Where Evolution falls short - Please read first post

[btlizard]

I know there are other topics out there, but I'm really not interested in a "what do you think" sort of discussion. I care about Truth. And people may have their varying opinions, but ultimately, out of a range of contradicting worldviews, only one can be right (or all wrong, possibly). Truth, by definition, is exclusive. So, my very narrow focus of this discussion is where Evolution (that is, a form of Naturalism) falls short, and I also provide some positive proofs for the beliefs I hold.

Intro: First of all, I want to say that I think this is a poor forum for having this type of discussion because—while it is helpful to be able to think out responses, everyone’s cards are on the table, and it is easy to reread or reference statements previously made—it has many limitations: It is difficult to reply to all questions, and one can be easily bombarded or ganged up on. Tangents can be common; too many conversations can go on simultaneously; and sometimes it’s difficult to communicate your meaning, intention, tone, etc.

So, before going into the particular details, I want to say that I think everyone who believes in Evolution falls into one of two categories: First, there are those who accept it unconditionally and absolutely; they are very adamant and unpersuaded (Resolute). Second, there are those believe Evolution is generally accepted as popular opinion by scientists; either they believe one side has convincing evidence or the other lacks it. But they are seeking answers (Undecided).

• The Resolute: I do not believe I would be able to help someone in the first group. A person in this group suffers from what is called “cognitive dissonance.” That is, he or she cannot accept or get the mind around any evidence that would contradict a foundationally held belief. Any evidence is meaningless because his or her mind is already set about how things are. Their mind will not be changed. What is ironic about someone in this group is that their worldview rejects absolute truth, yet their position is based upon an absolute. They must borrow from other worldviews even to engage in discussion (since they cannot account for logic and reason or good and evil either). For people who belong in this camp, I would ask them to refrain from joining the conversation because I do not believe they would be able to add anything to the discussion and neither would they benefit from it, since they have already decided they will not change their minds.
  
  The Undecided: A person in this group may not know which way the evidence is pointing, but either from what they hear on one side or do not hear on the other, they believe that Evolution probably is right. So, they accept it. Typically, this person would be open to hear evidence on either side and open to persuasion and discussion. Otherwise, he or she would belong to the first group. So for those who are earnestly and honestly seeking the truth, I believe this conversation will be beneficial, and it is appropriate for you to join the discussion. By all means, join in and ask questions.

My Position: One more item before I get started…my position is that I am a man of faith; I believe in God, and I accept the Bible as being true. But, do I belong in the first category? While I am resolved in my belief, it is not because I refuse to listen to evidence. While I do hold faith for the things I do not know or do not understand, faith should be taken in the direction the evidence leads. Obstinate Evolutionists hold onto a faith in the unseen (unobserved) as well, but I do not believe it is consistent with the evidence. I am not completely unyielding because I am open to discussion and will consider good arguments. While I do accept what God and the Bible say without question (though there is a reason for this), I will not use this as the basis of my arguments. I do want to want to point out, though, that “origins” really isn’t a part of science anyway. (You cannot observe something that’s already happened.) This often ends up creating some very limited definitions of “science.” I also don’t think you have to have an answer for the origin of the universe to engage in science. You don’t have to know where something came from in order to use it. You can use a computer without knowing where it was made and by whom. So, I don’t think you need an answer to the origin of the universe for science, but it is an important philosophical discussion. I think everyone has to account for the origin of everything in some way, philosophically. This will be the approach I will use: I will argue from a scientific and philosophical standpoint rather than a Scriptural standpoint.


Evolution has many facets, and it would be lazy on the part of the Evolutionist to start only after life begins. There is much more to the universe than simply what happens after live arrives. In order to have a believable worldview and one that others should accept, it should be coherent. All aspects must be addressed, not simply once life is already here. So, before we get into the discussion of development of kinds, I want to point out some of the other limitations of Evolution’s explanatory power:

• 1) Cosmic Evolution – The development of space, time, and matter from literally nothing.
  
  Something coming from nothing is highly improbably and has been all but proven false. The 1st Law of Thermodynamics and Conservation of Mass state that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed! In fact, we count on this NOT to happen in order to have an orderly universe. Could you imagine driving along and a house suddenly appears in front of you? This is no more implausible than all the matter, energy, space, and time suddenly appearing from nothing completely on its own. In fact, there is another argument about this that says that anything that has a beginning must have a first cause. There is plenty of evidence indicating that the universe began to exist and is not eternal (see 2nd Law of Thermodynamics – it should have wound down by now). Therefore, it must have a first cause. It could not spontaneously form itself.
  
  2) Steller Evolution – The development of complex stars from the first chaotic elements.
  
  Aside from the fact that no one’s ever seen a star form, there is a chicken and egg problem with stars and elements. The elements are needed to make the stars, but the stars are also needed to make the elements. So, which were produced first in the Big Bang? Some think that Hydrogen and Helium along with some subatomic particles were first produced and somehow condensed into stars. But again, there is no explanation for how they could have condensed, and this has never been observed.
  
  3) Chemical Evolution – The development of all chemical elements from the original two.
  
  The stars were thought to have produced the other elements from their incredible heat and pressure. This is a feat that has also already been disproved. While chemical fusion is possible, it is only possible to produce elements up to Iron (Atomic Number 26). So where did the other 66 elements come from?
  
  4) Planetary Evolution – The development of planetary systems from swirling elements.
  
  See issues from the first three. There is also the additional problem of Conservation of Angular Momentum: Many planets and even entire galaxies are spinning backwards. Most spin counter-clockwise (from top view), but some spin clockwise (from the same view). According to CAM, if a body is rotating and a part breaks off, it must spin in the same direction. This is a similar principle to Newton’s Laws of Motion.
  
  5) Organic Evolution – The development of life from inorganic material (a rock)
  
  Evolutionists are in the embarrassing position of believing a theory disproved 100 years ago. Spontaneous generation was disproved by the experiments of Louis Pasteur in the 19th century. Evolutionists may mock theists and others for their explanations for the beginnings of life, but the bottom line is that they believe that life developed from rocks being rained on for millions of years.
  
  6) Macro-Evolution – The development of one kind of life from a completely different kind of life (what most people talk about when discussing “Evolution”)
  
  There are also many problems with this (most of which boil down to the fact that none of it has been observed but all comes from imaginations of the Evolutionists), but I will cover this in the main text.
  
  7) Micro-Evolution – The development of variations within a particular kind of life (speciation)
  
  This is the only actually observed form of “evolution.” We have seen dogs produce different types of dogs. We’ve seen the varieties of horses and fish and lizards and finches and turtles and humans all form. But nothing is being added here. All of the varieties come from the information that was already available in the DNA of the original kind (which is why inbreeding is so bad…because the amount of information has been greatly reduced). This process has not been observed to produce different kinds of animals.

Evolution: I could cover many different issues with this, and many people out there smarter than me already have. What I will do is just touch briefly on some of what is put forth as Evolution’s “best arguments” and put a short response. It will not be a comprehensive response, but I may add more based on questions and replies. I will mention some “Negative Evidence” against evolution, as well as some “Positive Evidence” for Intelligent Design/Creation.

Negative Evidence:

Evidence from Fossils – This is, perhaps, the most popular “evidence” for Evolution. Yet, it is possibly the easiest to take out in one fell swoop: No fossil counts as evidence for Evolution because it cannot be proved that it had any kids, let along ones different from itself. The only thing that fossils prove is that something died. What some Evolutionists try to do is dig up some bones in the dirt (sometimes gathering them from various locations and sometimes only small fragments), rearrange them to fit what they imagine to be the case, and then have some artist draw out what they want it to look like. None of it is science. There are scores of examples of people (both accidentally and fraudulently) pairing phony bones together and using it to prove the ancestor of something else. One example of a caveman “Nebraska man” was based entirely on the discovery of one tooth. And from this, they made the whole man and his wife. As it turned out, the tooth was from that of a pig. “Lucy” is such an example. The geologic column as a whole is a fraud. Although the distribution of fossils may be similar in some cases, the entire column appears no where in reality but only in the minds of Evolutionists. Over and over, various Evolutionists openly state that dating methods of any kind wouldn’t even have been possible if the geologic column wasn’t established first. And it should be pointed out that the geologic column was established before the fossils in it were actually found. Another common practice of Evolutionists is that they both date the rocks by the fossils and the fossils by the rocks. They know how old the fossil is by the rocks around it, and they know how old those rocks are based off of the fossils in that layer. This is circular reasoning. It is done all the time, and it is not science. The cognitive dissonance that goes along with looking for fossils ignores such findings as dinosaur and trilobites in the same layers as humans. And the entire thing is based off of the false assumption that the layers are different ages, something that has long been proved incorrect. Instances such as trees (sometimes in the upside-down vertical position) connecting different layers demonstrate the fact that the layers are not different ages. The apparent lack of any transitional creatures (either alive or fossil) demonstrates the obvious fact that kinds are well defined. I could provide many quotations from Evolutionist scientists that say the same things as what I’ve said here, but the bottom line is that none of this even matters because no fossils even count as evidence for Evolution.

Evidence from Development – “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Supposedly, as a human embryo goes through development, it goes through the various evolutionary stages: Fish, Amphibian, Reptile, and Mammal. The problem is that aside from being built on a lie, embryonic biology is completely misrepresented. For example, at one stage the embryo supposedly has gill slits, but there are really bones that develop into the ears. The whole idea got started about 135 years ago by an Embryologist named Ernst Hackel. Hackel (who was one of the few Evolutionists, including Darwin, who actually had a degree in a scientific field) got tired of waiting around for evidence to come out for Evolution and doctors photos of embryos of various animals. The outcome was that they all appeared very similar to each other and not at all similar to the actual embryos. His University found out that he fakes the drawings, discredited him, and kicked him out of his position. One hundred thirty-five years later, we still have his drawings in high school and college Biology textbooks as a “proof” for Evolution.

Evidence from Structures – In addition to the above, this topic is a prime example of how Evolution is not beneficial to Science and actually hurts our understanding of Biological principles. The first argument is that different animals have similar structures. They look at an arm, a wing, and a fin, give the bones the same names, and color them the same colors in the textbook and say that proves we evolved from a rock. Crazy? You bet it is! Similar structures are just as much evidence for similar design as anything else. Why are computers built similarly? Or houses? Or cars? Or phones? Why are any number of things built similarly? Well, it might just be that it’s a good design, and it might just be that the same guy built them (or at least designed them). The other thing they say—which is the biggest slap in the face to Biology—is that many creatures have “vestigial structures,” that is, structures that no longer serve a practical use. Examples include: leg bones in whales and snakes and the human tailbone and appendix. What these Evolutionists fail to realize is that every example they provide is always an instance where something is being lost, not gained. In order for Evolution to work, information must be added at some point. (Why don’t they provide an example of that?) The other problem is that these, too, are based on misconstruction of the functional anatomy. To be brief, whale pelvic bones are used for giving birth; snake pelvic bones are used in mating; the human coccyx is an anchor for many important muscle functions; and the appendix is needed for certain digestive processes. By the Evolutionist definition, arms and legs would be vestigial because we can live without them, ignoring the fact that they are valuable and have many important functions.

Evidence from Mutations – Beneficial mutations are the building blocks for Evolution. Unfortunately, nobody has ever seen one. The only examples Evolutionists and textbooks will give for mutations are harmful ones (because they are the only ones). Variations in DNA and gene code are always harmful (see below). Short-legged sheep, two-headed turtles, and five-legged bulls will all have shorter life spans than a normal healthy animal. Even resistant bacteria and roaches are less adequately built than a normal bacteria/roach. One “beneficial” mutation given is that people in Africa with Sickle Cell Anemia are less likely to get Malaria, which is clearly not an advantage. This just goes to show that all examples given are simply instances where information is lost and the creature is worse off than it would otherwise be.

Evidence from DNA – I honestly don’t even know why Evolutionists even count this one an advantage. DNA causes more issues for Evolutionists than anything (see below). This is supposedly an evidence for Evolution because of the similarity in DNA between Chimps and Humans. Beside the facts that the entire human genomes have yet to be evaluated to date and that the percent similarity is changing all the time (98% in 2002, 95% in 2003), few have stopped to consider how utterly pointless such a “similarity” in DNA would be. I’m sure that William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is 95% similar to George Lucas’s Star Wars, but what on Earth does that prove?? Watermelons and Snow cones are also 99% similar. This “similarity” isn’t meaningful because the reporters rarely tell us what exactly is similar. There is a lot that can be discussed about how this research is done, but one important thing to keep in mind is that even a difference in DNA of 1.6% is equivalent to 48 million nucleotides. And, a change of only 3 nucleotides is fatal to an organism! How could this possibly account for a transition of one kind of animal to another? The other issue here is that number of chromosomes is completely irrelevant. First of all, chimps have one more chromosome pair than humans, but neither more nor less chromosomes indicates evolutionary direction. Chimps have the same number of chromosomes as a Tobacco plant at 48. And a Fern has the most chromosomes at 480. Chromosome number doesn’t matter just like DNA “percent similarity” doesn’t matter. It doesn’t tell us anything useful.


