(the rest of this has been cut for the moment).
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: : Funny, that; considering that humanity has been spread throughout the planet for much longer than that (~10,000 years at least).: I agree that the Neolithic Revolution and Adam's date on earth some 12,000 to 13,000 years ago are in synch. Science and the Bible do agree, don't they?
Ah, so now you're saying that the Bible says that Adam was born in 13,000, eh? Would you care to square that with Bishop Ussher, who famously calculated that the Earth was created in 4004 B.C.?
Or is every attempt at fitting time to the Bible a farrago of vapid and insubstantial hypotheses?
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: : Well, heck, no, we haven't discovered any major new species in the last 4000 years, in much the same way that we haven't discovered any new moons of Earth in the last 4000 years.
: Well count the years to the Cambrian Explosion and count the number of species since. I think that you'd have to agree that it would have to be a speciation rate greater than one new one per year. Let's see, then we should see conservatively 13,000 x 1 = 13,000 new species since Adam. The fact of the matter is that there is zilch to show. Now, who's eyes are closed?
Hah. How many insect species are there? Perhaps if you can tell me that, you might have an idea of how many species evolve in what timescale...
: Moreover, given that the extinction rate is estimated at 5 to 50 species per day, Darwin better stop dilly-dallying around.
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: : To expect that new species would suddenly arise out of nothingness in 4000 years (a geological heartbeat) is ludicruous. Do you expect to see park benches spring into fully formed existence? No.
: Again, God has rested.
Why? Isn't God tireless?
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: : Evolution is a gradual process; microevolution; as observed in bacteria and simple lifeforms *can* be observed in the wild. But we don't have breeding records going back further than 300 years; expecting any complex animal to show major variation in that time is unrealistic.
: So you admit that your "science" is based on a lack of evidence. Thank you very much indeed.
Science can never provide 100% of the evidence. Granted. Can you give any more evidence of the life of Jesus than eyewitness accounts?
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: : : : 13. There is no evidence for the rapid development of new species in nature.
: Why then do evolutionistists call it the Cambrian Explosion?
You obviously haven't even bothered to look at the page I quoted, so I'll quote the answer;
The Cambrian explosion is a sure sign of the activity of the Creator, suddenly creating a multitude of complex forms out of nothing. There are no fossils before the explosion. There are plenty of fossils of organisms that lived in the Precambrian, such as jellyfish, coelenterates, annelids, and even cyanobacteria that date back as far as 3.4 billion years (McGowan, 1984, 103). The Cambrian period marks the advent of shelled organisms like trilobites and brachiopods. The ancestors of the organisms appearing in the Cambrian explosion were soft-bodied and did not leave fossils as easily as the shelled Cambrian organisms. Precambrian rocks are also subjected to a disproportionately large amount of deformation, which destroys fossils. It is for these reasons, not creation, that the fossil record seems to display a sudden "explosion" of shelled organisms at the base of the Cambrian. Moreover, the "explosion" took around 15 million years, so it is not quite the instantaneous event creationists would expect, and is definitely inconsistent with young-earth creationism (Ecker, 1990,46-48), since young-earth creationists hold that the earth is no more than several thousand years old - far less than the time involved in the Cambrian explosion.
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: : Yes it is. In fact, it's what speciation is all about, according to the sciences. The point at which two similar races can no longer interbreed is when they become separate species; thus, the above is a valid example.
: Races as different species? Sounds a bit Aryan to me. Seems like we've been down this road once before this century with the Ubermann concept, eh hem.
FUD. To quote that page again;
"Evolution is the basis for Naziism and laissez-faire capitalism.Carl Sagan gets it right when he says:
...the Darwinian insight can be turned upside down and grotesquely misused: Voracious robber barons may explain their cutthroat practices by an appeal to Social Darwinism; Nazis and other racists may call on "survival of the fittest" to justify genocide. But Darwin did not make John D. Rockefeller or Adolf Hitler. Greed, the Industrial Revolution, the free enterprise system, and corruption of government by the monied are adequate to explain nineteenth-century capitalism. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, social hierarchies, the long history of anti-Semitism in Germany, the Versailles Treaty, German child-rearing practices, inflation, and the Depression seem adequate to explain Hitler's rise to power. Very likely these or similar events would have transpired with or without Darwin. And modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barns and Fuhrers - altruism, general intelligence, compassion - may be the key to survival. (Sagan, 1995, 260).
There's nothing fundamentally fascist about saying that different races will eventually become different species; it is when you start to suggest that one group is fundamentally and inherently superior that fascism occurs.
An example of this; take two groups of people, group A and group B. If group B declares group A to be a different species, there's nothing fascist about that; it may be true or false.
If group B declares that group A is inferior because they do not agree with group B; if they declare that group A are all going to Hell because of their beliefs and that group B is better than group A _for that reason_, that's fascism. Now, how many times has a certain large religious organization done that?
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: : Can you find a single shred of scientific evidence that runs counter to what I've said; or to the theory of evolution?
: Surely, look at the counter points above. And look at my original point of evidence which you, perhaps unknowingly, have confirmed with your "long-duration" speciation arguement. The speciation rate since the appearance of man has gone to zero, exactly as the Bible says (God rested).
Hello? *tap* *tap* *tap* anything in that head? Didn't you understand my previous post when I stated quite explicitly that evolution had taken place over a period of 3500 years, and that microevolution had taken place over 28 years? Or did you just choose to ignore it?
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: : Careful how you answer; if you try to use one of the points raised in this page (and that comprises most of your usual "reasons"), I will merely respond with the answer on that page; as they're scientifically correct to my (qualified) understanding. So read that page darn carefully; you'd better come up with something damn good or original; or admit defeat.
: Right. Sounds like an open mind to me. Perhaps if I don't admit defeat, you'll start the bombing.
No, Robert, it's just that; if you want to learn how to walk, you need to accept the fact that the ground is there and not spend every second trying to disprove its existence.
Can you refute categorically any of the arguments in the page I cited? If not, why not?
Until you can, I don't see any real point in going over and over and over the same old arguments again and again and again.
...
Robert: Evolution is bunk! God created everything! The Cambrian Explosion says so! No new species have emerged!
Me: Robert, you're wrong, becuase x, y and z. Provide me with counterarguments.
Robert: Evolution is bunk! God created everything! The Cambrian Explosion says so! No new species have emerged!
Me: No, you're still wrong, and you haven't come up with anything new and compelling yet...
Robert: Evolution is bunk! God created everything! The Cambrian Explosion says so! No new species have emerged!
...
This is not a debate which goes anywhere. Until you can actually give some impression of being able to hold a reasonable debate on the subject (like, for example, providing counterarguments rather than just restating your original position), this thread hasn't got much prospects...
Mind you, you always did seem more interested in proselytizing than debating.
Farinata.
