Raf

Hooray?

One more thing, as regards the Cambrian explosion and the challenge it poses to evolution by natural selection: It doesn't. The Cambrian explosion is a popular tool of creationists to cast doubt on the fact of evolution, but it does nothing to cast doubt on natural selection as the mechanism that best explains how evolution has taken place. I refer you to the National Center for Science Education (the same outfit whose article you cited to inadvertently establish that the Biblical flood was indeed an actual error, as I have repeatedly demonstrated). http://ncse.com/blog/2013/10/darwin-s-dilemma-was-cambrian-explosion-too-fast-evolution-0015109 Abstract for source article for the NCSE article: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(13)00916-0 Actual source article: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(13)00916-0.pdf

T-Bone, I personally believe your first paragraph reflects the majority of our experiences, mine included. I believe you can still be a decent, doctrinal consistent Christian while subscribing to your second paragraph, but of course, my opinion on such a thing is no longer worth terribly much. ;)

Billy Bob Thornton Armageddon Ben Affleck

I definitely have the right show in mind, but I don't suppose "that show with the guy with the hair who taught viewers how to paint" is sufficient

I Dreamed a Dream

Yes. They first appeared in Clerks. Dogma was supposed the be the follow-up, but instead, Kevin Smith made Mallrats, which bombed. Then came Chasing Amy, which is a pretty damn good movie. Finally, Dogma was made and released. This was followed by Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (the only movie in which they are the main characters) and Clerks II. Jay and Silent Bob had a cameo in Scream 3 (Jay mistakes Courtney Cox's character for Connie Chung).

Yes

Trading Places ?

Sorry. Here we go: "This is pitiful. A thousand people freezing their butts off waiting to worship a rat. What a hype."

This 1999 movie was intended to be a sequel to the writer-director's first (surprise) hit movie, which came out five years earlier. For various reasons, the director decided to write and direct two other movies first. The first of these two movies bombed. The second was a critical and commercial success. The movies all have two supporting characters in common and are set in the same universe. Sort of. Other actors play multiple roles in different movies in the series, but these two supporting actors always play the same two characters. After the 1999 movie came out, two more movies were made featuring these two characters (who also had a cameo, in character, in a movie from a COMPLETELY unrelated film franchise).

Of course. Any minute now.

I can see it. But I don't know what the show was called and can't remember the main dude's name.

Welcome to the forum, Longhunter. I took a look at that twitter account, and I don't believe for a second that any of it was written by LCM. Not his style at all. The person who wrote it has serious syntax/communication issues that LCM simply did not have. By the way, please check the dates on the threads you decide to post on. Before your update, the last post to this thread was seven years ago! Not that it's a problem, but it is probably something you want to know.

Now, instead of using this space to debate evolution (which is not abiogenesis and does not claim to be), let's stick with the topic of whether there are errors in Genesis. If you would like to discuss evolution in further detail, please start another thread. I raised the issue of the order of development of life on earth to show that Genesis conflicted with scientific consensus, which it absolutely does.