Positive Evidence:

Human Population – The current population of Earth is roughly 7 billion. It reached 6 billion in the late 1990’s, 3 billion around 1960, etc., possibly first crossing over into the billions in the earth 1800’s. Evolution teaches that man first showed up in his modern form around 50,000 years ago. Using a starting population of two people and a conservative average annual population growth rate of 0.5%, the current population of humans should exceed the number of atoms in the entire universe. This is clearly absurd. And even then, shouldn’t be able to dig in our back yards without hitting bones of human remains. Even using an impossibly small growth rate of 1/200th of a percent, the current population should be 20 times larger. You can tweak the numbers every which way, but the bottom line is that the math does not work out with human population growth for the numbers provided by evolution. Historical population data best fits a model of 8 people about 4400 years ago. Population also provides an additional difficulty for evolution in that it is incredibly easy for the “evolved” gene to get diluted back into the population. (The negative effects of inbreeding also show why this doesn’t work.) People also do not always procreate within their generation; so, the previous generation’s genes again would delude superior genes. This would make it impossible for anything ever to involve.

Irreducible Complexity – Arguably one of the best proofs of design is “Irreducible Complexity,” which basically says that some structures cannot be reduced past a certain point without becoming completely unusable. The typical example used is that of a mousetrap with five piece: a spring, a hammer, a catch, an arm, and a base. If any one of these components were taken away, the mousetrap would cease to function. Not only would the mousetrap cease to function but the remaining parts would have no useful function by themselves. This concept is applied to things such as cells and to the especially bacterial flagellum; both of which have hundreds of essential components. If any of a number of parts were missing or damaged, the entire system would fail. Now, Evolutionists retort that partially formed structures may still have a secondary function, with the most common example being that of feathers providing warmth in addition to being used for flight. The problem with this line of thought, however, is that we are thinking like designers. We think about how could this turn into that or these components be use for this or that. Evolution has no such benefit. If a perfectly working structure suddenly goes missing a component (even a small one), it will fail without having any idea what to do. Again, this is assuming we’re already at our barebones (hence irreducible) structure with no redundancies. The same goes for an additional (minute) component; it wouldn’t know what to do with it. We, as humans, think like designers wouldn’t much difficulty. A person might be able to think of something to do with four mousetrap parts, but Evolution wouldn’t have a clue what to do with them.

Appearance of Design – It is the human experience that things that appear to be designed are designed. We would never assumed that a book lying on the ground was produced by an exploding typewriter factory or that a computer formed by slow, gradual processes. We wouldn’t believe that an image on a coin or that Mount Rushmore was formed by erosion, but some do believe that George Washington himself is a result of Evolution. We automatically recognize design whenever we see it. We would never assume that a jumbo-jet formed naturally, and a living cell is thousands of times more complicated than this. Also, similar structures are best described by similar designer.

Origin of Information – Where does information come from? We see writing in a cave and we know people were the cause. If we find a floating bottle with a note in it, we know someone wrote it. If we found an icon or some writing on something buried in the desert, we would know someone was there. Even if we went to an alien planet and found writing that said “Welcome, Earth-dwellers,” we would assume there was intelligence behind it. This is because information must have a mind behind it. In fact, without a mind, it ceases to be meaningful. If you dropped Scrabble tiles and it landed in such a way as to spell “Go to Baltimore”, would you do it? Of course not, because it is not meaningful without a mind behind it. Nay, it ceases to be information at all. DNA contains massive amounts of information used to program living things. The information contained in the DNA from one cell would fill enough books to fill the Grand Canyon many times over (50-100 times, depending on the size of the type), yet all the DNA in the human body could fit in two tablespoons! In this age of information were we clearly understand that computer coding comes from a mind, it is increasingly obvious that DNA could not have formed by any means other than intelligence.

The “Samaritan Trait” – A single irregularity in a scientific theory requires that it be reworked to account for the anomaly. Evolution (which is not a theory in the scientific sense) if nothing else has this one inconsistency: We care about those in need. Not just about our progeny or those who are closely related to us. And not just those from whom we can benefit. We think bullying and “racism” and Nazism and the Holocaust and discrimination are morally wrong. Not because it is inconvenient to us or because it hurts us directly but because we recognize an inherent evil about it. We think it’s wrong to mistreat someone because he or she has a different skin color or is a different gender or is of a different religion or simply because he or she is different. We adopt children, and we don’t like it when people suffer. Why do we care about people who are of no direct relation to us? Why do we care about those who, as Darwin puts it, are rivals to our existence and the existence of or our progeny? By all means, if Evolution is true, we most certainly should slaughter the lesser “races”, lest they pollute the gene pool. We should let men take advantage of women. We should promote the Euthanizing of old people and children we don’t want and the crippled and mentally handicapped. By all means we should take the future Evolution of our species into our own hands and do these things. Yet, we know that we could not live in a world like that. We know such acts of cruelty are wrong. So what happened to the higher over the lesser from Darwinian Evolution? Evolution cannot account for this “Samaritan trait”. It is completely without an answer. Such a large inconsistency like this is devastating to a theory. Such inherent knowledge of good and evil cannot be explained by Naturalism.


In addition to all this, there are also many philosophical arguments I could make about the shortcomings of Naturalism as a whole. Going back to those who have to borrow the concept of absolute truth in order to have ground to stand on…Naturalism also has problems with how to account for knowledge, reason, thought, and free will. Indeed, these things are unaccounted for in the naturalistic framework. The simplest way to illustrate this is that Evolutionists hold that everything ultimately came about by random chance. Thus, the brain came about by random chance. So, all conclusions reached by the brain cannot be trusted because they are based on the random causes of Naturalistic fate. As C.S. Lewis said, “The description we have to give of thought as an evolutionary phenomenon always makes a tacit exception in favor of the thinking which we ourselves perform at that moment.”

There are many I could quote on this (and may in the future), but I will end simply with an unfortunate, yet honest quote from George Wald:

When it comes to the origin of life there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!

Thank you for reading and for “hearing” me out. I appreciate the respectful discussion and will gladly engage anyone who is willing to openly seek the truth. Let’s please keep the conversation friendly and avoid hostility. I will try to do the same.

[Blu]

Before I respond fully, i wanna ask: Did you get a lot of this from Kent Hovind?

[Luna May]

I will read this as soon as I get a decent night's sleep.
Btlizard, I'm sorry if I acted rashly, I'm really, really tired. I hope you don't hold it against me.
So, later.

[btlizard]

Before I respond fully, i wanna ask: Did you get a lot of this from Kent Hovind?

This question is pointless. It's either true or it's not. And if you want to know the truth, the majority of it comes from, true science, logic, common sense, and the admission by Evolutionists of Evolution's limitation to explain. This question really is irrelevant, though. I'll gladly give you sources for some things if you wish, but please don't start any Ad Hominem arguments.

And again, if you're in the first category, please don't bother responding.

[Current]

Hm, Luna and Blue have already declined to provide a full answer, at least for the moment. Understandable, considering length and all. Still, I have a holiday tomorrow, meaning I can stay up and offer my beloved Kilometric Reply (of Doom). Yay!

So, my very narrow focus of this discussion is where Evolution (that is, a form of Naturalism)

Evolution is not a form of naturalism, even though naturalists tend to accept evolution. There are non-naturalist evolutionists, and very few, but still real, non-evolutionist naturalists.

So, before going into the particular details, I want to say that I think everyone who believes in Evolution falls into one of two categories: First, there are those who accept it unconditionally and absolutely; they are very adamant and unpersuaded (Resolute). Second, there are those believe Evolution is generally accepted as popular opinion by scientists; either they believe one side has convincing evidence or the other lacks it. But they are seeking answers (Undecided).

Shades of grey, blitzard. People aren't usually easy to classify in two neat little boxes, except for the trivial X or not-X cases. Ultimately, though, this is irrelevant to the actual point.

By the way, the phrase is "cognitive dissonance", not "dissidence".

My Position: One more item before I get started…my position is that I am a man of faith; I believe in God, and I accept the Bible as being true. But, do I belong in the first category? While I am resolved in my belief, it is not because I refuse to listen to evidence. While I do hold faith for the things I do not know or do not understand, faith should be taken in the direction the evidence leads.

While I'm sure you're honest about this, I'd like to point out that basically everyone believes this about themselves. Please don't take this the wrong way; I'm not implying that you are lying, or wrong, about how open you are to new evidence. I'm as certain as can be you're not lying, and don't know you enough to say if your assessment is wrong. I will assume you are right about that point throughout this discussion, for a variety of reasons, mostly convenience. I hope you will afford everyone else that same privilege, within reason.

I do want to want to point out, though, that “origins” really isn’t a part of science anyway. (You cannot observe something that’s already happened.)

I disagree. While you cannot test what has already happened, (yet, anyway) you can create models about it and test those in the present day. You then use those models to make the best conclusions possible about the past. That is a part of science.

And, just a nitpick, but to the extent observation takes place you are always observing the past. Information cannot travel instantly, only at the speed of light or slower. That means that when I'm observing myself typing on the keyboard, it takes the photons a few picoseconds to get to my eyes, not counting the time it takes for that information to get from there to my brain and be processed.

Evolution has many facets, and it would be lazy on the part of the Evolutionist to start only after life begins.

Evolution as a word, sure. What is commonly referred to as the theory of evolution limits itself to biological evolution, and thus its merely a matter of common usage rather than laziness, similarly to how "abortion" is often understood as the abortion of pregnancy, and Prohibition as the prohibition of trading alcoholic beverages. If we were to discuss the broadest meaning of the word, which is "change", this thread would get a tad cluttered, so what say you we limit ourselves to the modern theory of evolution in biology?

In order to have a believable worldview and one that others should accept, it should be coherent.

Sure, but I don't think this is the best place to discuss entire worldviews. Like I said, it gets cluttered, worldviews covering a lot of ground by definition.

Something coming from nothing is highly improbably and has been all but proven false.

Yes and no. Causality can only exist as a concept in a framework of time, which wasn't the case when the first something existed.
Or to put it in another way, you can only say that something comes from nothing when you have an instant of time with nothing, and another with something. But if there was nothing, there wasn't time either. Something didn't "come" from nothing in the sense that something was the only thing there ever was, even if the universe doesn't stretch infinitely backwards.
It's a tricky and counter-intuitive concept, because human minds only exist within time, and assuming it as not there messes up with them. Not to mention language is full of references to time.

And I'm not even getting into quantum mechanics, in which something can come from nothing even within a time-based frame.

2) Steller Evolution – The development of complex stars from the first chaotic elements.

Aside from the fact that no one’s ever seen a star form, there is a chicken and egg problem with stars and elements. The elements are needed to make the stars, but the stars are also needed to make the elements.

The simplest element, hydrogen, needs only a proton to exist. By definition a proton that isn't in the same nucleus as another proton is hydrogen. Helium could form in the early universe without stars because it was hot enough to allow it.

But again, there is no explanation for how they could have condensed

Gravity. Protons have mass.

The stars were thought to have produced the other elements from their incredible heat and pressure. This is a feat that has also already been disproved. While chemical fusion is possible, it is only possible to produce elements up to Iron (Atomic Number 26). So where did the other 66 elements come from?

Fusion is not the only process that takes place. Neutron radiation can add a proton to a nucleus, and adding a proton means it's a heavier element. By the way, are you familiar with the concept of artificial elements? That is to say, humans creating elements heavier than those found in nature. That's how you get all those elements with funny names like ununoctium.

Planetary Evolution – [/b]The development of planetary systems from swirling elements.

See issues from the first three. There is also the additional problem of Conservation of Angular Momentum: Many planets and even entire galaxies are spinning backwards. Most spin counter-clockwise (from top view), but some spin clockwise (from the same view). According to CAM, if a body is rotating and a part breaks off, it must spin in the same direction.

That might be a problem if galaxies and planets broke off a single spinning object. And if space didn't have massive objects that could reverse spins or flip planets during collisions. Neither of those is the case.

This is a similar principle to Newton’s Laws of Motion.

Strictly speaking, conservation of angular momentum is a corollary of them.

The development of life from inorganic material (a rock)

Life developed from organic materials, actually. "Organic" is just the chemical term for type of molecule containing C-C bonds (other definitions are used sometimes, but the basic aspect is that they involve carbon). As the Urey-Miller experiment (just to name the most famous one) showed, organic materials can and do form from inorganic ones.

