6 days Creation

[da_man1974]

3 hours ago, Enoch2021 said:

Again, I don't "believe" it's Flat, I "Know" it's: Flat, Non-Spinning, and Domed.

 

regards

Do anyone who disagrees with you is wrong?

[Kevinb]

6 hours ago, Tristen said:

“Demonstrate design. How do you prove a being did it? How do you falsify a designer designing?  Is this an unsubstantiated assertion per chance?”

 

As framed, it is an unsupported assertion. Though the point was not garnish your uncritical acceptance, but to show that there is an alternative way to interpret the same facts. 

As I said could we explore the design alternative? To clarify you admit it's an unframed assertion? Can you...“Demonstrate design. How do you prove a being did it? How do you falsify a designer designing?  I'd love to know if there are better arguments as all I have seen is things like irreducible complexity..examples put forward nailed nicely at dover and it looks designed just like a car looks designed equivocation fallacy argument from analogy stuff. You may have more?  This is all I've seen so far though. 

The dover trial well I watched documentaries on you tube on it and interviews of those in on both sides. As you know it was effectively creation design stuff vs evolution by natural selection (including macro of course)Apparently I can't embed you tube here as it will get deleted. Anyway maybe search and watch if you're interested? Essentially all those involved on the evolution side were able to demonstrate the science of evolution..How to correctly interpret the evidence...how the evidence was found. How it follows the scientific method..how it makes prediction..how it's falsifiable... Where as the design creation stuff isn't..this is why the judge concluded it's not scientific and one must stay in science class and the other must not. Such that one is scientific and the other is religious..very brief overview. Anyway you know the result. Hours of footage to see including follow up lectures by guys like ken Miller ( who is religious btw )who were involved to present evolutions case.

 

Edited August 11, 2017 by Kevinb

[Kevinb]

7 hours ago, Tristen said:

Claiming scientific confidence in any past claim based on consistency between the facts and the model therefore commits the logic fallacy Affirming the Consequent. Confidence in past claims (as with supernatural claims) requires faith.

What other better modelling do we have? This is not saying 100% certainty even if we're talking gravity or germ theory of disease which we agree on. However I don't need to add supernatural claims in my position. That's an addition by faith...belief without evidence. Else demonstrate supernatural claims demonstrably. This is the distinction when you say they both need faith. 

[Tristen]

10 hours ago, one.opinion said:

I see your fallacy of my fallacy and raise it with an "overgeneralization" fallacy. In all seriousness, ignoring the meaning of scientific consensus doesn't mean it isn't valid.

Hi again One,

“ignoring the meaning of scientific consensus doesn't mean it isn't valid”

Deriving confidence through any kind of consensus is logically fallacious; and therefore technically irrational. If someone makes a claim, no matter what their credentials or how many people agree, they are rationally obligated to support the claim with argument and/or evidence.

 

“Do you have any examples of recent majority scientific opinions that have been overturned?”

Off the top of my head, the scientific community used to think stomach ulcers were from stress, and they mocked the scientist who eventually discovered it was due more to bacteria.

 

“Luckily, the assumptions have proved accurate. Otherwise, give some examples that they have been in error.”

Good. So it’s important to remember that if any of these assumptions can’t be trusted, then the entire method fails reliability – or else how do we know which “ages” are valid, and which are not (apart, of course, from that fact that they agree with what we want).

I’ll start by dealing with the assumption of knowing the original conditions. Obviously there are many different methods which work different ways. I am only providing “some examples” as requested.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0012821X69901605

I think this might be behind a paywall, but there’s enough information in the abstract to demonstrate the point that the assumption of initial isotope ratios was not as expected (from recent lava flows of known age).

I’ve noticed a few people mention isochron dating in this thread. One of the main weaknesses of isochron dating is that there is no objective way to distinguish between a true isochron and a mixing line. A mixing line is a form of contamination at the point of rock formation that results in the same kind of straight line as an isochron, but has absolutely nothing to do with time. Again, whether a line is accepted as an isochron, or rejected as a mixing line seems to depend entirely upon whether the calculated “ages” meet secular expectations.

In the textbook “Principles of isochron geology” (by Gunter Faure), There is a list of rubidium-strontium isochron “dates” rejected because they clearly didn’t conform to expectation.

