Re: West Virginia creationism

On 5/13/24 12:47 PM, Burkhard wrote:

Ron Dean wrote:
 

Vincent Maycock wrote:

On Fri, 10 May 2024 14:43:42 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean-noreply@gmail.com> wrote:
>

Vincent Maycock wrote:

On Thu, 9 May 2024 18:51:52 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean-noreply@gmail.com> wrote:
>

Vincent Haycock wrote:

<snip>

I was a young-earth creationist, so my reading of geology and
paleontology led me to the conclusion that flood geology is a cartoon
version of science with nothing to support it.

Around the same time,

I became an atheist since Christianity didn't seem to make any sense.>

>

So, you turned to atheism and evolution, not because you first found
positive evidence for evolution and atheism, but rather because of
negative mind-set concerning the flood and Christianity.

>
No, that's backward.
>

That's the way you put it. Your first mind-set, as you stated it. You
became disillusioned with the flood and Christianity.

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I said "because of my reading of geology and paleontology."

 >
Ok, thanks for clearing that up.

>

  I developed a negative mind-set concerning the

Flood and Christianity because of positive evidence for evolution and
non-Christianity (which, in the United States is a huge first stepping
stone to atheism per se).  And of course, as I said, I found negative
evidence against the Flood to be voluminous, which is why I said it
was cartoon-like.
>

The fact of the matter is, intelligent design says nothing about

either the flood story nor Christianity or any religion or God for that
matter.

>
Yes, like I said I was a YEC, but the way you phrased it allowed for
me to focus on that and not old-earth-creationism or Intelligent
Design or any of those other "compromise" viewpoints that I never
subscribed to.
>

ID stands on it's own, it's not a compromise between anything.

>
Right, but that's how we were taught when I was growing up.  My
comment was supposed to be historical, not normative.

 >
There is a difference between Creationism and intelligent design, in that ID does not subscribe to the Genesis narrative, Both YEC  Old Earth creationism does. However, both creationism and ID both point to the same apparent flaws in Evolution and observe the same empirical evidence.

>

ID observe essentially the same empirical evidence as
evolutionist do, but they attribute what they see to intelligent design
rather than to evolution. Both the evolutionist and the ID est
interprets the same evidence to _fit_ into his own paradigm.

>
How does your paradigm explain the nested hierarchies that turn up in
phylogenetic studies of living things?
>

This is an example of interpretation to fit into a paradigm.

>
So fit it in to your paradigm, then.  Why would the Designer create
such an over-arching and ubiquitous phenomenon that is precisely what
we would expect from evolution?

 >
This is a excellent example of the point I've been making nested hierarchies have been mutually seen as  strong empirical evidence for either Evolution or ID. The concept was was first conceived by a Christian who thought that an intelligent God would arrange animals and plants etc in an orderly   harmonic, systematic, logical and rational manor: and this he set out to find. This man was a Swedish scientist, Carolus Linnaeus. He organized organisms into groups which was known at the time and he characterized organisms into boxes within boxes within boxes IE groups. His nested hierarchies are incomplete by today standard, But the concept was his,  which he saw as evidence of  his God.
So, it appears the concept was appropriated by evolutionist from a creation concept.