Evolutionists are in the embarrassing position of believing a theory disproved 100 years ago. Spontaneous generation was disproved by the experiments of Louis Pasteur in the 19th century.

Pasteur showed that bacteria don't form spontaneously. His experiments didn't address, let alone disprove, abiogenesis, as they did not involve conditions similar to early Earth.

6) Macro-Evolution – The development of one kind of life from a completely different kind of life

Macro-evolution, strictly speaking, is evolution at or above species level. Oh, and if you're going to keep using the word "kind", please define it and explain how it differs from "species", if at all.

There are also many problems with this (most of which boil down to the fact that none of it has been observed but all comes from imaginations of the Evolutionists)

Incorrect. Macro-evolution, (according to the actual definition, which I posted above), has been observed.
Speciation event in the London Underground mosquito

7) Micro-Evolution – The development of variations within a particular kind of life (speciation)

This is the only actually observed form of “evolution.” We have seen dogs produce different types of dogs. We’ve seen the varieties of horses and fish and lizards and finches and turtles and humans all form. But nothing is being added here. All of the varieties come from the information that was already available in the DNA of the original kind

Incorrect. New information can and does arise. See: nylon-eating Flavobacterium.

(which is why inbreeding is so bad…because the amount of information has been greatly reduced)

Actually, it's because it increases the possibility of recessive traits manifesting themselves.

Evidence from Fossils – This is, perhaps, the most popular “evidence” for Evolution. Yet, it is possibly the easiest to take out in one fell swoop: No fossil counts as evidence for Evolution because it cannot be proved that it had any kids, let along ones different from itself.

It also shows a wealth of organisms that shared similar characteristics and can be used to trace back ancestry. Not to mention, the fossil record is a useful way to test evolution, since if it was wrong with find such things as Precambrian rabbits, ultimately keeping evolution falsifiable.

The fossil record is not the most powerful evidence for evolution. It's just popular because, for some reason, people tend to find dinosaurs more exciting the endogenous retroviruses.

The only thing that fossils prove is that something died

Also, it can tell us how species that don't exist right now looked, and give us a rough idea of when they died. Which, again, is a useful test of evolution.

There are scores of examples of people (both accidentally and fraudulently) pairing phony bones together and using it to prove the ancestor of something else.

Every single example of which was disproved by scientists using the theory of evolution as a framework and the tools related to it.

Yes, fakes happen. People try to trick or profit from scientists, sometimes even other scientists, being as they are human and all. This doesn't disprove evolution. Or would you argue that faked miracles, which are absurdly more common than faked fossils, disprove Christianity?

The geologic column as a whole is a fraud.

A bold claim to make. One that happens to be wrong, too.

the entire column appears no where in reality but only in the minds of Evolutionists.

Evidence, please.

Another common practice of Evolutionists is that they both date the rocks by the fossils and the fossils by the rocks. They know how old the fossil is by the rocks around it, and they know how old those rocks are based off of the fossils in that layer. This is circular reasoning. It is done all the time, and it is not science.

Oh, not this again. This has to be the most oft-repeated YEC argument ever. Sorry if I sound somewhat exasperated, it's not personal, it's just that I've heard and refuted this one about 3.22 bajillion times since I started arguing with Creationists.

Yes, it's true that you can date the fossil from the layer, and the layer from the fossil. What is not true is the implication that this is done at the same time, for a single set of fossil and layer.. Example: we have a geological layer which, through various dating methods, we can be reasonably sure is between X and Y years old. Therefore, it is a reasonable assumption that, if tomorrow we find a new fossil in that layer, it'll be between X and Y years old.
And, if we know, through various dating methods, a particular kind of animal only existed between A and B years ago, then the layer we find it in must be between A and B years old.

The key to this is that it is corroborated by multiple dating methods. That is, if tree rings and radiometric decay tells us both the same date, it's likely that is the correct date, and can be used to date other things. If this was circular, we'd see precambrian rabbits. We don't.

The cognitive dissidence that goes along with looking for fossils ignores such findings as dinosaur and trilobites in the same layers as humans.

Source, please. By the way, again, it's "dissonance".

Instances such as trees (sometimes in the upside-down vertical position) connecting different layers demonstrate the fact that the layers are not different ages.

Source, please. The usual claim of multi-layer trees is, I find, often exaggerated from reports that ultimately originate in the fact that roots grow underground. But if you have specific examples that show otherwise, please share. I'm interested.

The apparent lack of any transitional creatures (either alive or fossil) demonstrates the obvious fact that kinds are well defined.

Tiktaalik. Archaeopteryx. Just to name the popular ones.

Evidence from Development – “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

Let's stop right there. No serious biologist believes Haeckel was right nowadays. Individual laypeople might, but then we're supposed to be arguing about the actual ToE, not misrepresentations.

The first argument is that different animals have similar structures. They look at an arm, a wing, and a fin, give the bones the same names, and color them the same colors in the textbook and say that proves we evolved from a rock. Crazy? You bet it is!

That might be because that's a strawman.

The other thing they say—which is the biggest slap in the face to Biology—is that many creatures have “vestigial structures,” that is, structures that no longer serve a practical use.

Lots of people get this one wrong. Vestigial=useless is a gross oversimplification that people latch onto because science education sucks. OK, I won't get into a rant on that right now.
Vestigial means "greatly reduced in function compared to similar structures in other species". Our appendix is vestigial because we can look at the appendix of, say, a cow, and notice it plays a much bigger role in digestion. Our tailbone is vestigial because we can look at the prehensile tail in some apes and notice it's much more useful. Same for whale's pelvis, etc,

By the Evolutionist definition, arms and legs would be vestigial because we can live without them, ignoring the fact that they are valuable and have many important functions.

Tool use makes our arms much more useful compared to the forelimbs of other animals, and our legs allow us our erect posture (mixed with other stuff, of course). They are not vestigial by the actual definition of the term.

Beneficial mutations are the building blocks for Evolution. Unfortunately, nobody has ever seen one.

Lenski experiment. Period.

Evidence from DNA – I honestly don’t even know why Evolutionists even count this one an advantage. DNA causes more issues for Evolutionists than anything (see below). This is supposedly an evidence for Evolution because of the similarity in DNA between Chimps and Humans. Beside the facts that the entire human genomes have yet to be evaluated to date and that the percent similarity is changing all the time (98% in 2002, 95% in 2003), few have stopped to consider how utterly pointless such a “similarity” in DNA would be.

Human chromosome 2. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs, as you probably know. Other apes have 24. Human chromosome 2 has two centromeres, whereas normal chromosomes have one, located at the centre, and extra telomere sequences at the middle, instead of at the end, just as if it had originally been 2 different chromosomes, which fused. And what do we see? The genetic sequences in apes at that location are terribly similar to the ones in humans.
How do you explain that within a creationist framework?

I’m sure that William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is 95% similar to George Lucas’s Star Wars, but what on Earth does that prove?? Watermelons and Snow cones are also 99% similar.

Really? How many of the sentences, let alone paragraphs, do Star Wars and Romeo and Juliet have in common?
I'm guessing it's less than 19/20. I'm guessing it's far less than 1/20, actually.
That's how you measure chimp-human similarity. Sequences of tens of thousands of base-pairs that are identical. You could grab a random part of the genetic code and not be able to tell whether it came from a chimp or a human.

And, a change of only 3 nucleotides is fatal to an organism!

Depends where. Most of the time, a change of 3 nucleotides does nothing at all.

Chromosome number doesn’t matter just like DNA “percent similarity” doesn’t matter. It doesn’t tell us anything useful.

It's not just chromosome number. It's what's inside those chromosomes.

By the way, I notice you completely forgot about endogenous retroviruses. (can you tell that I love typing that?)
Y'know, some of the best evidence for shared ancestry in our DNA and that makes no sense in a creationist model?

Human Population – The current population of Earth is roughly 7 billion. It reached 6 billion in the late 1990’s, 3 billion around 1960, etc., possibly first crossing over into the billions in the earth 1800’s. Evolution teaches that man first showed up in his modern form around 50,000 years ago. Using a starting population of two people and a conservative average annual population growth rate of 0.5%, the current population of humans should exceed the number of atoms in the entire universe.

A growth rate of 0.5% per year is ridiculous with two people. Of course, there weren't two humans 50,000 years ago, but I was just pointing out that your calculation is completely divorced from reality.

Regardless, the ToE doesn't claim stable growth rates, which is just fine, because that's not what happens. When you overpopulate an area, you run out of resources, and the population drops sharp. Technology allows us to get the most out of resources, which is why population is growing much faster now. Back in the past, though, stuff like the Toba event neared us to extinction.

You can tweak the numbers every which way, but the bottom line is that the math does not work out with human population growth for the numbers provided by evolution. Historical population data best fits a model of 8 people about 4400 years ago.

I'd like to see your work for that.

Population also provides an additional difficulty for evolution in that it is incredibly easy for the “evolved” gene to get deluded back into the population.

... I think that word doesn't mean what you think it means.
Delude: To deceive someone into believing something which is false.
In case you mean "dilute", well, populations aren't solvents. A gene doesn't need to be prevalent in the world population to be selected for. Instead, it is selected for within a local population, which makes it prevalent (or not)

Besides, large population numbers speed up evolution. Genetic drift, for one, and greater numbers of people mean more chance for mutation to take place.

Irreducible Complexity –

Is a fallacy, because it doesn't take into account changes in use for organs and the fact evolution can add parts as well as remove them.

Appearance of Design – It is the human experience that things that appear to be designed are designed.

Humans live in a world shaped by humans. We see lots of design around because we made most of it. Selection bias.

We would never assumed that a book lying on the ground was produced by an exploding typewriter factory or that a computer formed by slow, gradual processes

That is mostly because we know how books and computers are formed. Exploding typewriter factories cannot result in books, mostly because the explosion would burn the paper, and also because there is not directing mechanism such as natural selection.
Computers are not self-replicating (yet), and as such the process of evolution wouldn't apply to them.

We wouldn’t believe that an image on a coin or that Mount Rushmore was formed by erosion,

Because a) we know how those were formed and b) they lack the necessary properties for evolution.

We automatically recognize design whenever we see it.

Not really. The human brain tends to see agency where there is none. That is, we assume something happened because of someone did it. It was useful back when we were running from predators and we assumed that the leaves moving was an animal rather than the wind, because that gets you killed easy.

Besides, pareidolia.

Also, similar structures are best described by similar designer.

Only when both have a known designer, and even then it's not necessarily so. Pyramids were found both in the Americas and in Egypt, yet nobody assumes they were designed by the same people.

Where does information come from?

In the case of DNA, from mutation. See, once again, the Lenski experiment.

We see writing in a cave and we know people were the cause. If we find a floating bottle with a note in it, we know someone wrote it. If we found an icon or some writing on something buried in the desert, we would know someone was there. Even if we went to an alien planet and found writing that said “Welcome, Earth-dwellers,” we would assume there was intelligence behind it.

All of those are example of symbolic information. That is, it only makes sense to a mind that knows what the symbols stand for. DNA has its deciphering mechanisms built into the cell, so no need to postulate an outside mind.

The “Samaritan Trait” – A single irregularity in a scientific theory requires that it be reworked to account for the anomaly. Evolution (which is not a theory in the scientific sense)

Bold claim. Once again, happens to be wrong.

if nothing else has this one inconsistency: We care about those in need. Not just about our progeny or those who are closely related to us. And not just those from whom we can benefit.

What you call the "Good Samaritan" trait has been known for a while, and it is accounted for in gene-level selection in social animals. (and other theories, too, but that's the one I know best)
To keep it short, social animals are those that rely on cooperation with others of the same species, humans being a prime example. And gene-level selection means that a gene can be preserved even if the individual carrying it dies, if there are other individuals who do.
Basically, a mutation gives individual A a small sense of empathy. While this might be detrimental if A is the only one with this trait, A manages to reproduce, maybe because it wasn't too strong, maybe because A was just an unlikely success, maybe whatever. Over time, there is a small population with this trait, and they help each other in a minor way. This gives the population an advantage, so the trait is selected for and further increases as now every increase in empathy leads to greater cooperation, which is even more advantageous, etc.
Even if some individuals with that trait sacrifice themselves and thus fail to reproduce, they are helping others with that same gene, so the trait survives. That is a gene working to preserve itself over the individual.

Why do we care about people who are of no direct relation to us?

Because evolution is not a terribly specific process. We evolve empathy because it works, but empathy to those that are somewhat similar to us works is not much less effective than empathy to those of us that are directly related. Not to mention, we always care more about those we feel closest.

And, a lot of what you mentioned is due to intellect applied to empathy, rather than empathy alone. Racism was absurdly common not too long ago, and fear and hatred of what is different still exists. We are just culturally advanced to a point where we learn to ignore the "fear of different" impulse in favour of the "empathy" impulse, for a variety of reasons.