“Pleistocene to Recent (<1.6 million years old)

- lava with a Rb/Sr age of 773 million years (Bell K, Powell JL: “Strontium isotopic studies of alkalic rocks: The potassium-rich lavas of the Birunga and Toro-Ankole Regions, east and central Africa.” J Petrol 1969;10:536-72)

upper Miocene to Pliocene (5-9 million years old by K/Ar dating)

- lava with a Rb/Sr age of 31-39 million years (Dickinson DR, Dodson Mn, Gass IG, Rex DC: “Correlation of initial 87Sr/86Sr with Rb/Sr in some late Tertiary volcanic rocks of south Arabia.” Earth Planet Sci Lett 1969;6:84-90);

Pliocene to Holocene (<5.3 million years old)

- lava giving Rb/Sr ages of 570 and 870 million years (the 570 million year “isochron” is apparently from <3000 year old lava). Leeman WP, Manton WI: “Strontium isotopic composition of basaltic lavas from the Snake River Plain, southern Idaho.” Earth Planet Sci Lett 1971;11:420-34)

Miocene to Holocene (<24 million years old)

- volcanic rock with a Rb/Sr age of 1.2 billion years (Duncan RA, Compston W: “Sr-isotopic evidence for an old mantle source region for French Polynesian vulcanism.” Geology 1976;4:728-32).

Pliocene to Holocene (<5.3 million years old)

- lava with a Rb/Sr age of 1.5 billion years (Leeman WP: “Late Cenozoic alkalirich basalt from the western Grand Canyon area, Utah and Arizona: Isotopic composition of strontium.” Bull Geol Soc Am 1974;85: 1691-6)” (I got this info from a paper by Paul Giem “Isochron Dating”).

Sometimes isochron “dating” even yields negative values – i.e. the sample are dated into the future (called “futurechrons”) - which are rejected because they obviously don’t conform to expectation.

Note that none of this is new news, but for some reason these results don’t seem to have filtered through to the popular impression.

 

“As part of a bigger picture, both humans and animals (and plants, for that matter) would almost certainly have to have been miraculously transported to Australia and the Americas for repopulation of these areas to have occurred in the last 4,000 years”

I’d have to here your justification for this before responding.

 

“I will continue to side with the overwhelming scientific consensus”

That is not a rational approach. I’m not criticising your agreement with their preferred model, but that you are choosing to place confidence in consensus.

 

“Let's look at a hypothetical situation. I never got into it, but many people enjoy "Antiques Road Show" and the like. If someone had a Civil War artifact and got 100 experts to look at it and evaluate it. Ninety-nine experts confirm its authenticity and assign it a value ranging from $7,500 - $10,000 dollars. One expert says it has all the appearances of age, but it is clearly not authentic and says it is worth 50 cents. Would you say "There is a difference of opinion, so obviously both opinions are equally viable!"?”

I would say “equally” irrelevant without rational justification. If I was a buyer, and one expert said the artefact is not authentic, then I want to know why. Maybe the one expert knows something the others don’t, or notices something the others missed.  Logically, it is possible for 99% of experts to  be wrong. So consensus alone is insufficient to logically justify confidence.

 

“I never said that our ancestors (at least Biblical ancestors) were animals or implied anything about a lack of intelligence. In fact, I would posit that in some ways, their intellectual abilities surpassed modern ones, such as memory for oral tradition. What I said was that they didn't have the framework. Should the Bible have said "In about 5500 years, some guys named Hooke and van Leeuwenhoek will make some really important discoveries with this thing called a microscope... and then this will all make sense..."?”

No, but the Bible could have said, “God created the universe an immensely long time ago. After the earth formed, the conditions for life arose. Over time, life underwent a series of changes until finally, after a prolonged period of competition, death and suffering, humans arrived on the scene.” – if that’s the way it really happened. There is no intellectual basis for being untruthful about the true origins of life and the universe.

 

“They perceive the Bible at odds with reality when people stick blindly to things like a flat earth and geocentricism based on misinterpretation of the Bible. And without a gentler way to put it, forgive me, adherence to young earth creation is falling into the same category”

Such an assertion is utterly meaningless in the absence of rational justification.

 

 

[Tristen]

7 hours ago, one.opinion said:

Quick question: is this your own analysis, or have you read this in someone else's analysis?