 again, pretty much wrong in every respect. Let's start with the last
sentence:
 yes, all science is cumulative, that is new theories are always built
on old theories, and incorporate those parts that stood the test of time. Which is why eg. Newtonian mechanics is now a proper part of
the theory of relativity. And the same held true for Linnaeus, who did not invent the concept of nested hierarchy, he merely applied it with
particular rigour, and more data than anyone before him. The concept goes back to Aristotle's categories and traveled to Linneaus via
the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry. Who, funnily enough, was also the author of a book titled "Against the Christians". So you could say he
appropriated a pagan and/or atheist concept.
Linnaeus did not just apply the schema to biology and living things, but
also to minerals, rocks, mountain formations and planets. But there it didn't work and now is all but forgotten.
And there we have the next problem for you and
your use of Linneaus. Linneaus believed of course that God had created
everything, not just living things. Yet the nested hierarchies that we
find in biology don't work for minerals. From an evolution perspective,
that is of course no surprise: descent with modification will always
create natural nested hierarchies, and few other things will. But if nested hierarchies were also what we should expect from creation by God,
then the absence of natural nested hierarchies in the rest of the world should indicate that they are not the result of design, so Christianity
would be disproven.
 Generally, Linnaeus SO doesn't work for you, on pretty much every level. First, he grouped humans among the apes,these among quadrupeds, and these in animalia. Yes, that worried him from a theological perspective, but when attacked for it, he was adamant that that was just what the data showed. He challenged his critics to find one objective fact that would allow them to distinguish humans from other apes (Carl Linnaeus to Johann Georg Gmelin, letter 25 February 1747) So going back
to your nonsense about the alleged moral implications of nesting humans
among other animal groups, Linneaus did this long before Darwin.
Oh, and as we are at it, unlike Darwin he also introduced subcategories
(albeit as variations, not species) for humans, and not only that, he ranked them. So Black africans according to his schema were:
from their temperament phlegmatic and lazy, biologically having dark hair,
with many twisting braids; silky skin; flat nose; swollen lips; Women
with elongated labia; breasts lactating profusely and from their
character Sly, sluggish, and neglectful. White people by contrast were by
temperament sanguine and  strong, biologically with plenty of yellow hair; blue eyes, and from their character light, wise, and  inventors etc.
Modern scientific racism has its origins here rather than in Darwin.
 Now, did he as you claim consider the nested hierarchies as evidence for
God? Not quite, though that is an easy mistake to make for modern
readers, who look at him through Paleyan lenses. But he didn't, and the reasons are interesting. He was not a natural theologian in the Paleyan mold, and the inference does not run from: "we observe nested hierarchies, these are what we should expect from God's design, therefore God" The
problem with this inference was always that it is inconsistent with God's omnipotence - God could have created differently had he so chosen, which means we can't use His contingent choice as evidence for anything.
What Linnaeus does is reasoning in the other direction. He takes God's existence and the fact that he is the Creator as a given - no further
evidence is needed or wanted. But by seeing order in his creation, we are seeing beauty, it lifts us up and also makes the world intelligible to
us. So we should be grateful for, and maybe moved by the way he created, but that is very different from "believing more" - it is an aesthetic, not
an epistemological response. For the ToE this is very different. We know
that descent with modification will always create nested hierarchies, we
can model this on computers, and observe it also in e.g. printing errors in book printing. So unlike God, evolution HAS to create nested
hierarchies, which then makes the observation of them suitable evidence.
Or with other words, the concept of "God" has no explanatory function in Linneaus theory, and that is part of the reason why it was so easy to simply
adapt it to evolutionary thinking, it only needed a new coat of paint
 OK, and now let's move on to this theory. He did indeed, at least initially,
fully embrace species fixism. However, and rather counterintuitively, he
also embraced gradualism. In fact, the often-cited Latin form of the principle, "Natura non facit saltus" comes from him - though the idea is older, and was
an Axiom e.g. in Leibniz' work. Ultimalty, it too goes back to Aristotle, and there we find the reason why Linneaus also extended his schema to rocks and minerals:
 "Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of
demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie.
Thus, next after lifeless things in the upward scale comes the plant, and of plants one will differ from another as to its amount of apparent vitality; and, in a word, the whole genus of plants, whilst it is devoid of life as compared with an animal, is endowed with life as compared with other corporeal entities. Indeed, as we just remarked, there is observed in plants a continuous scale of ascent towards the animal."
 So, God created all species at once, and in a fixed state, AND in a
finaley gradiated way so that we can trace their "ancestry" (scare
quote, they are not earlier in time, only in God's thought - from
his perspective they are "one", in the way a lake is one: just with different depth, getting gradually deeper as one gets to the centre).
 Now what are the implications of this? Well, according to Linnaeus
we SHOULD indeed find rabbits in the Cambrian, and not just rabbits, but elephants, whales and indeed humans. So a bit of a problem right there. But there is one thing we MUST NOT find in his model, and that
is "sudden appearances". A) because everything happened at the same
time, so no one species appears before the other, and B) because
nature makes no leaps, so for each animal we should be able
to trace its "ancestry" back, gradually and wihtout inerruption, to rocks. Now, according to your mangled version of Gould, what we in fact "observee is just the opposite: sudden appearances, and no
gradual progression. With ohter words if your "theory" , i.e. your
disfigured Gouldian punktuated equilibrium, were true, then linneaus would definitly be false, his theory is much , much more incompatible with sudden appearances than Darwin's. So you'll have to make up your mind which nonsense you want to peddle, your misunderstanding of Gould or your misunderstanding of Linneaus.
 One final point, and that is another big problem for you. Linnaeus did indeed START as a species fixist. However, he also found more and more evidence that that picture was irreconcilable with the facts. A watershed moment was for him was the discovery of a variant of
the common toad-flax (Linaria vulgaris L.). The plant, had four
more spurs than the common toad-flax, and yet was clearly produced by these. That violated his idea that genera and species hwere the result of one single act of original creation,  unchanged ever since. He was so shocked by the finding that he called the newly found plant
'Peloria', i.e. 'monster'.
Quite a bot of his late work was dedicated to come up with new theoories
that explained Peloria, and all the other examples that kept popping up. He wasn't happy with either of them, and while he continued
to write about this, he dropped any reference to species fixism from his book on taxonomy, realising, correctly, that his taxonomy
was independent from his theory of creation. Another reason why using
the system was straightforward also for Darwin and his followers, Linnaeus himself had realised that a) the data did not suport fixism
and b) his classification did not depend on it. (for details see eg. Gustafsson, Åke. "Linnaeus' peloria: the history of a monster."
Theoretical and Applied Genetics 54 (1979): 241-248)
       