Why do we care about those who, as Darwin puts it, are rivals to our existence and the existence of or our progeny? By all means, if Evolution is true, we most certainly should slaughter the lesser “races”, lest they pollute the gene pool. We should let men take advantage of women. We should promote the Euthanizing of old people and children we don’t want and the crippled and mentally handicapped.

Because we are social animals, and the ability to empathise with others of our group is incredibly useful, survival-wise. That's the basic origin of morality, helping out your local group because it works better than not.

Such inherent knowledge of good and evil cannot be explained by Naturalism.

There's no such thing as inherent knowledge of good and evil. There is the inborn notion of it, but inherent knowledge implies its objective and universal. It's not.

In addition to all this, there are also many philosophical arguments I could make about the shortcomings of Naturalism as a whole.

And I could rant all day on the multiple flaws of supernaturalism. But honestly, that deserves its own thread.

Going back to those who have to borrow the concept of absolute truth in order to have ground to stand on…Naturalism also has problems with how to account for knowledge, reason, thought, and free will. Indeed, these things are unaccounted for in the naturalistic framework.

I have a naturalistic answer, from my own naturalistic framework. Remember, we're not a monolithic group, I only speak for myself: Free will is an illusion, everything else was advantageous for our ecological niche.

The simplest way to illustrate this is that Evolutionists hold that everything ultimately came about by random chance.

Natural selection is not random. And stop conflating evolution and naturalism.

Thus, the brain came about by random chance.

Or not, as explained above.

So, all conclusions reached by the brain cannot be trusted because they are based on the random causes of Naturalistic fate.

Let's assume for a second that I didn't explain the flaws in these last few sentences: In any case, the brain works. That's the ultimate test of it. How it came to be is irrelevant.

As C.S. Lewis said, “The description we have to give of thought as an evolutionary phenomenon always makes a tacit exception in favor of the thinking which we ourselves perform at that moment.”

You'll notice CS Lewis wasn't a neurologist or biologist.

There are many I could quote on this (and may in the future), but I will end simply with an unfortunate, yet honest quote from George Wald:

When it comes to the origin of life there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!

Context is your friend. Wald was not referring to spontaneous generation in the sense of Pasteur, and his claim of "impossibility" was not literal. See:

Our everyday concept of what is impossible, possible or certain derives from our experience: the number of trials that may be encompassed within the space of a human lifetime, or at most within recorded human history. In this colloquial, practical sense I concede the spontaneous origin of life to be "impossible." It is impossible as we judge events in the scale of human experience.

The scale of human experience is terribly small, as you'll notice.

[btlizard]

I really don't know why you people do that...reply sentence by sentence. Why don't you ever group a thought together? I'll get around to replying to this eventually. But let me just say now, that this isn't really want I'm looking for in a discussion. I don't really want 3-5 people or whatever, replying to every single sentence that I say and then be forced to reply to each individual person's response and then to the response of those responses...it gets out of hand very quickly. Am I wrong in thinking that?

OK, Current, I'll read the rest of your post, now.

[Blu]

I really don't know why you people do that...reply sentence by sentence. Why don't you ever group a thought together? I'll get around to replying to this eventually. But let me just say now, that this isn't really want I'm looking for in a discussion. I don't really want 3-5 people or whatever, replying to every single sentence that I say and then be forced to reply to each individual person's response and then to the response of those responses...it gets out of hand very quickly. Am I wrong in thinking that?

OK, Current, I'll read the rest of your post, now.

As I've said, you don't need to respond to it all.

And I find it difficult to let mistakes go, which is why I'm writing after pretty much every sentance

[Master Crayak]

One example of a caveman “Nebraska man” was based entirely on the discovery of one tooth. And from this, they made the whole man and his wife. As it turned out, the tooth was from that of a pig. “Lucy” is such an example.

Where did you hear that?
I've never heard that before.
Please edit your first post so that we can see what your sourses are.

This thing is true[1] this second thing is also true [2] oh and by the way, here is another thing that is true [3] and to top it all off, here is another thing[4].
[1] Sir John Smith Ph.D. in this sci mag
[2] Mary Jones Ph. D. in this other sci mag
[3] James Turner Ph.D. wrote this paper on this thing
[4] H. G. Wells wrote in his book "The proof you've been looking for" pg 126.

If you dropped Scrabble tiles and it landed in such a way as to spell “Go to Baltimore”, would you do it?

This is just funny. But lets say I did pick up just the right tiles to spell that out and that happened? Then what would that prove?

Evolution cannot account for this “Samaritan trait”. It is completely without an answer. Such a large inconsistency like this is devastating to a theory. Such inherent knowledge of good and evil cannot be explained by Naturalism.

What are you going to do? Tell us that this came from Eve eatting that apple?

Historical population data best fits a model of 8 people about 4400 years ago.

Wait! I know this one!
TM was just talking about it the other day.
This is Noah and his family, just after that flood that he can't prove yet.

[btlizard]

Please, when replying to what I say below, please try to refrain from nit-picking every little sentence. If possible, try to group the thoughts together. Thank you. It’s much appreciated.

Evolution is not a form of naturalism, even though naturalists tend to accept evolution. There are non-naturalist evolutionists, and very few, but still real, non-evolutionist naturalists.

Actually, evolution absolutely is a form of Naturalism. It’s the most popular form in fact. As George Wald said at the end, there are two possibilities: special creation or spontaneous generation. I should have had a note that said there is a third one that tries to combine the two, but I neglected to do so. I’m really not interested in going in-depth on this point. So I apologize if that is where someone is. Basically, I see no reason to believe in “Evolution” of any kind (excluding the poorly named #7 type). Saying that God used evolution I think is absurd. We would be a cruel, stupid, and wasteful God. I’m not sure why someone would want to believe in someone like that. But, like I said before, the main reason why I don’t cover that is because I see no reason to even believe the Evolution dogma anyway. Besides, the reason that most people believe in Evolution is because they don’t want there to be a God; so I’m not sure why they’d try to combine the two. Believers in God who try to do this only do so because they think that Evolution really is science, but what I’m saying is that there’s no reason to do that. Because it’s not science.

Shades of grey, blitzard. People aren't usually easy to classify in two neat little boxes, except for the trivial X or not-X cases. Ultimately, though, this is irrelevant to the actual point.
By the way, the phrase is "cognitive dissonance", not "dissidence".

I’m not sure of the point of this. I’m not trying to make some overarching categorization. I understand people are complicated. My point is simply (and already made): either you’re someone who is interested in truth and seeking answers or you’re someone not interested in what is or is not true; you’re not changing your mind. If you’re in the second boat. then there’s no point in even engaging in conversation.
And thank you for the correction. I’ll try to accept it gracefully.

While I'm sure you're honest about this, I'd like to point out that basically everyone believes this about themselves. Please don't take this the wrong way; I'm not implying that you are lying, or wrong, about how open you are to new evidence. I'm as certain as can be you're not lying, and don't know you enough to say if your assessment is wrong. I will assume you are right about that point throughout this discussion, for a variety of reasons, mostly convenience. I hope you will afford everyone else that same privilege, within reason.

I will try. And understand and agree that people think they are right, too. Few people sit around thinking “I know I’m wrong, but oh well.” The main point I was trying to make here is that faith is not irrational in and of itself. People take steps of faith all the time. We leave our house in good faith that a meteorite won’t immediately crush us. People sometimes get scared off by “faith” since they think it means having to throw off reason and logic. That’s not so. I simply want to say that at some point, you have to take all the evidence out there, and make the best possible conjecture. I don’t believe it is Evolution. And, yes, I do believe I know (in some limited capacity) what it is. And people are welcome to question me on that or disagree. But I would hope there are those who honestly want to know what is true.

I disagree. While you cannot test what has already happened, (yet, anyway) you can create models about it and test those in the present day. You then use those models to make the best conclusions possible about the past. That is a part of science.

Granted. I was simply trying to say that the question of origins need not be answered before one can engage in Science. You don’t need to know who made a computer to be able to use it (not to say that that information wouldn’t be helpful, though).

Evolution as a word, sure. What is commonly referred to as the theory of evolution limits itself to biological evolution, and thus its merely a matter of common usage rather than laziness, similarly to how "abortion" is often understood as the abortion of pregnancy, and Prohibition as the prohibition of trading alcoholic beverages. If we were to discuss the broadest meaning of the word, which is "change", this thread would get a tad cluttered, so what say you we limit ourselves to the modern theory of evolution in biology?

No, because the point here is that Evolution (which is part of a Naturalistic explanation of the origin of the universe) must be understood in context within a broader coherent theory. We can limit our discussion here to “biological evolution,” sure. But the point is that the overarching “theory” has many problems before you can even get to life arriving. I also would like to reiterate that it would be nice if you just tried to see the point I’m trying to make rather than the particular words I used. Nit-picking will make this whole thing even more pain-staking.

Sure, but I don't think this is the best place to discuss entire worldviews. Like I said, it gets cluttered, worldviews covering a lot of ground by definition.

That’s fine, we can limit our discussion. But the reader should still be informed of its limited explanatory power.

Stuff about time and existence

And when in human history have we observed this? My point is, it’s not science. Things that begin to exist have a cause. If the Universe began to exist, it must have a cause. Nothing cannot simply explode into all time/space/matter/energy simply because there really is nothing there. That’s just absurd.

The simplest element, hydrogen, needs only a proton to exist. By definition a proton that isn't in the same nucleus as another proton is hydrogen. Helium could form in the early universe without stars because it was hot enough to allow it.

And where exactly did that heat come from? Not to mention the protons themselves...

Gravity. Protons have mass.

And yet like charges repel. So it would have had to be another cause.

Fusion is not the only process that takes place. Neutron radiation can add a proton to a nucleus, and adding a proton means it's a heavier element. By the way, are you familiar with the concept of artificial elements? That is to say, humans creating elements heavier than those found in nature. That's how you get all those elements with funny names like ununoctium.

Uh, yes, I am familiar with that. I did take several Chemistry classes in my life. But those were elements where we already started with a heavy element. Start with Hydrogen, continually blast it with protons, etc. How long until you get, say, Lead? That’s assuming that’s even possible. Let me know how that goes.

That might be a problem if galaxies and planets broke off a single spinning object. And if space didn't have massive objects that could reverse spins or flip planets during collisions. Neither of those is the case.

Actually, that would be the case for this explanation. All of that mass came from the same Big Bang, did it not? Or are you going to say that there were multiple Big Bangs happening at the same time? That would be even more improbable. If it all came from the same BB, then it did come from the same spinning object. They broke off and spun in whatever direction everything else was spinning. The amount of energy it would take to stop an entire galaxy and start it spinning in the opposite direction is unfathomable. There are no such space objects to do this.

Life developed from organic materials, actually...

Again missing the point. If Life came from organic stuff, eventually that organic stuff came from inorganic stuff. By the transitive property, life came from inorganic material. You’re just saying what that process may have looked like.

Pasteur showed that bacteria don't form spontaneously. His experiments didn't address, let alone disprove, abiogenesis, as they did not involve conditions similar to early Earth.

Again, point is missed. But even if you want to go down this road, every experiment in this regard has been and utter failure. And I’ll do you one better. Take a living cell, jab it and release all of its contents in a test tube. Now, add whatever you want and do whatever you want to it. I’ll venture to say that no one will ever be able to get a living cell out of that, even with all the components required there.

Macro-evolution, strictly speaking, is evolution at or above species level. Oh, and if you're going to keep using the word "kind", please define it and explain how it differs from "species", if at all.

Do I really have to define the obvious? This is like that one quote from the Supreme Court Justice, I forget the one, but basically “I cannot define it, but I know it when I see it.” Let me give examples; that would be best. A giraffe is clearly a different kind than an elephant. A lizard is a different kind than an eagle. Etc. We know that these are different kinds. Now, I know you’ll come back and object about ones that seemingly overlap. But even Evolutionists are pretty honest about this one. Legless lizards are from a different line than snakes; hence, legless lizards are still lizards. I’d have to get into just about every example to be able to answer properly. Probably the best way to define it is that they cannot reproduce with another kind. Someone once tried to give this definition to species, but it was clearly wrong, given the fact that Lion and Tigers, for example, interbreed all the time.

Incorrect. Macro-evolution, (according to the actual definition, which I posted above), has been observed.

I’m not sure what makes yours the “actual definition”. Because if you looked at it that way, you’d have both observed and never observed instances in the same category. We see wolves and dogs coming from a common ancestor. We do NOT see crocodiles and parakeets coming from the same ancestor. Macro is the latter example. Micro is the former example. You can come in and say you don’t like my definition, but that is how I’ve defined it and will use it.

Incorrect. New information can and does arise.

