I'm also curious about anyone giving an explanation for why people would have lived so much longer back in early human history. I don't think they did. It's all in how you read the genealogies. Any time genealogies become the linchpin to support a certain idea, I'd keep in mind 1 Timothy 1:3-4 and ...

If something could not have arisen randomly, how could it have arisen other than by intelligent design? By natural processes, since they can produce nonrandom results. Edit: I know you want to leave natural processes out of this in order to get things down to a dichotomy, but there's no reason for ...

Anyone who is taking a look at a system and evaluating between whether it is created by a natural process or by a designer on the grounds that those are the only two possibilities has put his or her self into a false dilemma. Precisely. It's like asking whether Mt. Rushmore was formed by ...

Natural selection can NOT operate until self-reproduction is in place. How big would the gap to that first reproductive unit have to be before you began to question if it could have come about by chance? I don't think I've ever said that I believe abiogenesis happened entirely by chance. I don't ...

In other words, there is no imaginable system that would convince you it could not have evolved through natural selection alone. Please don't presume to know what would or wouldn't convince me . I'm way more of an expert on that topic than you are. ;) If the Torah could be extracted from a genome ...

I do not question that Evolution can do some absolutely wonderful and amazing things. The question is, is there ANYTHING that natural selection can not do? Darwin said: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive ...

Those who don't give a rip about theology may want to scroll past this post. It has nothing to do with evolution or science. The problem with "Naturalistic Evolution" is that it doesn't jive theologically. By doing so, you've introduced death into the world BEFORE the fall of Man; which did not ...

Evolutionary origins are likewise tied to the philosophical idea of naturalism. No more or less than the meteorological origins of thunderstorms are tied to naturalism. There's nothing unreasonable about using meteorology to explain how rain falls while also believing that rain ultimately comes ...

God is formally referred to as He, wit ha capital H. There's no reason to change that. Was there a good reason to change to that? Capitalizing pronouns referring to deity is a fairly recent practice, and one that had its heyday a century ago. I don't see anything wrong with it, just as I have no ...

Eggs. Since chickens are a kind of domesticated fowl, by definition they didn't exist before fowls were domesticated. Many animals (reptiles, dinosaurs, other birds) were laying eggs long before chickens were bred from pheasants.

As for the reading of Genesis 1, check out this old post . Interesting. My thoughts are along the same lines, though a bit different regarding some details. A while back I wrote a fairly short essay about how I approach the Bible and creation. It deals more with the "big picture" and doesn't go ...

Many edits later: I got a \"General Error: Could not insert new word matches\" each time I tried to respond. I found out that the offending words were \"however\", \"horse\" and \"different\". I've kludged my post into submission. re: Weyrman's first paragraph DNA recombination does not override ...

Hi Drakona, thanks for the reply. In the first bit, you talked about how overall systems require foresight. I think there was foresight behind the universe, and that's why it's so capable of giving rise to other complex systems. I'm a Christian, as you know, and I think God knew what he wanted and ...

Neither do I. Simpler, not simple.

On the other hand, I have never been able to take evolution -- in the theistic or non-theistic variety -- very seriously, and not for theological reasons, but for evidential ones. It just flies too much in the face of my mathematical & systems engineering intuition. Say what you will about deep ...

Of course, the problem here is that Christ was almost certainly speaking Aramaic, not greek, so the joke may not have been intended quite this way in the original, we can't be certain. But Matthew translated it that way, and I assume he did so in an attempt to capture the flavor of the original ...

If someone claims "life is designed, but there's no evidence for it" there's no point in arguing -- it's a philosophical position based upon external beliefs, and it's not very persuasive. I agree it's not a view to be argued scientifically. I disagree that it's unpersuasive. It's persuasive when ...

ID-as-an-origins-position could be falsified if people studied ID-as-a-framework more. If we had good methods for detecting intelligences in general, then we'd be able to come to scientifically sensible, responsible conclusions about whether or not life in particular was designed. First, I think ...

Wow, good post Kilarin. One incongruity between your analogy and real life is that in the analogy we know something about Joshua and about students in general, and due to this it may be possible to distinguish between a natural selection-like process and what a student programmed. Since we have no ...

Have you read Behe's rebuttal to McDonald? Yes, and so has McDonald. His updated mousetraps I linked to are in response to Behe's rebuttal where he tried to push the analogy further than he did originally in his book. And yes, it is all about marketing--using that as an analogy, of course. Okay, I ...

If all of the so-called intermediate forms for McDonald's mousetrap evolution can actually function as such, then why weren't there any mousetraps of those designs (or anything remotely similar) ever marketed? The answer is simple: because none of them work! His poorly-designed mousetraps still ...

I'm just going to focus on the first part of Drakona's post about the whale evidence. One reason is because of time, and another is that I think anyone who looks at the whale evidence in detail will become aware just how difficult it is to propose a better explanation than common descent. I might be ...

Yeah, Pandora explained what I meant about IC. A few comments on John McDonald's reducibly complex mousetrap : Step 2: adding the coil, seems to be much more of a disadvantage than an advantage. The trap was already weak enough that most (if not all) mice could escape, even if they did happen to ...

What Natural Selection does NOT have any evidence for is the ability create irreducibly complex structures. Irreducible complexity (IC) takes Darwin's statement and flips it around, hoping nobody notices that the flipped version is not the same. Darwin said systems must be able to be formed by ...

Long time no see, Mercury. I wonder how long it'll take you to guess who this is. ;) Hey Dove! :D I've lurked here before, so no guessing required. PZ Meyers totally takes him to task on that one and he comes back and says, essentially, "Oh, what I meant were interesting examples. Like, each ...

Kilarin wrote:He wasn't actually presenting an argument in favor of either side, he was discussing the nature of the argument.

Yes, and while he is right about neither side understanding the other, nearly every supposed example of this that he presented was something incorrect. I don't see how that helps.

Like those he criticizes, it looks like Scott Adams gets some things wrong: Intelligent Design accepts an old earth and even accepts the fact that species probably evolved. They only question the ?how.? That's not the case. The ID movement has been clear that they take no position on the age of the ...