Returning to the subject of what evolution "predicts," I see that there's some misunderstanding on your part of what I meant. I shall attempt to clarify. You asked, "Are there any details to the predictions that we should be on the lookout for? ... how would we know over the course of human history if the predictions came true?" Etc. The problem here is, you are interpreting my use of the word "prediction" as an expectation that we will observe something as it happens. While that is certainly the case on the micro-level (which you do not dispute), it is not the case in the macro-level (which you do appear to dispute, correct me if I'm mistaken). So let's take a step back and explain what I mean in context by "predict." Let's say you have a crime. Murder, rape, robbery. A real ugly scene. The victim, of course, is no longer around to testify about what has happened. But you have a suspicion that the killer is a specific person. Why? Well, this person showed up at a pawn shop trying to sell some of the stolen items. You now have a hypothesis: The Seller is also The Rapist/Killer. Working from that hypothesis, what do you expect to find back at the crime scene and other places? Based on the hypothesis that the Seller is the Rapist/Killer, you can expect (predict) the following: If there's DNA inside the victim it will belong to the Seller. If there are fingerprints at the scene, they will belong to the Seller. If there are footprints at the scene, they will match the Seller's foot size. If there is a recording, it will show the Seller. Note, none of these are predictions about the future. They are predictions about what you will learn about the past. For the sake of argument, now, let's say we have the following: There's no video of the incident, but a closed circuit camera took a photo every 23 seconds. Fingerprints all over the crime scene come back to the Seller. It's his DNA in the victim. The stolen items are all recovered in the Seller's bedroom. After a while, you gather enough evidence so that your hypothesis, "The Seller is the Rapist/Killer" is no longer just a hypothesis. It is now a theory: an explanation of what took place that is consistent with the evidence and that can be used to extrapolate beyond what you have as evidence. In one photo, taken at moment 1:00:00, someone matching the Seller is seen outside a window. At 1:00:23, the figure is still outside the window, but the glass is broken, and a brick is inside the house. At 1:00:46, the Seller is inside the house, on the opposite side of the window. Now, you may look at these three photos and bemoan the fact that there are no transitional fossils photos showing that the Seller threw the brick through the window and crawled through the now broken window to get to the inside of the house. And unless you find those transitional photos, you are simply not prepared to believe that the person inside the house is the same person as the one outside the house. For example, you note, the person inside the house is bleeding, while the person outside the house is not. Clearly not the same person. You could go that route, but you'd be an idiot. You wrote: "The fossil record lacks transitional fossils showing common traits between an ancestral group and its supposedly derived descendants." That is an absolute falsehood, on a number of levels. First of all, ALL FOSSILS ARE TRANSITIONAL. What you are actually saying is that we do not have a complete fossil record of the evolution of any species, and that is, of course, true. But to say the fossil record "lacks" transitional fossils betrays an utter misunderstanding of what fossils are in the first place. All the fossils we have are transitional. That's what fossils are! But here's what happens: I have a picture of myself from 1971 and a picture of myself today. While there are some similarities, we do not look like the same person at all. It's a pretty big gap between 1971 and 2014. But wait, now I find a picture of myself from 1992! Good, right? It shows what I looked like about halfway between 1971 and 2014 (give or take a year). But what happens? Now, instead of ONE gap, we have TWO -- one from 1971 to 1992, and the other from 1992 to 2014. Now we look for more transitional photos. We find pics dating 1983 and 2001. Awesome. We're filling in what we can, but we also now have four gaps. That's a LOT of missing photos. Can't be sure the person in the 2014 photo is a later form of the person in the 1971 photo. Not with so many missing transitional photos. The reason there are so many gaps in the fossil record is simply that there are so many fossils. Biologists have done a fairly decent job of classifying and categorizing these things and showing which fossils are transitional in relation to each other and which are on a different "branch," so to speak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils Of course, no list will EVER be complete, because the surveillance camera didn't take a video. It only took intermittent snapshots. So, back to what evolution predicts. Evolution predicts that we will find certain fossils in certain strata. Evolution does NOT predict that we will observe one species for a period of a few hundred or even a few thousand years and observe the transformation of one species into the next. That's what Ross implied, and that was a lie. Etc.

If Ross is talking about observations made during human history, then his comment makes no sense. Let's review the comment in question: Why would anyone expect to observe a measurable change within a species, much less the appearance of a new one, during the FRACTION of human history during which we have been inclined to make the observations we've made? How long have ecologists been observing these things? A couple of hundred years? Let's go to town and say 5,000 years. In evolutionary terms, that's a blink of an eye! BUT WAIT! That's not all we're seeing from Ross (or is it your summary? I'm not really keeping track). This is nothing short of a lie. Not really much more to say about it than that. Unless there's more in context than is provided in summary, it's a whopper of a falsehood. Every scientific theory makes predictions. Evolution is not unique in this regard, and evolution does not predict the sudden appearance of a new species while observing an old one (for example, ecologists observing horses and whales observing the emergence of a new species descended from either in a short period of time, say, 5,000 years). Evolution predicts tiny changes over exceedingly large periods of time, nothing particularly noticeable from one generation to the next. In any event, all of that is far afield from whether Genesis is correct about the order of creation described in chapter 1 versus the progression of earth and life development that we can ascertain from science. So while your discussion of microevolution and macroevolution are rather interesting, they are rather beside the point of this thread. Genesis 1:1 lumps "time/space zero" and the formation of the earth, a period encompassing about 9 or 10 billion years, into "in the beginning." Fine, I guess. Not gonna quibble. Me, if I said something happened "in the beginning of 2014" and you later learned it happened in late August, I think you'd accuse me of being kinda sort of wrong. But again, why quibble. See the part I've highlighted in bold? Yeah, that's a lie. v. 14, God says "let there be..." Unless language is meaningless, before God says "let there be," there was not. v. 15 says "and it was so." It does not say "and it had already been so for a few billion years." Verse 16 says God made two great lights. It doesn't say he revealed two great lights. He wasn't writing from Earth's perspective (why would he? There was no one on Earth to make this observation). He made the stars. Not "they were already in existence." I could go on, but you get my point: what you are saying is decidedly NOT what Genesis is saying. Genesis is pretty clear that the Sun, Moon and stars are made on day 4. You come along, KNOWING that to be untrue, and try to twist what Genesis actually says so that it now says these things were really here all along. Well, that's just not what it says. Sorry. By the way, birds did not precede land creatures. I thought we went over that already.