I don’t see where information is being added. Information is not being added when a dog produces another dog. Information is always lost, just like making a copy of a copy. It’s why inbreeding is a bad thing. Information has been lost; so there’s less complexity. And if this were true, where would the information even come from?

Actually, it's because it increases the possibility of recessive traits manifesting themselves.

Really, I see that as TO-MAY-TO TO-MAH-TO...The point is that complexity (availability of various genes) is reduced. Thus, information is being lost, not gained from generation to generation.

It also shows a wealth of organisms that shared similar characteristics and can be used to trace back ancestry. Not to mention, the fossil record is a useful way to test evolution, since if it was wrong with find such things as Precambrian rabbits, ultimately keeping evolution falsifiable.
The fossil record is not the most powerful evidence for evolution. It's just popular because, for some reason, people tend to find dinosaurs more exciting the endogenous retroviruses.

They show that something died. Sure, it did live, too, but it can’t be evidence that one kind of animal turned into another kind. Simply because there no way of knowing what kind of kids it had, if any. And it’s not like the bones come marked up saying “this one goes with this one” and “this one was the ancestor of this one”. No, how it actually works is that someone who already has their notion of Evolution in there head comes along, finds the bones, rearranges them so that they reflect their theory (disregarding how they might actually be found), and calls it science. And we do find things all the time that disprove the geologic column. They just don’t get published for the same reason that radioactive dates that the Evolutionist doesn’t agree with don’t get published.
And I didn’t say it was the most powerful, just that it was used the most.

Also, it can tell us how species that don't exist right now looked, and give us a rough idea of when they died. Which, again, is a useful test of evolution.

Which is only done with the dates already decided in the Geologic Column. Radioactive methods are NOT used, unless they match the dates already decided by the GC.

Every single example of which was disproved by scientists using the theory of evolution as a framework and the tools related to it.
Yes, fakes happen. People try to trick or profit from scientists, sometimes even other scientists, being as they are human and all. This doesn't disprove evolution. Or would you argue that faked miracles, which are absurdly more common than faked fossils, disprove Christianity?

The point is that Evolutionists are often so quick to prove their theory, they will use phony evidence. Some have said on record that they will use evidence proven wrong, simply because it portrays the overall concept they want to portray (which is correct, in their view).
And this isn’t what I said at all. I didn’t say that Evolution is disproved because some people have faked fossils. I would not be so unjust. It is just that the fact that the ONLY evidence they use is that which has been proven wrong, in one form or another.

A bold claim to make. One that happens to be wrong, too.

Right back at you. And it is a fraud. See below.

the entire column appears no where in reality but only in the minds of Evolutionists.

Evidence, please.

Are you serious? You want me to PROVE that the geologic column DOESN’T exist? You cannot prove the nonexistence of something. I can merely point out the fact that no where on Earth have we found, in the order presented, the fossils in the Geologic Column.

Oh, not this again. This has to be the most oft-repeated YEC argument ever. Sorry if I sound somewhat exasperated, it's not personal, it's just that I've heard and refuted this one about 3.22 bajillion times since I started arguing with Creationists.
Yes, it's true that you can date the fossil from the layer, and the layer from the fossil. What is not true is the implication that this is done at the same time, for a single set of fossil and layer.. Example: we have a geological layer which, through various dating methods, we can be reasonably sure is between X and Y years old. Therefore, it is a reasonable assumption that, if tomorrow we find a new fossil in that layer, it'll be between X and Y years old.
And, if we know, through various dating methods, a particular kind of animal only existed between A and B years ago, then the layer we find it in must be between A and B years old.
The key to this is that it is corroborated by multiple dating methods. That is, if tree rings and radiometric decay tells us both the same date, it's likely that is the correct date, and can be used to date other things. If this was circular, we'd see precambrian rabbits. We don't.

Just because it’s often repeated doesn't make it any less valid. The problem with this, is that even using the method you talk about, radioactive dating determines if its dates are accurate based off of...wait for it...the GEOLOGIC COLUMN. So again, the whole thing does point back to that. They come up with the dates they want, then use some pseudo-science to get the answer they want. It is circular reasoning, and it’s not a valid approach. And we can talk more about dating methods if you want.
And by the way, your way of disproving Evolution is quite questionable. The only way the column will be false is if we find “precambrian rabbits”? How about the fact that many of the animals down there already lived at the bottom of the ocean? So, the only way to disprove the column is if some rabbit (or the like) swam all the way below a trilobite and got buried? No. Some of the organization is valid but for a different reason. Something that must be grasped (as below) is that the layers are NOT different ages. And we can get into that if you want. That alone is enough to question the GC.

The cognitive dissidence that goes along with looking for fossils ignores such findings as dinosaur and trilobites in the same layers as humans.

Source, please.[/quote]
Just as an example: http://paleo.cc/paluxy/meister.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Source, please. The usual claim of multi-layer trees is, I find, often exaggerated from reports that ultimately originate in the fact that roots grow underground. But if you have specific examples that show otherwise, please share. I'm interested.

I don’t exactly have any on my hard drive. So, I just googled some. Hopefully this will at least somewhat satisfy your curiosity. I apologize in advance, as I have not previewed these links thoroughly.
http://www.tasc-creationscience.org/con ... ied-forest" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.bible.ca/tracks/tracks-petrified-tree.jpg
http://www.icr.org/article/445%20/
http://ianjuby.org/jogginsb.html

If you can find any photos from the Mt. St. Helen’s explosion, those are good, too.

Tiktaalik. Archaeopteryx. Just to name the popular ones.


Archaeopteryx = fully functioning bird. Tiktaalik = a fully functioning fish. These examples are not transitional. And I did kind of skim over this topic, which I’m willing to talk about more. But I’ll just mention this quote from Evolutionist Dr. Colin Patterson:
“...I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader? I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin's authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a paleontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least "show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived." I will lay it on the line - there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. “

Let's stop right there. No serious biologist believes Haeckel was right nowadays. Individual laypeople might, but then we're supposed to be arguing about the actual ToE, not misrepresentations.

Maybe not, but the fact that they still print it in the books shows their intent to deceive. And If i were to leave off things that were clearly wrong, then I wouldn’t have had much in this topic in the first place. I included because it’s a clearly wrong argument that is still used (at least in textbooks).

That might be because that's a strawman.

Um...that is essentially what they do.

Vestigial means "greatly reduced in function compared to similar structures in other species". Our appendix is vestigial because we can look at the appendix of, say, a cow, and notice it plays a much bigger role in digestion. Our tailbone is vestigial because we can look at the prehensile tail in some apes and notice it's much more useful. Same for whale's pelvis, etc.

I would still say this is a misunderstanding of their functions in Biology. And I would also say that this is starting with the presupposition that Evolution is true. That is, Evolution is true, therefore, these structures aren’t as useful as they once were, as seen by these other creatures. And, these structures aren’t as useful (vestigial), so this helps prove Evolution. It’s circular reasoning.

Tool use makes our arms much more useful compared to the forelimbs of other animals, and our legs allow us our erect posture (mixed with other stuff, of course). They are not vestigial by the actual definition of the term.

Point is: just because you can live without it (or because you don’t understand its purpose/function), does NOT mean it is not important. And it certainly does not prove Evolution (again losing, not gaining).

Lenski experiment. Period.

I don’t see how this is evidence. I goes exactly to what I said before. The mutations may be beneficial in the lab, but not in a normal environment. This is simply adaptability. The bacteria are adapting for now, but if they were released back into the general population, they would be unfit. This is not a beneficial mutation. And information is NOT being added. I would say looking at the results, a biased conclusion was reached.

Human chromosome 2. Humans have 23 chromosome pairs, as you probably know. Other apes have 24. Human chromosome 2 has two centromeres, whereas normal chromosomes have one, located at the centre, and extra telomere sequences at the middle, instead of at the end, just as if it had originally been 2 different chromosomes, which fused. And what do we see? The genetic sequences in apes at that location are terribly similar to the ones in humans.
How do you explain that within a creationist framework?

Yeah, I knew that. I think I meant 46 and 48. I mistyped. Thanks for correcting, though.
How do I explain that? Easy. Similar design. We’re fooling ourselves if we really think we understand DNA that completely. I concede some similarities. I merely say that the similarities do not matter and certainly do not prove Evolution.
How do you explain that a change in 3 nucleotides is fatal to an animal? How could it possibly change?

Really? How many of the sentences, let alone paragraphs, do Star Wars and Romeo and Juliet have in common?
I'm guessing it's less than 19/20. I'm guessing it's far less than 1/20, actually.
That's how you measure chimp-human similarity. Sequences of tens of thousands of base-pairs that are identical. You could grab a random part of the genetic code and not be able to tell whether it came from a chimp or a human.

I don’t know, as I was pulling an analogy out of thin air. I was just trying to be lighthearted. Like I said above, it’s ludicrous to think we understand DNA that completely. Similarities can simply mean that they were both written in English and used the same 26 letters. They both used sentences and paragraphs. And I’m sure they used many of the same words (especially he, she, it they, a, the, an, etc.). Those two books are a lot more similar than say the 1’s and 0’s of a computer code. The point is that “similarity” is meaningless. And a watermelon and a snow cone’s similarity doesn’t mean that they were formed by Evolution. The same stuff was just used to make them both. So what?

Depends where. Most of the time, a change of 3 nucleotides does nothing at all.

That may or may not be so, but I was just quoting from someone on the Human Genome project. The other point is that, despite any similarities, there are millions and millions of differences between the two that cannot be reconciled by Evolution. And to be brief, I’ll just simply say that without an advantage in selection beneficial mutations during this time, it would be impossible to explain how the large number of mutations became fixed in the population. And that’s just talking about humans and chimps.

It's not just chromosome number. It's what's inside those chromosomes.
By the way, I notice you completely forgot about endogenous retroviruses. (can you tell that I love typing that?)
Y'know, some of the best evidence for shared ancestry in our DNA and that makes no sense in a creationist model?

I understand that chromosome number doesn’t matter. I’m just saying that if Evolution were true, it SHOULD matter. Things should get more complicated and have more chromosomes. As it is, the number is irrelevant and has no clear indication of Evolutionary direction.
If you would like to expound on HERVs, then be my guest. I don’t fully understand them, and I seriously doubt mankind does either. But I completely disagree that they don’t fit in a Creationist worldview. Just like the appendix, the function may not be well-understood, and just like many other post-Fall changes, it may have served a different function before.

A growth rate of 0.5% per year is ridiculous with two people. Of course, there weren't two humans 50,000 years ago, but I was just pointing out that your calculation is completely divorced from reality.
Regardless, the ToE doesn't claim stable growth rates, which is just fine, because that's not what happens. When you overpopulate an area, you run out of resources, and the population drops sharp. Technology allows us to get the most out of resources, which is why population is growing much faster now. Back in the past, though, stuff like the Toba event neared us to extinction.

I agree, I simplified it and modified it in FAVOR of Evolution. There were likely more, sure. But even if you start with only 2 people that long ago, you still run into problems. Relooking at the video below, though, I guess I should have used 0.456% and 500,000 years, though. It may be divorced from reality, but it’s in favor of Evolution, yet it still doesn’t work out.
Check out this video (skip ahead to 2:35 if you wish): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRGuSPYp ... re=related" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
But even if Evolution doesn’t claim stable growth rates, you run into problem going not that far back. Would the first man and first woman wait 1000 years before their first child. You run into problems EARLY. Based on the growth curve, it would have to be essentially flat for thousands of years. This really isn’t going to happen. You really can’t explain your way out of it because the math speaks for itself.

I'd like to see your work for that.

8 people 4500 years ago, using a growth rate of 0.456% (A better estimate than what I used above)
Today’s population = 6.5 billion. *magic*

spelling correction

I should have you be my editor, then. I obviously didn’t proofread it in great detail.

Is a fallacy, because it doesn't take into account changes in use for organs and the fact evolution can add parts as well as remove them.

Not a fallacy. See what I what I wrote about it. When you’re already at bare minimum, losing something is devastating. And you’re very dismissive of one of the best anti-Evolution evidences.

Humans live in a world shaped by humans. We see lots of design around because we made most of it. Selection bias.

We *recognize* design. This is the key.

That is mostly because we know how books and computers are formed. Exploding typewriter factories cannot result in books, mostly because the explosion would burn the paper, and also because there is not directing mechanism such as natural selection.
Computers are not self-replicating (yet), and as such the process of evolution wouldn't apply to them.

This is exactly my point. we KNOW it can’t happen that way, yet these things are much less complicated than cells. And the very reasons we know a book couldn’t form from an exploding factory is similar to why we know that creation had to be designed. The particular fallacies just vary.

Because a) we know how those were formed and b) they lack the necessary properties for evolution.