It's not my own research - if that's what you mean. But there's a clear line of reducing confidence in the claim of a chromosome fusion as technology improves. Interestingly, I haven't heard any secular updates on this subject since the advent of Next Generation Sequencing (which permits whole genome sequences relatively cheaply). This kind of analysis would be important, as previous chimp genomes were built around a human genome scaffold. I know there's a creationist study that analyzed the relevant sections of the human chromosme, finding no justification for assuming fused telomeres or a silenced centromere. For example, human telomeres are saturated with characteristic short repeats. In the 30kb region designated a fused telomere, there should be at least 1600 copies. They found 34 - which makes it not significantly different from non-telomeric regions of the genome.

Note that no fusion was observed. So all we really have is that the human chromosome is organised differently to the associated chimp chromosomes. And even if a fusion did happen, the facts would only suggest it happened in humans - so doesn't actually speak to a relationship between humans and apes.

[Kevinb]

7 hours ago, one.opinion said:

Did we? Or did we just find a perfectly functional human chromosome organised in such a way as to contain similar information as found in two primate chromosomes. Early reports claiming an alleged fusion were based on molecular techniques with low resolutions (i.e. not genetic sequences). As sequencing resolution improved, it has become clear that the supposedly fused telomeres (chromosome ends) don’t actually look like telomeres, and the supposedly silenced centromere doesn’t look like a centromere. As early as 2002, a paper was released that described the telomeres, over and over again as “degenerate”. They claimed, “The arrays were originally true terminal arrays that degenerated rapidly after the fusion” – which is code for, ‘we still like to think that they are fusion points even though they have deteriorated beyond recognition’. (http://genome.cshlp.org/content/12/11/1651.long ). See how an adherence to paradigm trumps the facts.

This analysis supports evolution. The fused ape chromosomes of 14 and 15 off the top of my head. Even if there is some degenerate we are still confirming a fusion here and of these chromosome as the report explains. This is the kinda thing evolution predicts. It didn't have to be there at all of course which would have then not helped a common ancestry case. Creationists clearly must just attempt a dispute as evolution and macro wouldn't be consistent with their view of scriptural statements. In any case we are back to demonstrate God made and designed it. Demonstrate the supernatural. However you want to interpret evidence religion then adds supernatural..miracles.. different lifeforms poofing into being and such. 

[one.opinion]

55 minutes ago, Tristen said:

I know there's a creationist study that analyzed the relevant sections of the human chromosme, finding no justification for assuming fused telomeres or a silenced centromere.

You're probably thinking of Dr. Jeffrey Tomkins, researcher at ICR. He does some good work and raises some good questions. I asked the question earlier (if it was your analysis and conclusion or someone else's) because it looked like you were drawing too much meaning from the word "degenerate". If I look at an old, mold-covered fruit in the back of my crisper drawer, I could probably say it has degenerated while still being able to identify it. Degeneration doesn't suggest in any way that expected sequence similarity is completely lacking, it has just deteriorated over time. These sequences are vital to the extension of telomeres when in the right chromosome context to carry out their functions, but clearly can no longer fulfill their role if they have lost their normal position. A certain amount of degeneration is certainly expected, especially after the millions of years between the proposed fusion event and today.

Here is a reasonably thorough and fair analysis: https://hmcgq.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/chromosome-2-fusion/

[Tristen]

3 hours ago, Kevinb said:

What other better modelling do we have? This is not saying 100% certainty even if we're talking gravity or germ theory of disease which we agree on. However I don't need to add supernatural claims in my position. That's an addition by faith...belief without evidence. Else demonstrate supernatural claims demonstrably. This is the distinction when you say they both need faith. 

Hi again Kevin,

“To clarify you admit it's an unframed assertion?”

I presented an alternate explanation of the same presented facts; namely, that if a trait is functional (like fins in dolphins), its existence can be just as readily be interpreted to be a result of design, as it can a result of evolution. The factor determining which conclusion you prefer is the presupposed paradigm through which you consider the evidence. It doesn’t just work one way.

But yes, I framed it as an unsupported assertion. I apparently should have spelled out my intent more clearly.

 

“Can you...“Demonstrate design”

I can provide an argument supporting design. I can provide evidence consistent with design. Can you demonstrate macro-evolution? Can you demonstrate Common Ancestry, or Big Bang, or Cosmological Inflation, or Abiogenesis?

