Creation vs. Evolution

[deco_martini]

In the Bible they knew how to settle disputes like this. Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal to see whose god was real. Elijah and the prophets both setup altars. Each was given animal flesh for their altar. The winner was whoever could get their god to light their altar fire for them.

The Baal prophets prayed, fasted, danced, sang, and even cut themselves to no avail.

Elijah had his altar's wood repeatedly doused in water. He had a trench filled with water made around the altar (so it would be apparent he hadn't set the fire himself). He prayed to Jehovah and BAM, fire.

This was how these things were settled in the Bible. Now, there is a concept called eating your own dogfood. This means if you believe in something you should practice it or use it yourself. Hence, I have updated the Elijah challenge for modern times.

Two charcoal grills are setup and filled with charcoal.

The God grill:
The God grill will have its charcoal soaked with water. The creationist is allow to pray for God to light his grill.

The Science grill:
The science grill will be filled with charcoal. The science advocate will be given a tin of lighter fluid and a box of matches since the scientific method has shown that through repeated observation and testing, a flammable agent and a lighting mechanism will make charcoal burn.

Choice t-bone steaks are placed upon each grill. Once a grill catches flame, the person who represents that grill may season and cook it to taste and remove it when they consider it done. At the end of one hour, each griller has to eat their steak as it is.

Thus far I have never had a creation advocate accept this challenge. I guess they don't like those parts of the old testament as much as Genesis.

*After the contest, Elijah had the rival religious groups leaders' murdered. He then raced a chariot onfoot for miles and won. (seriously, 1st Kings 18)

 

[Thalassamania]

But I really do like Steak Tartar.

 

[Soggy]

Mmmm.....steak.

 

[Thalassamania]

Down boy, you need to get better first.

 

[Theunis]

I do have a serious question. Don't you as atheist think the following is applicable on you?

2 Peter 1: But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.

I can't see how you cannot believe in God. Please explain this to me.

 

[Sas]

I do have a serious question. Don't you as atheist think the following is applicable on you?

2 Peter 1: But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.

No, because I don't believe in God so therefore I don't believe in heresies or that I will incur the wrath of God.

I can't see how you cannot believe in God. Please explain this to me.

Well define 'God'. There are many different beliefs about what this means. However I'll answer the question for any God: There is no evidence of anything supernatural or godlike in the world that has been demonstrated by a scientific experiment that has been reproduceable. None at all. So why would one believe in God? Especially the Christian one which says that I am a terrible sinner for just being who I was born as...

 

[Sordello]

 

[adurso]

I do have a serious question. Don't you as atheist think the following is applicable on you?

2 Peter 1: But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.

I can't see how you cannot believe in God. Please explain this to me.

May I assume this means that anyone not a Christian is damned to swift destruction?
Is the Flying Spaghetti Monster a heresy?
Are Wiccans heretics?
Are the various Native American beliefs causing them damnation?
Every time someone shot at me I called upon Ghu, Jehovah, God, Mr. Wizard and everyone and everything else I could think of to keep me safe; am I a heretic?

 

[Warthaug]

I've already admitted I'm not a biologist and therefore "ignorant" in regard to some issues. I was speaking more about albinoism, discoloration, size, and large scale observable deformities etc. Usually animals with deficiencies like these don't reach sexual maturity due to survival of the fittest.

And severe mutations like those are only a small portion of the detrimental ones (aside from albinism, which is not all that serious of a condition, with many albinic animals being observed to reach sexual maturity in the wild).

The vast majority of detrimental mutations are minor - small decreases in biochemical efficiency, minor immune suppression, etc. The reason is simple - most things which are more severe don't make it to birth.

And the same is true of beneficial mutations; most are small in scale - a variant of an HLA that allows you to deal with a new pathogen, an expansion of the substrates an enzyme can act against, etc.

Hugely advantageous or disadvantageous mutations are rare. The vast majority of evolutionary change occurs through a series of small mutations, built up over time. Large jumps simply don't occur - even PE takes place over dozens or more generations.

Bottom line, I've observed nature all my life and have read about adaptations and small mutations. Still, I've yet to see a large genetic mutation on anything that benefitted the animal. Two heads still aren't better than one.