You finally get it! This is exactly why biological evolution is impossible.

Not really. The human brain tends to see agency where there is none. That is, we assume something happened because of someone did it. It was useful back when we were running from predators and we assumed that the leaves moving was an animal rather than the wind, because that gets you killed easy.
Besides, pareidolia.

So I guess it’s more evolutionary beneficial to realize that Boeing makes 747 and that they don’t come from a tornado hitting a junk yard? You’re missing the obvious when you just dismiss our recognition of design. It’s so ingrained in you that you don’t even realize that you’re acknowledging design.

Only when both have a known designer, and even then it's not necessarily so. Pyramids were found both in the Americas and in Egypt, yet nobody assumes they were designed by the same people.

Yes, but neither would anybody assume they formed by slow gradual processes. That only proves the point that we recognize design. (We didn’t see the Mayans or the Egyptians building the pyramids or writing on walls, but we recognize intelligence.)

In the case of DNA, from mutation. See, once again, the Lenski experiment.

Information can’t come “from” mutation. The Lenski experiment again just shows the information that was already present. You’re missing a fundamental principle here. Information must come from a mind. See examples above. We see the Egyptian writings, and we know someone wrote it. If we saw a computer code, we would know that someone wrote it (although if it was in 1’s and 0’s, it may be harder to decipher). There is information on DNA because there was a Writer, and Author. Plain and simple, information cannot come from a mutation. This is a philosophically flawed notion. I could get into a whole discussion about how knowledge of a subject and the subject itself are distinct from one another. Information is independent from the medium on which its written. Explaining how a printing press works doesn’t explain the information written on the page or where it comes from.

All of those are example of symbolic information. That is, it only makes sense to a mind that knows what the symbols stand for. DNA has its deciphering mechanisms built into the cell, so no need to postulate an outside mind.

I would say that they are a means of communicating information. Again, explaining how a printing press works doesn’t explain the information written on the page or where it comes from.

Bold claim. Once again, happens to be wrong.

It’s really not that bold because Evolution ISN’T a theory in the scientific sense. I’m amazed you’re even fighting me on that. Scientists don’t even say it’s a scientific theory. A Theory in the scientific sense is something that’s well established and has observational support, which Evolution does not have. Evolution is an unsubstantiated conjecture about the past.

What you call the "Good Samaritan" trait has been known for a while, and it is accounted for in gene-level selection in social animals. (and other theories, too, but that's the one I know best)
To keep it short, social animals are those that rely on cooperation with others of the same species, humans being a prime example. And gene-level selection means that a gene can be preserved even if the individual carrying it dies, if there are other individuals who do.
Basically, a mutation gives individual A a small sense of empathy. While this might be detrimental if A is the only one with this trait, A manages to reproduce, maybe because it wasn't too strong, maybe because A was just an unlikely success, maybe whatever. Over time, there is a small population with this trait, and they help each other in a minor way. This gives the population an advantage, so the trait is selected for and further increases as now every increase in empathy leads to greater cooperation, which is even more advantageous, etc.
Even if some individuals with that trait sacrifice themselves and thus fail to reproduce, they are helping others with that same gene, so the trait survives. That is a gene working to preserve itself over the individual.

I know the Evolutionary explanation, but I’m saying it’s inadequate. Because at best, Evolutionists say that it is a hiccup on the gene pool. A mistake. Something that shouldn’t be, yet is. Evolution is about “survival of the fittest.” It makes no sense in Evolution for us to feel that we “ought” to give ourselves for someone else, especially someone who is completely unrelated to us. It’s a mistake, and if we were to correct it and go the way that Evolution shows us we should go, then we should care only about our immediate relatives, kill the lesser races, etc. etc. Even Darwin’s book is called “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races.” We should be preserving the favored races, now that we have intelligence to do so, if Evolution were true. Despite your attempted explanation, this problem is devastating to the idea of Evolution, because no person, not even an Evolutionist, is going to go on record as saying we should cause genocide and the like.

Because evolution is not a terribly specific process. We evolve empathy because it works, but empathy to those that are somewhat similar to us works is not much less effective than empathy to those of us that are directly related. Not to mention, we always care more about those we feel closest.
And, a lot of what you mentioned is due to intellect applied to empathy, rather than empathy alone. Racism was absurdly common not too long ago, and fear and hatred of what is different still exists. We are just culturally advanced to a point where we learn to ignore the "fear of different" impulse in favour of the "empathy" impulse, for a variety of reasons.

But we have excellent brains with great thinking capacity and understanding, now, so we should know better.
And what I’m saying is, if Evolution is true, we SHOULD be racist. Someone is superior, someone is inferior. In fact what is “good” should mean what is best for the human race (strong survive) and what is “evil” would be preventing this. If Evolution is true, racism should be good and sympathy for the weak should be evil.

Because we are social animals, and the ability to empathise with others of our group is incredibly useful, survival-wise. That's the basic origin of morality, helping out your local group because it works better than not.

It’s still a mistake that needs correct. (Again, if Evolution is true.)

There's no such thing as inherent knowledge of good and evil. There is the inborn notion of it, but inherent knowledge implies its objective and universal. It's not.

Oh brother, you couldn’t be more wrong. Even little babies recognize it to some extent. But this is an entirely separate topic that I don’t want to get into here. C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity does a pretty good job of explaining this one.

And I could rant all day on the multiple flaws of supernaturalism. But honestly, that deserves its own thread.

Well, that’s exactly what I’m saying; more could be said, but doesn’t need to be said here. Supernatualism is pretty easy to argue against Naturalism, though. I’ll just point to another Lewis book Miracles

I have a naturalistic answer, from my own naturalistic framework. Remember, we're not a monolithic group, I only speak for myself: Free will is an illusion, everything else was advantageous for our ecological niche.

That is an appropriate Naturalistic answer. If it’s true, however, it’s pointless to have a discussion because no one can change their mind anyway from what they’re programmed to do. And, please...let’s not get off on a tangent about this.

Natural selection is not random. And stop conflating evolution and naturalism.

They are two parts of the same fruit. I’ll use them interchangeably because Evolution is an explanation of Naturalism. And people who want to believe Evolution want a Naturalistic framework. And the part that I was talking about that’s “random” is the random mutations. Everything is random because the origin of the universe was random. Therefore, everything is random. And natural selection isn’t a “thing”. It’s just a label used for how one species survives over another. You said yourself that these changes have no logical reason behind them.

Or not, as explained above.

The universe is either organized or chaotic. Take your pick. If the cause of your brain is ultimately based on chaos or Naturalist explanation rather than something Rational, then your brain itself and the thoughts it produces are irrational.

Let's assume for a second that I didn't explain the flaws in these last few sentences: In any case, the brain works. That's the ultimate test of it. How it came to be is irrelevant.

To say the brain works is subjective. It’s merely pragmatic. But we cannot ever say that we can deduce and truths. Figuring out how to catch food is one thing. It’s good at that. But we have no assurance in knowing that our conjectures about the origins of space-time are worthwhile with such a brain. And your statement begs the question. How do we know if it works? If what we think is actually true. Well how do we know if it’s actually true? Because we reason to ourselves that it is. But, if our brain cannot be trusted, how can we trust that conclusion?

You'll notice CS Lewis wasn't a neurologist or biologist.

You’ll notice that virtually none of the major Evolutionists out there, including Darwin, were in any field of science. Your point is? This is a philosophical question, and Lewis if philosphically-minded. Your simple explanation of how things works does NOT explain the origin of them. Read what I said above. You beg the question. How can we even trust our brain to know if it’s reliable or, as you say, “if it works”?

Context is your friend. Wald was not referring to spontaneous generation in the sense of Pasteur, and his claim of "impossibility" was not literal. See:

Our everyday concept of what is impossible, possible or certain derives from our experience: the number of trials that may be encompassed within the space of a human lifetime, or at most within recorded human history. In this colloquial, practical sense I concede the spontaneous origin of life to be "impossible." It is impossible as we judge events in the scale of human experience.

The scale of human experience is terribly small, as you'll notice.

And again you entirely miss the point here. First, we’re still relying on the belief of things that we have never observed and human history has never observed. Not science. The other point is that Wald openly states that he (like many others) simply do not want there to be a God that exists. Therefore, he will believe in whatever he can, no matter how far-fetched, to avoid this unpleasant conclusion. It’s sad really. And I mean that in a sympathetic way. My heart actually breaks for people like this.

OK, I’m going to take a long break. So I really hope I don’t see about five 100 point responses when I come back. It kind of just becomes a waste of time to answer them all, especially if the people I’m responding to don’t care about the answer.

[Blu]

Yay for long post!

I know there are other topics out there, but I'm really not interested in a "what do you think" sort of discussion. I care about Truth. And people may have their varying opinions, but ultimately, out of a range of contradicting worldviews, only one can be right (or all wrong, possibly). Truth, by definition, is exclusive. So, my very narrow focus of this discussion is where Evolution (that is, a form of Naturalism) falls short, and I also provide some positive proofs for the beliefs I hold.

A form of naturalism?
No, it’s science.

So, before going into the particular details, I want to say that I think everyone who believes in Evolution falls into one of two categories:

Wow... categorising people who accept a scientific field fall into two groups? This I’d like to see...

First, there are those who accept it unconditionally and absolutely; they are very adamant and unpersuaded (Resolute).

You seem to misunderstand science. People accept science simply on evidence. If evidence points the other way, the population will gradually change with it. People who hold onto beliefs are mostly, if not always, holding onto faith-based religious beliefs.

Second, there are those believe Evolution is generally accepted as popular opinion by scientists; either they believe one side has convincing evidence or the other lacks it. But they are seeking answers (Undecided).

All of them, basically

Btw, I shall be reading over your post to see which group you fit into, because of course, these two categories should apply to you as well.

The Resolute: I do not believe I would be able to help someone in the first group. A person in this group suffers from what is called “cognitive dissidence.”

Lol, dissidence.

That is, he or she cannot accept or get the mind around any evidence that would contradict a foundationally held belief. Any evidence is meaningless because his or her mind is already set about how things are.

Evidence got them there in the first place. Evidence is therefore not meaningless to them.

Their mind will not be changed. What is ironic about someone in this group is that their worldview rejects absolute truth, yet their position is based upon an absolute.

Remember, these are people you’re making up in your head.

They must borrow from other worldviews even to engage in discussion (since they cannot account for logic and reason or good and evil either).

That’s a bold claim to make lol Prove it.

My Position: One more item before I get started…my position is that I am a man of faith; I believe in God, and I accept the Bible as being true. But, do I belong in the first category? While I am resolved in my belief, it is not because I refuse to listen to evidence.

Well, you obviously don’t require it either, since there is no evidence for God, and yet you believe him...

Ok, let’s get to the meat of your argument, starting with the blatantly Kent Hovind stuff...

Evolution has many facets, and it would be lazy on the part of the Evolutionist to start only after life begins.

Was Einstein lazy because he didn’t discover electricity?
Evolution is defined as the change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool over successive generations. Alleles are alternate genes. Genes are found in chromosomes, chromosomes are found in cells. Cells came when life began.
Evolution deals with nothing other than life, just like gravity doesn’t deal with the make-up of an atom. They’re different sciences.
Just because science comes up with a theory, does not mean that theory must explain everything about everything.

There is much more to the universe than simply what happens after live arrives. In order to have a believable worldview and one that others should accept, it should be coherent.

Evolution is not a worldview. It’s a science.
Why aren’t you arguing with gravitationalists? Or electromagneticalists? Surely their worldviews are just as incoherent because they don’t tell us where shoes came from...

All aspects must be addressed, not simply once life is already here.

Are you for real?

So, before we get into the discussion of development of kinds

When discussing science, you use scientific terms. You don’t use words like ‘kinds’ in order to fog things up.
Tell me, is kind equivalent to Kingdom, Order, Class, Phylum, Genus or Species? These are the scientific classifications you must use from now on. I won’t have you bringing in words with no clear definition.

1) Cosmic Evolution – The development of space, time, and matter from literally nothing.

Ah, I miss ‘Dr.’ Hovind. Is he still in jail?

Something coming from nothing is highly improbably and has been all but proven false.

I know that this stuff has nothing to do with evolution, but I’ll have some fun anyway.
Nobody in their right mind says that everything started from absolutely nothing. Science is still working on what caused the Big Bang.

The 1st Law of Thermodynamics and Conservation of Mass state that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed!

Oh, the irony...

In fact, we count on this NOT to happen in order to have an orderly universe.

The irony meter is off the scale!

Could you imagine driving along and a house suddenly appears in front of you?

The irony meter has just exploded.

Seriously, are you trying to disprove your own ideas?