Actually, by finagling, I mean calling something a matter of perspective when it's clearly and obviously not. Let's again review what the Bible says about the Flood. The purpose of the flood was to wipe out all mankind. All of it. Not all of it in one region. All of it. Genesis 6:7. Genesis 6:13 the end of ALL FLESH is come before me. All of it. v. 17 says all flesh will die, everything under heaven. This is God talking, by the way, not man. God's observation point is infinite. When he says all, we expect him to mean ALL all. Now, what you're saying is, God didn't mean ALL flesh would die. He just said it. He didn't mean he was going to destroy all life. He just said it. He didn't mean he was going to flood the whole earth. He just said it. He didn't mean the flood covered mountains with 15 cubits of water. He just said it. You know, if the Bible said the whole world was covered in water, I'd probably concede your point. But Genesis gets pretty darned specific about what it means when it says the whole world. He doesn't tell Noah to spend 120 years moving his family from an unsafe region of the world to a safer one. There wasn't going to BE a safer one. He told Noah to build an ark, because that was the only way Noah was going to survive! I'm sorry if this offends, but it's the IDEA I'm discrediting, not the person espousing it. Even if we were to concede that the water did not rise as high as the Bible says it rose (an actual error), the point remains that the flood described in the NCSE article didn't cover ANY mountains, much less every mountain. This event, as described in the Bible, did not happen. Something similar might have happened nearby, but it didn't carry a 600 year old man and his child-bearing daughters in law to Ararat, unless you want to define Ararat so loosely that it means "wherever the boat landed." That's what I mean by finagle. Only one of us here is going by what the Bible says. And it's not the one who believes it's true. Ross is not employing scientific reasoning. I'll say more on this further down.

As far as the National Center for Science Education article and the Biblical flood, only one question needs to be asked. Does the article describe a flood that would carry Noah's Ark to an area that could reasonably be referred to as "the mountains of Ararat"? Ararat has two peaks (that's why it's called "mountains." It's not a mountain range like the Rockies, the Alps or the Andes). Supposedly, definitions of "the mountains of Ararat" have been loosely interpreted to the extent that we're talking about a mountain in Cizre, Turkey (Mount Judi, about 60 miles away from Ararat, if I read correctly). For the sake of argument, let us accept Mt. Judi because it is nice and far south of the actual mountains of Ararat. Does the flood described in the NCSE article come anywhere near Mt. Judi? Nope. Not even close. Therefore, by this very article you cited, IF the flood stories of multiple cultures (not just the Hebrew culture) were an allusion to an actual, historical flood, it still does not exonerate the Bible of the actual errors committed in the telling of the story. To wit: The flood did not cover mountains, as the Bible claimed it did. And the flood did not carry the ark to the mountains of Ararat, or to the mountains 60 miles south of Ararat, or anywhere near the Turkish border, because the flood did not extend that far north! Pick your actual error.

Big post, can't answer all of it at once, so please be patient. That's the easiest, so I will tackle it first. A real unbiased scientist would be one who did not BEGIN with his conclusion (that there WILL be harmony between science and scripture no matter how much I have to twist one or the other to make it happen). Ross begins with his conclusion, as do you. That's not how science works.

A writer discovers that the cartoon universe he thinks is a product of his imagination is actually real -- and rapidly becoming overrun by zombies.

Sorry... coming right up...

Maybe Raf was indicating a knowledge of the movie without actually guessing the movie, which sounds to me like Conan the Barbarian

Animal House