Originally Posted by
Ryan R
That being said, you should have taken to heart my caution not to be so irresponsible with how you treat Scripture. When I stated that Scripture cannot be revised your retort blames Scripture for crimes committed against God and man primarily through a satanic institution that you refer to as “the church.”
At the end of the day man-made institutions are made up of men whose individual interpretations agree with the majority of whatever group they are in. As Crawfish has pointed out before, everyone interprets scripture. . .but I think I'll leave this for your other proposed thread. Suffice it to say that viewing the Creation account as semi-poetic vs. strict historical narrative does not "distort" God's word, nor does it constitute "revision".
If you aren’t going to acknowledge this fundamental point then I have nothing more to say to you on this topic.
One of the "traditions of man" is the scientific method, and the scientific method, for lack of a better word, simply works. You depend on it working every time you drive your car, type a word on a keyboard, turn on a light switch, take a pill, check the weather, or take a bite to eat. That method, that "tradition of man", has been telling us things about the universe that we've used to build things that are really useful and downright nifty, and these things actually function, they do what that tradition tells us they should do.
It works because God created a consistently orderly universe, He was, in fact, so confident in that universe that He told us we could actually learn about Him by studying it (Rom. 1:20). If your interpretation is truth and it conflicts with observation what does this tell us about God? Did He build a deceptive universe? Are you willing to take this "all the way"? By that I mean that, if your interpretation of scripture and science disagreed on EVERY point would you still refuse to take a second look at that interpretation?
It doesn’t work to say “scientists changed the way they think about fossilization based on evidence” in reference to the discovery of soft tissue, because the evidence is that it is impossible, demonstrated by the experts saying "Impossible!" when they first heard about it. Accepting the impossible as though it were possible is not the same as changing based on the evidence, but despite it.
Some scientists reacted to the big bang and even heliocentrism as "impossible!", going on the initial reaction of a selected number of scientists snipped from various headlines is not an argument. By this same standard couldn't I also say the flood or a 6,000 year old earth is impossible since scientists routinely say it is so?
As for radiometric dating, my argument was that it is untrustworthy because it fails its field testing. By assuring me that it can’t even be verified by being tested does not weaken my argument.
I didn't say it can't be verified, I said the tests you are referring to were done with the knowledge that they were going to get an inaccurate result because they were not using the method properly. Austin had to know this because the lab he used made it abundantly clear that their equipment wasn't sensitive enough to test materials under two million years old, they only reason one would then send a twenty year old sample to them is to knowingly get a wrong result and then dishonestly hold that up as an example of the testing method being inaccurate.
This is very comparable to someone doing a long division problem, forgetting to bring down a number after subtracting, getting a wrong answer and then proclaiming that they have proven that long division doesn't work. No matter how loudly they might protest about long division being falsified they are still going to fail their math test.
This being said, I stand by my point that the evolutionary ornithologists such as Larry Martin and Allan Feduccia who do oppose it are more in the know than a lot of those who popularize its acceptance.
They can hold out for their hypothetical Archosaur all they want, until someone actually digs them up some non-theropod transitional fossils they're going to remain a minority. You may also want to look into some of Feduccia's comments about YEC's using his work before using him as a source elsewhere. . .just a heads up.
As for polystrate fossils that took millions of years to cover, my example is Joggins fossil cliffs. Apparently this area took 10 million years to cover, and I am assuming that the forest was one, intact forest when it was covered. If this is not a fair assumption, then to take a single example of a polystrate tree should take about 100,000 years to cover (
http://biblicalgeology.net/Answer/Po...e-fossils.html).
Whew, that was confusing. The article you sited is talking about a formation in South Wales not the Joggins fossil cliffs that are located in Nova Scotia. The dead give away that this is an outdated quote is when the authority (Derek Ager) is described as “. . . trained under strict Lyellian uniformitarianism”. Current geologists no longer use strict Lyellian concepts of uniformitarianism and haven’t for quite a while. . .in fact, even Lyell didn’t adhere to strict Lyellian uniformitarianism."Some geologists of Lyell's school did indeed carry things too far, and insist on only slow, gradual processes. The residue of that, in the 1900's, was mostly the attitude that catastrophe explanations should not be used until other explanations were ruled out. But it's not worth arguing about the views of long-dead scientists. The important point is what living ones say.
"They know from recent history that volcanoes can make abrupt changes to landscapes, and that a river flood can dump yards of mud in the space of days. So, it is obvious that some rocks formed more quickly than others. Lyell himself said so in 1830 in his Principles of Geology.
"In the last few decades, there has been much more appreciation of this variability of rate. We now explain the scablands of Washington by the sudden bursting of a huge glacial dam. It is now a common idea that a meteorite killed off the dinosaurs. We also appreciate that conditions were once different. For instance, the atmosphere of the early earth had no free oxygen.
"So, modern geology is not just about slow, gradual processes. That said, it is clear that slow processes exist. For instance, the Santa Barbara basin is today acquiring sediment at one foot per century.
"Physicists sometimes use the same word. When they use it, they mean that reality is lawful - that there is some set of laws which uniformly apply everywhere, and which have always applied."
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/c...n/uniform.html
Rapid deposition addresses the polystrate fossils found in the Joggins formation quite nicely since the polystrate fossils found therein are embedded primarily in sandstone. Trees were buried over a period of years in sediment, once completely buried they would be in an anoxic environment which would permit them to be fossilized as the surrounding sediment was compressed into sedimentary rock. If you would like to see a more in depth discussion of the Joggins fossil cliffs and how they do not support YEC or a global flood there is an excellent article here.