This is no more implausible than all the matter, energy, space, and time suddenly appearing from nothing completely on its own. In fact, there is another argument about this that says that anything that has a beginning must have a first cause. There is plenty of evidence indicating that the universe began to exist and is not eternal (see 2nd Law of Thermodynamics – it should have wound down by now). Therefore, it must have a first cause. It could not spontaneously form itself.

We don’t know yet. We’re trying to figure it out. You, on the other hand, don’t want to figure it out, but just say ‘Goddunit’.

2) Steller Evolution – The development of complex stars from the first chaotic elements.

Aside from the fact that no one’s ever seen a star form, there is a chicken and egg problem with stars and elements.

http://outreach.atnf.csiro.au/education ... ation.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The elements are needed to make the stars, but the stars are also needed to make the elements. So, which were produced first in the Big Bang?

Hydrogen atoms were around. They condensed to form stars. Larger elements were formed within the stars. What’s so hard to understand?

Some think that Hydrogen and Helium along with some subatomic particles were first produced and somehow condensed into stars. But again, there is no explanation for how they could have condensed, and this has never been observed.

I think you should take this up with a gravitationalist.

3) Chemical Evolution – The development of all chemical elements from the original two.

The stars were thought to have produced the other elements from their incredible heat and pressure. This is a feat that has also already been disproved. While chemical fusion is possible, it is only possible to produce elements up to Iron (Atomic Number 26). So where did the other 66 elements come from?

Supernovae
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

4) Planetary Evolution – The development of planetary systems from swirling elements.

See issues from the first three. There is also the additional problem of Conservation of Angular Momentum: Many planets and even entire galaxies are spinning backwards. Most spin counter-clockwise (from top view), but some spin clockwise (from the same view). According to CAM, if a body is rotating and a part breaks off, it must spin in the same direction. This is a similar principle to Newton’s Laws of Motion.

If you actually understood the conservation of angular momentum, you would know that it is only conserved in a closed system. Space is not a closed system. You get large collisions (eg. Asteroid collisions) which change the angular momentum.

5) Organic Evolution – The development of life from inorganic material (a rock)

You spend too long watching Kent Hovind seminars. I think what you mean is Abiogenesis. And only Kent Hovind says we come from a rock.

He’s in jail for tax fraud, you know.

Evolutionists are in the embarrassing position of believing a theory disproved 100 years ago.

Please, enlighten me.

Spontaneous generation was disproved by the experiments of Louis Pasteur in the 19th century. Evolutionists may mock theists and others for their explanations for the beginnings of life, but the bottom line is that they believe that life developed from rocks being rained on for millions of years.

Nope. I don’t.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultran ... hesis.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

6) Macro-Evolution – The development of one kind of life from a completely different kind of life (what most people talk about when discussing “Evolution”)

There are also many problems with this (most of which boil down to the fact that none of it has been observed but all comes from imaginations of the Evolutionists), but I will cover this in the main text.

7) Micro-Evolution – The development of variations within a particular kind of life (speciation)

This is the only actually observed form of “evolution.” We have seen dogs produce different types of dogs. We’ve seen the varieties of horses and fish and lizards and finches and turtles and humans all form. But nothing is being added here. All of the varieties come from the information that was already available in the DNA of the original kind (which is why inbreeding is so bad…because the amount of information has been greatly reduced). This process has not been observed to produce different kinds of animals.

Explain to me how the mechanisms in macro and micro evolution differ, and then tell me how one can occur but not the other.

Evidence from Fossils – This is, perhaps, the most popular “evidence” for Evolution. Yet, it is possibly the easiest to take out in one fell swoop: No fossil counts as evidence for Evolution because it cannot be proved that it had any kids, let along ones different from itself.

Well, it was alive at one point, wasn’t it. Isn’t that what actually matters?

[/quote]The only thing that fossils prove is that something died.[/quote]
...And that it lived in a certain time period in a certain area that can be used to trace ancestry and the likes...

What some Evolutionists try to do is dig up some bones in the dirt (sometimes gathering them from various locations and sometimes only small fragments), rearrange them to fit what they imagine to be the case, and then have some artist draw out what they want it to look like.

So we should discard the whole Theory...
Hmm... I think not.

None of it is science.

Wait till the scientists hear about this!

There are scores of examples of people (both accidentally and fraudulently) pairing phony bones together and using it to prove the ancestor of something else. One example of a caveman “Nebraska man” was based entirely on the discovery of one tooth. And from this, they made the whole man and his wife. As it turned out, the tooth was from that of a pig.

And who figured this out?
Oh yeh! An evolutionary biologist! Lol!

“Lucy” is such an example.

Um... Lucy was not fraudulent in any way...
Seriously, watch someone other than Kent Hovind, please.

The geologic column as a whole is a fraud. Although the distribution of fossils may be similar in some cases, the entire column appears no where in reality but only in the minds of Evolutionists. Over and over, various Evolutionists openly state that dating methods of any kind wouldn’t even have been possible if the geologic column wasn’t established first. And it should be pointed out that the geologic column was established before the fossils in it were actually found.

Sources please.

Another common practice of Evolutionists is that they both date the rocks by the fossils and the fossils by the rocks. They know how old the fossil is by the rocks around it, and they know how old those rocks are based off of the fossils in that layer. This is circular reasoning.

...And it would be impossible to get any dating done in the first place. They would just have to make it up, and then there would be no need to even date them according to each other...
You see how ridiculous that claim is?

It is done all the time, and it is not science.

And when was the last time you tagged along with palaeontologists and witnessed them making everything up? Or is this some baseless assertion?

The cognitive dissidence

lol

that goes along with looking for fossils ignores such findings as dinosaur and trilobites in the same layers as humans.

They ignore it because they haven’t found it.

And the entire thing is based off of the false assumption that the layers are different ages, something that has long been proved incorrect.

Wow, you make TM look like a source charity!

Instances such as trees (sometimes in the upside-down vertical position) connecting different layers demonstrate the fact that the layers are not different ages.

... Or that trees grow roots and live a long time.

The apparent lack of any transitional creatures (either alive or fossil) demonstrates the obvious fact that kinds are well defined.

I’ll ask again: What is a kind? Species? Genus? Phylum?...
And what about Tiktaalik?

I could provide many quotations from Evolutionist scientists that say the same things as what I’ve said here,

And yet you don’t...

but the bottom line is that none of this even matters because no fossils even count as evidence for Evolution.

I’m waiting to see the article you send to scientists which process this so!

Evidence from Development – “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Supposedly, as a human embryo goes through development, it goes through the various evolutionary stages: Fish, Amphibian, Reptile, and Mammal. The problem is that aside from being built on a lie, embryonic biology is completely misrepresented.

Well them, show us how it’s REALLY represented!

For example, at one stage the embryo supposedly has gill slits, but there are really bones that develop into the ears. The whole idea got started about 135 years ago by an Embryologist named Ernst Hackel. Hackel (who was one of the few Evolutionists, including Darwin, who actually had a degree in a scientific field) got tired of waiting around for evidence to come out for Evolution and doctors photos of embryos of various animals. The outcome was that they all appeared very similar to each other and not at all similar to the actual embryos. His University found out that he fakes the drawings, discredited him, and kicked him out of his position. One hundred thirty-five years later, we still have his drawings in high school and college Biology textbooks as a “proof” for Evolution.

And once again, it’s the evolutionists who see the problem and deal with it...
Haeckels embryo pictures were based on actual embryos, but with parts exaggerated. The parts were all there but made easier to see, which could be why they’re still in textbooks. And no, they don’t ‘prove’ evolution with it. It is used to show part of the history of embryonic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo_dra ... 34-1919.29" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Evidence from Structures – In addition to the above, this topic is a prime example of how Evolution is not beneficial to Science and actually hurts our understanding of Biological principles.

Not beneficial to science?
How about medicine then? Is that not part of science?
Biology is pretty much based around evolution. How does it hurt our understanding of it in any way?

The first argument is that different animals have similar structures. They look at an arm, a wing, and a fin, give the bones the same names, and color them the same colors in the textbook and say that proves we evolved from a rock. Crazy?

Yes, you are.

You bet it is! Similar structures are just as much evidence for similar design as anything else. Why are computers built similarly? Or houses? Or cars? Or phones? Why are any number of things built similarly? Well, it might just be that it’s a good design, and it might just be that the same guy built them (or at least designed them).

So why then, if the eye was such a good design, are there so many different types of eyes? Like compound eyes, for example. Why doesn’t everything have the same type of eye if it was so good? Why don’t we have the eyes of an eagle? How come they get better eyesight than us?!
And before you forget, evolution easily explains these similarities anyway.

The other thing they say—which is the biggest slap in the face to Biology—is that many creatures have “vestigial structures,” that is, structures that no longer serve a practical use.

Wrong!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestigial_organ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
They often do have uses. Just different ones.

Examples include: leg bones in whales and snakes and the human tailbone and appendix. What these Evolutionists fail to realize is that every example they provide is always an instance where something is being lost, not gained. In order for Evolution to work, information must be added at some point.

You don’t appear to understand Evolution. Evolution does NOT require a gain in something. It simply requires change that better suits an organisms to its environment.

(Why don’t they provide an example of that?)

Why don’t you look it up?

The other problem is that these, too, are based on misconstruction of the functional anatomy. To be brief, whale pelvic bones are used for giving birth; snake pelvic bones are used in mating; the human coccyx is an anchor for many important muscle functions; and the appendix is needed for certain digestive processes.

Yes, and vestigial organs often do take on another use. Please read up on something before you use it in argument.

By the Evolutionist definition, arms and legs would be vestigial because we can live without them,

Well, not very long.

Evidence from Mutations – Beneficial mutations are the building blocks for Evolution. Unfortunately, nobody has ever seen one.

Nylon-eating bacteria? Humans changing to have paler skin in cooler conditions? Humans getting immune to small-pox? Virus’ getting immune to antibiotics? Finches growing larger beaks to break into larger shells?
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/beneficial-mutation.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoMutations.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The only examples Evolutionists and textbooks will give for mutations are harmful ones (because they are the only ones).

Nope. The one i have right in front of me tells us how changes in skin colour allowed us to better survive climates with less sun exposure.

Variations in DNA and gene code are always harmful (see below).

Despite all the examples I’ve just given...

Short-legged sheep, two-headed turtles, and five-legged bulls will all have shorter life spans than a normal healthy animal. Even resistant bacteria and roaches are less adequately built than a normal bacteria/roach. One “beneficial” mutation given is that people in Africa with Sickle Cell Anemia are less likely to get Malaria, which is clearly not an advantage.

It is if you don’t want to die sooner.

This just goes to show that all examples given are simply instances where information is lost and the creature is worse off than it would otherwise be.

Good. Now look at the links I gave you and learn something.

Evidence from DNA – I honestly don’t even know why Evolutionists even count this one an advantage.

Because it fit perfectly with the idea of evolution and allowed us to see the mechanisms by which it works.

DNA causes more issues for Evolutionists than anything (see below). This is supposedly an evidence for Evolution because of the similarity in DNA between Chimps and Humans.

You seem to miss that the main reason that it acts as evidence is because of the way it works, not because of similarities between species. The similarities do of course come as evidence but the evidence is far better when you look at how DNA works, replicates and passes on genetic information.
I could go on to say how it does it, but this post is long enough as it is.

Beside the facts that the entire human genomes have yet to be evaluated to date and that the percent similarity is changing all the time (98% in 2002, 95% in 2003), few have stopped to consider how utterly pointless such a “similarity” in DNA would be.

I fail to see how it could be pointless, seen as how the genomes we have uncovered so far follow the predicted ancestry tree almost perfectly.

I’m sure that William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is 95% similar to George Lucas’s Star Wars, but what on Earth does that prove??

It proves that you can’t think up a decent analogy, considering that movies don’t reproduce and pass on genetic information.

Watermelons and Snow cones are also 99% similar. This “similarity” isn’t meaningful because the reporters rarely tell us what exactly is similar.

Lol! The genome. That’s what is similar.
You know, that thing called a DNA sequence.

There is a lot that can be discussed about how this research is done, but one important thing to keep in mind is that even a difference in DNA of 1.6% is equivalent to 48 million nucleotides.

Yeah, and every generation a lot of nucleotides are changed, and the changes accumulate over time and successive generations.

And, a change of only 3 nucleotides is fatal to an organism!

Lol, i love the dramatics.
And no. Usually, it makes little difference. The main types of mutation are insertion, deletion and substitution. They all usually produce neutral mutations, though sometimes they produce positive or negative ones. For example, a substitution of one nucleotide might code for a different protein that gives immunity against certain pathogens.

How could this possibly account for a transition of one kind of animal to another?

Accumulation of mutations.
And again, you use the term ‘Kind’. Let’s keep it to scientific terms, please.

The other issue here is that number of chromosomes is completely irrelevant. First of all, chimps have one more chromosome pair than humans, but neither more nor less chromosomes indicates evolutionary direction.