 >
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/the-history-of-evolutionary-thought/pre-1800/nested-hierarchies-the-order-of-nature-carolus-linnaeus/
 >
A common designer I think is an even better explanation to the observation of commonality and relationship than descent from a common ancestor. This is exactly what one would expect from an engineer. It takes trust and faith to accept common ancestor, and descent. If you look at the drawings you generally see big cats in the same family or sub family. You see these Lions, tigers, Jaguars leopards, but each specie observed is at the node or end of missing connecting link in the living or fossil record. And this is the case of almost everything we observe from the fossil record
for most animal species, according to the Late Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge. So, looking at a nested hierarchies what you see is isolated species, but very few links. And the few links that are pointed to in the fossil record are, in reality based on evolutionary theory. I'm sure you are aware of
what Darwin said about the scarcity of intermediate links. How much better off are we today with the many new species at the end of their nodes that Darwin knew nothing about.

 

  You as an atheist would naturally turn to evolution, since God in your mind does not exist. Atheism like theism is a personal belief. But to no small degree each of us establishes our paradigm, and we defend it as best we can. I respect your views and I certainly have no desire to push my view on you.
 >

 

IOW the
paradigm rules. Now to clear up another situation. While IDest see
evidence which supports design, there is no known evidence which points
to the identity of the designer.

>
Do you think you might be able to identify him/her/it if you tried
harder, scientifically?
>

One may believe based upon faith the
the designer is Jehovah, Allah or Buddha  or some other Deity but this
is belief

>

At one time I was also an evolutionist. In addition to a book I was
challenged to read, and to some extinct, what I discussed above I also
thought that after reading Paley, Darwin dedicated his effort to
discounting or disproving Paley's God. This seemed to be more than a
coincidence.

>
How do you square that with the enormous amount of research he did
into the subject?  If he was just "mad at God" you would think he
would have published immediately with only a scant amount of
supporting evidence to support his ideas.
>

There is something, rarely mentioned in the literature.  Darwin was a
Christian until a great tragedy befell him and his family. That's the
death of his daughter, Annie in 1851 at the age of 10.  This naturally
caused great pain to Darwin and this terrible tragedy turned him against
religion and God whom he blamed. One could certainly sympathize with him
on the loss of his daughter.

>
What's your explanation for why Annie had to die?  Is it better than
my explanation? (which is that there is no reason she died -- nothing
in the universe is out there to care whether she lived, suffered, or
died)
>

Everyone dies, including you and me. Some much older and others  much
younger. Annie didn't have to die, but she was exposed the the weather
or a disease which caused her death.

>
But why would God allow that?  I consider this to be positive evidence
in favor of atheism.
>

And so did Darwin. Why would you think that the designer should be an on
scene manager constantly controlling everything minute by minute. The
fact is, it did not, instead it chose to permit reproduction by
organisms themselves rather than create each species individualy. It
designed the genetic code and the information needed, as well a multiple
edit and repair machines to correct copy errors and mutations in the
DNA. It infused almost all of the first complex modern complex animal
phyla during the Cambrian. It created a universe beginning with then big
bang, a universe of natural order, patterns and logic, evidenced by the
fact that mathematics is able to describe this universe it's physical
laws, constants many of the actions we observe Indeed Math cam explain
what is observed. This is not a condition of blind, aimless mindless
random activities.

>
None of that is an explanation for why God would allow Annie to die.
Or are you even a Christian to begin with?  Perhaps I should've
started with that.

 >
I think I have Christian values, but I don't attend religion services. And I don't pray. So, where does that leave me?

>

I personally think there is something terribly wrong with the
devaluation of human life caused by accepting evolution. We descended
from common ancestors along with chimps, gorillas, monkeys horses,

swine

and dogs. Consequently, we are just animals same as other animals. So,
as animals in every respect we are of no more worth or value than any
other animal. So, we kill and eat other animals so, from a moral
standpoint, why is this more acceptable? The question was asked in a
YouTube site of young college people, "If you saw a man and your dog,
that you loved, drowning you could only save one which would you save"?
As I recall the everyone except a professor said they would save their
dog. This means they would let the man die, his life is of no more value
than a dog's life. This I'm afraid is where evolution is leading the
human race.

<
No comment! I'm not surprised.

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I didn't reply to this because I thought some of the other posters had
addressed it by the time of my post.
>

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True, but science advances, not by going along following the same path
ways that have been explored. But by taking new pathways.

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Nice post. It's a real pity that Ron ignores everything you say, just as he ignores almost everything anyone says.