 

“How do you prove a being did it? How do you falsify a designer designing?”

You can’t “prove” anything beyond mathematics and logic algorithm. You cannot falsify any claim of the unobserved past or the supernatural. The questions are spurious.

 

“Anyway maybe search and watch if you're interested? Essentially all those involved on the evolution side were able to demonstrate the science of evolution..How to correctly interpret the evidence...how the evidence was found. How it follows the scientific method..how it makes prediction..how it's falsifiable... Where as the design creation stuff isn't”

I would be happy to consider any arguments you found compelling.

 

“this is why the judge concluded it's not scientific”

The same logic is applied to both. I come to my own conclusions based on my own study. Judges are human, and also therefore have biases.

 

“What other better modelling do we have?”

I’m not claiming there’s a better way to investigate the past. I’m just saying there are logical limitations on how much, and what kinds of, confidence can be derived from investigations of the past. The same criticisms you attribute to religious bias apply equally to secular bias.

 

“However I don't need to add supernatural claims in my position”

This statement may betray a motive to explain reality without God (the only reason you might consider it superior), but doesn’t actually speak to the truth or untruth of Gods existence.

 

“an addition by faith...belief without evidence”

No more than Big Bang, or Cosmological Inflation, or that life arose from non-life, or that all life is related through a common ancestor, or that the diversity of life stems from macro-evolution. Neither the past, nor supernatural can be observed. These claims are therefore evidenced indirectly – i.e. through supporting the models incorporating the claims (i.e. by comparing the available facts for consistency to the model). None of the above secular claims of history have been observed. They are accepted because facts have been interpreted to support the models which incorporate them. Thereby confidence in the model equates to confidence in the model's claims - despite the specific claims themselves being unsupported by observation. The identical logical methodology is applied to supernatural claims, claims of Biblical history, and claims of secular history. It requires faith from both paradigms.  Therefore none of them are “without evidence”, but the evidence is indirect for all of them.

 

“Else demonstrate supernatural claims demonstrably. This is the distinction when you say they both need faith”

There is no actual “distinction”. Claims which cannot be directly observed (because they are claims about the past or supernatural claims) can only generate legitimate confidence through faith. It is not scientific confidence because there is no way to conduct experiments in the past, or measure the supernatural.

 

 

[Tristen]

1 hour ago, one.opinion said:

You're probably thinking of Dr. Jeffrey Tomkins, researcher at ICR. He does some good work and raises some good questions. I asked the question earlier (if it was your analysis and conclusion or someone else's) because it looked like you were drawing too much meaning from the word "degenerate". If I look at an old, mold-covered fruit in the back of my crisper drawer, I could probably say it has degenerated while still being able to identify it. Degeneration doesn't suggest in any way that expected sequence similarity is completely lacking, it has just deteriorated over time. These sequences are vital to the extension of telomeres when in the right chromosome context to carry out their functions, but clearly can no longer fulfill their role if they have lost their normal position. A certain amount of degeneration is certainly expected, especially after the millions of years between the proposed fusion event and today.

Here is a reasonably thorough and fair analysis: https://hmcgq.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/chromosome-2-fusion/

There was a nearly 10-fold divergence from what they expected to observe in typical telomeres - attributed to "a high rate of change"; prompting them to ask, " If the fusion occurred within the telomeric repeat arrays less than ∼6 Mya, why are the arrays at the fusion site so degenerate?"

[one.opinion]

4 minutes ago, Tristen said:

There was a nearly 10-fold divergence from what they expected to observe in typical telomeres - attributed to "a high rate of change"; prompting them to ask, " If the fusion occurred within the telomeric repeat arrays less than ∼6 Mya, why are the arrays at the fusion site so degenerate?"

Ok, so let's just say it diverged more than expected, how is that evidence that it didn't occur? Tomkins' own research shows sequence similarities between 45% and 50% to the highly repeated telomere sequence, which is quite high, as far as DNA sequence comparisons go.

 

I forgot to mention this earlier about radiometric dating. What you may have noticed as you collected your examples of inconsistencies is that they are all rather outdated. The precision and accuracy of dating have improved (as one would expect) since those anomalies 40-50 years ago.