And once again you've proven you don't have a working understanding of evolution. Any change which would produce large-scale evolution of an organism we can see with our eyes, in our lifetimes, would be all but a disproof of evolution. Evolution is slow, taking place over hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of generations. I cannot think of a single thing we can see with the naked eye that reproduces fast enough for large changes like the ones you describe to be visible in one human generation. There is one exception to this, which I'll return to in a moment...

But there are examples of huge morphological changes in smaller organisms, driven over the expected number of generations by the usual evolutionary drives. I already provided citations for a species which underwent an unicellular to multicellular phenotype - a dramatic change in phenotype. Likewise, huge changes in viral and bacterial morphology have been observed; all taking place over the expected number of generations:

Shikano, S., L. S. Luckinbill and Y. Kurihara. 1990. Changes of traits in a bacterial population associated with protozoal predation. Microbial Ecology. 20:75-84

Now, for that exception I mentioned. Plants have an unusual ability to undergo "spontanious speciation" through the duplication of most/all their chromosomes (often followed by a rapid pruning of parts of the replicated chromosomes). This not only produces a new species in one generation, but also leads to large changes in the phenotype of the plant. For example, the first case of observed speciation (O Lamarckinia to O Gigas; DeVries, 1905) saw a large change in the phenotype of the plant; notably in the size and number of flowers.

Once again proving, you are free to believe what you want so long as you ignore the relevant facts...

Bryan

 

[Warthaug]

Other than sedimentary rock formatit the ons on every mountain, field and valley in the world. Couple that with mollusk and fish fossils just about everywhere. BTW, as a Christian I believe Genesis 1:1...every miracle that came after that is a piece of cake including the amount of water needed to flood the planet.

You know, I always have to laugh when creationists quote the presence of sedimentary rock as some sort of evidence of a massive flood. When I was a kid the farm I worked on (and the city I lived in) suffered a large flood. This produced a small "lake" on the farm that lasted for several months. When it drained all of the dead animals, farm implements, plants, etc, were all jumbled togeather; not deposited in anything representing sedimentary layers. And anyone else who's seen a flood has seen the exact same thing. Even density (assuming a large enough water column to allow density sorting) cannot account for it.

My favorite example of this is the sorting of radioisotopes in the sedimentary layers. Take uranium-lead dating as an example. Uranium has a density of ~18,900 kg/m³, while lead has a density of 11,340kg/m³. What this means, is that in the event of density-based flood deposition we should see more uranium in the deep layers than in the upper layers, as it would settle faster than lead.

Thing is, we see the exact, polar opposite. There is more uranium in the upper layers than in deeper layers. Your flood model cannot explain that, but it is completely consistent with a model of slow deposition followed by radioactive breakdown.

There are stories in almost every culture, in disparate parts of the globe that talk about a great flood.

And, if you read Jarad Diamonds "Guns Germs and Steel" you'll find the explanation for that - accompanied by a slew of data explaining it. I'll give you a hint - there were floods; they weren't global, but to populations who had a home range of a few dozen km, they seemed global...

2. Again there's evidence but not a lot of time spent examing it. Science today loves to measure age of fossils as determing the age of the Earth. They completely ignore any evidence to the contrary or dismiss it as Christian Bias.

LOL, so its all a conspiracy then <sound of hand slapping head>. Of course, the only fossils used to date strata are those who've previously been dated using alternate techniques - like radiodating.

Strange, that we would use things with a proven age to date things of unknown age

3. You say this despite the fact that modern man can be traced to a single mother about 150000 -200K years ago?

Not exactly; "mitochondrial eve" was not a single human, but rather a population. Regardless, they were already human - Homo sapiens - not some progenitor "kind". Keep in mind that by your own definition "kind" would be family level or higher; so we'd be talking about speciation from a common ancestor to create humans, chimps and bonobos at the very least. We shared out last common ancestor with chimps 4-6 million years ago; far, far, far longer than creationist models allow for.

BTW, saw this on the discovery channel. The gene is dubbed the Eve gene and is shared by everyone.

Which gene? Mitochondria aren't genes, but organelles created by multiple genes. There is a gene named "eve" (even-skipped), which is involved in the formation of embryos. But its hardly unique to humans - all segmented metazoans have this gene; without it we wouldn't exist:

NCBI Sequence Viewer v2.0

Bryan

PS: Segmented metazonas would be everything from segmented worms, on up through insects, all the way to us.