Yeah, and chromosome 2 in humans is a combination of two chromosomes that fused together.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome_2#Evolution" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Chimps have the same number of chromosomes as a Tobacco plant at 28. And a Fern has the most chromosomes at 480. Chromosome number doesn’t matter just like DNA “percent similarity” doesn’t matter. It doesn’t tell us anything useful.

Except it can provide a lineage that should, and does fit the ancestral pattern.

Positive Evidence:

Human Population – The current population of Earth is roughly 7 billion. It reached 6 billion in the late 1990’s, 3 billion around 1960, etc., possibly first crossing over into the billions in the earth 1800’s. Evolution teaches that man first showed up in his modern form around 50,000 years ago. Using a starting population of two people and a conservative average annual population growth rate of 0.5%, the current population of humans should exceed the number of atoms in the entire universe.

Yeah... If you aren’t counting death...
You amaze me... really...

This is clearly absurd.

Thanks for acknowledging that.

And even then, shouldn’t be able to dig in our back yards without hitting bones of human remains.

Things decompose.

Even using an impossibly small growth rate of 1/200th of a percent, the current population should be 20 times larger.

Not counting death, of course, because let’s not forget that we’re not talking about reality here...

You can tweak the numbers every which way, but the bottom line is that the math does not work out with human population growth for the numbers provided by evolution.

Actually, it works perfectly for evolution, because we know that things die.

Historical population data best fits a model of 8 people about 4400 years ago.

To a creationist, perhaps.

Population also provides an additional difficulty for evolution in that it is incredibly easy for the “evolved” gene to get deluded back into the population.

You don’t get evolution, do you?

(The negative effects of inbreeding also show why this doesn’t work.)

No. Inbreeding is bad because if a family has a bad allele in the DNA, then making them breed together means that the bad gene is more likely to show up in the phenotype because both the parents may have the bad allele.

People also do not always procreate within their generation; so, the previous generation’s genes again would delude superior genes. This would make it impossible for anything ever to involve.

Evolution does not talk of individuals within the population, it talks about the whole population.

Irreducible Complexity – Arguably one of the best proofs of design is “Irreducible Complexity,” which basically says that some structures cannot be reduced past a certain point without becoming completely unusable.

And which has been fully disproved.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ICsilly.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The typical example used is that of a mousetrap with five piece: a spring, a hammer, a catch, an arm, and a base. If any one of these components were taken away, the mousetrap would cease to function. Not only would the mousetrap cease to function but the remaining parts would have no useful function by themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieKDLtrBXs0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This concept is applied to things such as cells and to the especially bacterial flagellum; both of which have hundreds of essential components. If any of a number of parts were missing or damaged, the entire system would fail.

The bacterial flagellum one was debunked, in a court room, of all places.
The problem with irreducible complexity is that it assumes that a feature must have always had the same function. Taking your example, the bacterial flagellum would, of course, have had to have all (or most) pieces there in order to function. What you miss though, it that without the motor section, it makes a pretty good feature to use as an injector.
Watch this vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdwTwNPyR9w" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Now, Evolutionists retort that partially formed structures may still have a secondary function, with the most common example being that of feathers providing warmth in addition to being used for flight. The problem with this line of thought, however, is that we are thinking like designers.

.............................................
No, we are thinking in an evolutionary sense. Let’s not resort to word games...

We think about how could this turn into that or these components be use for this or that. Evolution has no such benefit.

Please, read about evolution...

If a perfectly working structure suddenly goes missing a component (even a small one), it will fail without having any idea what to do.

Yeah, but things don’t just suddenly disappear after it’s already been formed.

Again, this is assuming we’re already at our barebones (hence irreducible) structure with no redundancies. The same goes for an additional (minute) component; it wouldn’t know what to do with it. We, as humans, think like designers wouldn’t much difficulty. A person might be able to think of something to do with four mousetrap parts, but Evolution wouldn’t have a clue what to do with them.

Watch the vids I have provided.

Appearance of Design – It is the human experience that things that appear to be designed are designed.

So ignorance proves your god?

We would never assumed that a book lying on the ground was produced by an exploding typewriter factory or that a computer formed by slow, gradual processes. We wouldn’t believe that an image on a coin or that Mount Rushmore was formed by erosion, but some do believe that George Washington himself is a result of Evolution.

We know how books, computers, coins, Mount Rushmore and even George were made. Different processes.
It’s like seeing a mole building a mole hill, then walking up to a mountain and saying “A really big mole must have made that.”
You aren’t thinking on a scientific level. You’re just taking your past experience and applying it to things you can’t explain. It’s called arguing from ignorance.

We automatically recognize design whenever we see it.

I don’t know anyone who goes to the zoo, see’s a giraffe, and says “They must have made it in a pretty big shed.” No. Even toddlers know that organisms were not individually designed (unless, of course, you brainwash them from an early age).

We would never assume that a jumbo-jet formed naturally, and a living cell is thousands of times more complicated than this.

Jumbo-jets don’t have babies though, do they. They don’t change genetically over generations either. They don’t natural respond to different environments and give their genes to their offspring. Your analogy fails.
The cell, on the other hand, reproduces, rapidly at that. It passes on genes which can mutate or go through polyploidy (which increases information potential).

Also, similar structures are best described by similar designer.

So different structures must then prove no designer? Like my previous eye example?
Anyway, evolution also describes it, and very well. Difference is, we have the evidence to back up the claim...

Origin of Information – Where does information come from? We see writing in a cave and we know people were the cause. If we find a floating bottle with a note in it, we know someone wrote it. If we found an icon or some writing on something buried in the desert, we would know someone was there. Even if we went to an alien planet and found writing that said “Welcome, Earth-dwellers,” we would assume there was intelligence behind it. This is because information must have a mind behind it.

Information in the sense of communication, yes.

In fact, without a mind, it ceases to be meaningful. If you dropped Scrabble tiles and it landed in such a way as to spell “Go to Baltimore”, would you do it?

Lol, i might do it for giggles

Of course not, because it is not meaningful without a mind behind it.

That’s because you’re looking at information in a purely human sense.

Nay, it ceases to be information at all. DNA contains massive amounts of information used to program living things.

I knew you would do this. You’re comparing the DNA code to a language. It’s not linguistics, it’s pure, simple chemistry. You’re analogy is a major fail.

The information contained in the DNA from one cell would fill enough books to fill the Grand Canyon many times over (50-100 times, depending on the size of the type), yet all the DNA in the human body could fit in two tablespoons! In this age of information were we clearly understand that computer coding comes from a mind, it is increasingly obvious that DNA could not have formed by any means other than intelligence.

No. No. No!
Evolution has no goal. It does not aim for anything. When the first DNA molecules were formed, with a random sequence of nucleotides, the ones that were beneficial stayed around, and were built on in millions of years. Again, it boils down to chemistry of molecules and natural selection.
You speak like you know little of Evolution. This little information bit shows that you think that evolution has a goal to achieve. Going back to the Baltimore analogy, you say that it had to fall in that specific order. This is where the language analogy fails most, because evolution does not need the tiles to have fallen into certain places after some time. The genetic mutation and change is random, and natural selection selects those better mutations. It does not strive for any particular DNA sequence. It does not try to form a sentence like the Baltimore thing. It simply accumulates traits that work.

The “Samaritan Trait” – A single irregularity in a scientific theory requires that it be reworked to account for the anomaly. Evolution (which is not a theory in the scientific sense)

You know, baseless claims don’t make you look like a good debater...

... if nothing else has this one inconsistency: We care about those in need. Not just about our progeny or those who are closely related to us. And not just those from whom we can benefit. We think bullying and “racism” and Nazism and the Holocaust and discrimination are morally wrong. Not because it is inconvenient to us or because it hurts us directly but because we recognize an inherent evil about it.

I think I can name a social benefit of helping those who suffer.
Remember that not long ago, people lived in isolated villages, where everyone they saw was working within the same civilisation. It is instinctive to act charitable because it benefits you in the long run.
The difference nowadays is that, in a short period of time, we have become much less isolated. We have TVs, so we can see people from all around the world. Yet the instinctive trait to be charitable is still there, so that when we see another human, this instinct is still there, even though the people aren’t directly related.

We think it’s wrong to mistreat someone because he or she has a different skin color or is a different gender or is of a different religion or simply because he or she is different.

Most people...
See above reason for this.

We adopt children, and we don’t like it when people suffer. Why do we care about people who are of no direct relation to us? Why do we care about those who, as Darwin puts it, are rivals to our existence and the existence of or our progeny?

See above reason again.

By all means, if Evolution is true, we most certainly should slaughter the lesser “races”, lest they pollute the gene pool.

You HAVE watched Expelled, haven’t you
This, as expected, is false. You don’t understand evolution, so I didn’t think you would get it right.
Evolution works best with a larger gene pool. Killing off parts of the gene pool reduces variation. It is a BAD thing in an evolutionary sense.

We should let men take advantage of women.

(Deuteronomy 20:10-14)
As you approach a town to attack it, first offer its people terms for peace. If they accept your terms and open the gates to you, then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor. But if they refuse to make peace and prepare to fight, you must attack the town. When the LORD your God hands it over to you, kill every man in the town. But you may keep for yourselves all the women, children, livestock, and other plunder. You may enjoy the spoils of your enemies that the LORD your God has given you.
(Deuteronomy 22:28-29 NLT)
If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her.
(Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NAB)
If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbors wife.
I could continue, but I think it’s already obvious who wants to let men take advantage of women.
Evolution, on the other hand, says nothing on the subject.

We should promote the Euthanizing of old people and children we don’t want and the crippled and mentally handicapped.

Again, narrowing of the gene pool is a bad thing.
And even then, we don’t need your God to have morals. You think we’re savages?

By all means we should take the future Evolution of our species into our own hands and do these things.

Now you’re just mocking... That’s not very Christian of you!

Yet, we know that we could not live in a world like that. We know such acts of cruelty are wrong.

I thought you were Christian. Don’t they want to kill all homosexuals and any other religious group? I’m sure I’ve heard that somewhere...
Lol, the irony levels have been skyrocketing today.

So what happened to the higher over the lesser from Darwinian Evolution?

It was never there. Only in your mind.

Evolution cannot account for this “Samaritan trait”. It is completely without an answer.

I’ve just given you one.

Such a large inconsistency like this is devastating to a theory.

Gravity says that fat people create a larger dent in the space-time continuum. Such cruelty to fat people is devastating to the gravitational theory!
Yes. That’s how crazy you sound right now.
It has nothing to do with the mechanisms of evolution!

Such inherent knowledge of good and evil cannot be explained by Naturalism.

Explain good and evil to me. Define them.

In addition to all this, there are also many philosophical arguments I could make about the shortcomings of Naturalism as a whole.

Philosophical? Not scientific where it actually matters?

Going back to those who have to borrow the concept of absolute truth in order to have ground to stand on…

How condescending...
How ironic as well, since a lot of Christianity was borrowed from earlier religions!

Naturalism also has problems with how to account for knowledge,

Increase in brain mass and neuron connections.

reason,

Individual benefit and cultural benefit.

thought,

Processing of stimuli within the brain/neuron action.

and free will.

We’re alive and we control what our bodies do. Also, there is no God dictating over us.

Indeed, these things are unaccounted for in the naturalistic framework.

Despite the fact that I’ve just given you answers.

The simplest way to illustrate this is that Evolutionists hold that everything ultimately came about by random chance.

Nope. The Earth got here because of the laws of physics, and life as we see it here today is due to natural selection, which is not a random process.

Thus, the brain came about by random chance.

What did I just tell you?

So, all conclusions reached by the brain cannot be trusted because they are based on the random causes of Naturalistic fate.

Drawing baseless conclusions from baseless claims...

As C.S. Lewis said, “The description we have to give of thought as an evolutionary phenomenon always makes a tacit exception in favor of the thinking which we ourselves perform at that moment.”

What a great scientist he was.
Wait a minute...

There are many I could quote on this (and may in the future), but I will end simply with an unfortunate, yet honest quote from George Wald:
When it comes to the origin of life there are only two possibilities: creation or spontaneous generation. There is no third way.

Amino acids have come about naturally.

Spontaneous generation was disproved one hundred years ago, but that leads us to only one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation.

“So, because A is false, then B is automatically true!”

See a problem with that?

We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds; therefore, we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance!

It’s not impossible, because it’s actually happened.

Thank you for reading and for “hearing” me out. I appreciate the respectful discussion and will gladly engage anyone who is willing to openly seek the truth. Let’s please keep the conversation friendly and avoid hostility. I will try to do the same.

Sorry if I’ve come across a little sarcastic. I’m just like that please don’t take offense. I rather enjoyed replying.