So I'll see your Joggins fossil cliffs and raise you a Yellow stone fossil forest.
Here we see two things; obvious examples of fast deposition caused by alternating periods of volcanic activity coupled with slow periods of gradual change in which one forest grows on top of the buried remains of the one before. It's difficult to envision a better illustration of how modern geology incorporates gradual and fast process' in explaining formations. As a bonus it also cannot be explained by a young earth or a global flood.
Evolutionary geologists assure us that when we find fossils that appears to cross strata, they are immersed in pockets that, unlike the rest of the strata, were laid down quickly. We can wholesale dismiss the application of this model to the rest of strata, however, because of an unverifiable method of dating the other rocks. This is an example of what is referred to as the rigors of unbiased scientific inquiry. I for one see some assumptions here that defy the simpler explanation.
I’m sorry, “evolutionary geologists”? Pray tell who exactly are they because I don’t recall that particular field of study. What “pockets” are you talking about? We can observe rapid deposition taking place in parts of formations today because of things like rivers or heavy rainfall, finding evidence of the same process occurring in the past is not exactly earth shattering. What “unverifiable method of dating” was used? Why is it unferifiable?
Absolutely we don’t know anything about any of these things.
That would be 100% wrong as evidenced by the theory of relativity, the addition of new elements to the periodic table as they are discovered, and our updated knowledge of the orbit of planets used to guide space craft.
Scientific inquiry requires us to make assumptions, as we aught, and make calculations accordingly to try to validate or reject these assumptions. Almost at any point there can be a thousand un-accounted for variables that affect our understanding of gravity, the solar system, the periodic table, or whatever. Sometimes a calculation can conflict with all prior assumptions in a model. If a new model is verified as working better than previous models, then whole series of previously accepted assumptions can be uprooted and replaced. The most valuable scientific discovery comes from avoiding the assumption that we know anything. This kind of rigidity is the enemy of scientific discovery.
Science is externally corrected by evidence – it’s not like our knowledge of the universe hits “reset” every time a new theory gains strength based on observation. Our knowledge is constantly increasing, not cycling around in some kind of limbo of knowledge where we are required to throw up our hands in frustration and announce that nothing can be known.
It is not true that only a handful of species could fit on the arc, there’s room, just do the math. Baby animals are almost all very small and eat very little, if the larger species (elephants, brachiosaurus, etc) were taken that way.
No one has done the math and been able to cram every land animal into the ark. Even Woodmorappe had to exclude all the the invertebrates (There are over 2,000 species of land invertebrates in the Galapagos Islands alone!) and use genera, not species, and even then he had to rely on highly questionable methods to fit everything. Baby animals require a great deal of care, ever been to the San Diego Wild Animal Park? Notice how much effort it takes to raise wild animals so that they can survive in the wild?
Anything that can breed and produce fertile offspring is the same species, and was complete with the genetic variability capable of producing the diversity that we see today. It was present both on the land at the time (as we find in the fossil record) and reproduced after the arc landed.
There is no “bottleneck” within the fossil record corresponding with a YECGF (Young Earth Creationist Global Flood) model.
This is not microevolution. Microevolution is as impossible as macroevolution. Variability exists in the genome but change is only possible through random mutation. Microevolution implies the genome is gaining information. This is not what we observe and defies entropy.
You’ve managed to misapply information theory and entropy in the same paragraph. We’ve recently observed bacteria evolve the ability to digest nylon through random mutation. “Information” was most definitely “added” as these bacteria can now do something no bacteria in the history of the universe was capable of doing before. The ability to digest nylon did not “exist in the genome”, it evolved.
Unless you are going to radically redefine entropy any 2nd law of thermodynamic arguments are useless. . .actually they would be useless even if you could figure out how to apply the principle of entropy to biological systems since earth is not a closed system. I've had this argument before here, and to save time I'll quote myself from a different thread.
"The 2nd law deals with heat (that's the "thermo" part of it's name) and entropy (heat absorbed in a process). Basically it states that heat will not freely flow from a colder body to a warmer one, and that the amount of heat being used up will not decrease in a closed system. As an example, if you leave a hot cup of coffee out it will lose heat and, eventually, get cold. In a closed system with no energy input your cup of coffee is not going to spontaneously heat itself back up much to the chagrin of those who spend too long typing out long posts instead of drinking their coffee while it's warm.
"People who argue against evolution mistakenly apply the concept of entropy as applicable to biological systems on earth. Entropy isn't an actual property of matter but rather a measurement of irreversable disorder. For instance, when we talk about the entropy of a gas we're talking about a measure of disorder in the distribution and movement of molecules within whatever volume that gas occupies. This level of energy loss/disorder can't spontaneously reverse itself in a closed system. But if you keep dumping energy into that system entropy can increase, decrease, or stay the same depending on the system. Lets go back to our coffee example, in a closed system if you leave your coffee out it's heat will dissipate and it will not spontaneously heat itself back up. However, you can heat up your cold coffee in a microwave, you can also go outside during the day and see earth's microwave; the sun. Input of energy across a system's boundary (be it a coffee cup or earth's atmosphere) can overcome entropy. Not a closed system = 2nd law not applicable. The earth is not a closed system."
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