, that would be fraud. It's all about chance - so the analogy stands."

Ellie, I addressed these in previous posts. No need to go over it again. But yes you are correct about the lottery not having a winner every week. I was a thinking of a raffle as someone pointed out. The analogy stands to "prove" a multi-verse - which I think is the point I was originally making. I just think that is less plausible than God. Others may not.

Besides, I thought it was self-evident that the universe cannot be infinite. An infinite universe would have to have been around for an infinite amount of time to give it time to expand to an infinite size. And it is not infinite in time (according to big bang data and the second law of thermodynamics). Thus time, space and matter had a beginning and must have had a cause. That cause must be, by definition, immaterial, non-spatial and timeless. (Sounds a lot like God.)

EllieArroway · 19/04/2013 11:14

That is really, really interesting, Icbineg A flying frog?

BestValue · 19/04/2013 11:21

"The consensus of scientific opinion is currently that it is both infinite in size and time, but it is still in debate."

ICBINEG, I just posted on this above but there cannot be any debate. The second law of thermodynamics prohibits an infinite universe and so do the laws of mathematics. Infinity is a concept that cannot exist in reality. And the universe is constantly cooling down, losing energy available for work and increasing in entropy. This cannot have been going on forever as the universe would be cooled down by now. Science put this question to rest unofficially in the 30s, officially in the 60s and the Bible predicted it 3,500 years ago. It is no longer an open question (no matter how much atheists would like it to be.) Even a multi-verse would require an absolute beginning.

BestValue · 19/04/2013 11:25

"Don't know if you even realize you changed the words mid-argument, Ellie. "Species" is hard to define. "Kind" is not. That's evidence for my side.
No it isn't."

Why not, Pedro? Just saying 'no it isn't' is not a logical argument. It's childish. You have to be fair and reasonable. This is why I said "kind" is more precise. And it happens to be exactly what we observe in nature.

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