1. Regarding Talk.origins
I have been familiar with this site from the usenet days. It has some good argumentation, but it is not the gospel. It now, of course, has a rebuttal site called trueorigins.org.
2. Defining Evolution
You are right, I probably did not use accepted definitions. But I believe that my understanding of the concepts is ok – natural selection is the proposed mechanism for evolution. Microevolution, or speciation, or adaptation, to me all seem similar enough to be grouped together as "change within a kind," as creationists like to call it. This type of change, which is observed in the natural world, is not macroevolution, which is of course, the development of new and more complex organisms over eons. But maybe that isn’t even right – but anyway, macroevolution does promise that we got humans and other complex animals from some original primordial soup via evolution, right?
This last type of change, which purports to answer the question of origins, esp. of mankind, is what I find dubious, fanciful, and poorly supported by evidence – claiming it as fact based on the historical evidence (since there is not directly observed data) seems, um, nothing I would bet on.
3. I am a mutant.
Lucky for me I am not insulted by such a tongue in cheek statement. I agree that we are all mutants, but not more advanced mutants than our ancestors. In fact, we may be less advanced, biologically speaking.
One of the interesting claims that the biblical creationists make is that, before the Noahic flood, people lived to 900 years. What is interesting in this fantastic (but perhaps true) account is that it would indicate that we were pretty well put together in the past, but have been actually getting worse over time – that makes sense to me, since most mutations are not helpful at all but rather deletrious (sp?)
4. Morphologically Modern Bone
I do not mean "if you found a horse head in the cambrian." I was not clear enough on my dating method. I do not trust dating things via the geologic column because the assignment of age of the columns is based on evolutionary assumptions, and therefore probably circular.
But if an indisputably modern bone was radiodated as very old, that would contradict evolution. That’s why I thought my link to the ICR article was appropriate.
5. Pre-Cambrian Fossils
I didn’t know there was more evidence on this. I will check it out.
6. Rehashed Arguments
I am sure that those who live over at talk.origins, as well as at icr.org have heard one another’s arguments repeatedly.
My experience in the evolution/creation argument is thus – there is lots of condescenion on both sides, many straw men being built on both sides, and good arguments and counter arguments that make both sides seem right.
I guess I lean towards the creationist side for a few reasons –
(a) evolutionists are often so cock-sure of their position that they react with scorn to criticism, and leave no room for reasonable debate. Of course, I’m sure there are reasonable, good-natured folk on both sides of this issue, as well as zealots. And since evolutionists are the establishment and not the underdogs, their derision is all the more concerning to me – they look like people trying to hold onto power, not just defenders of the truth turning away the religious idiots.
(b) Creationists have convinced me that there is reasonable doubt, and no science professor (except one in college) ever told me there was any doubt. When I began to look at the evidence (where’s my J. Gould book? ;), it was not as solid a case as I was taught – and many of the revelations about the fluid phylogeny trees, mis-classified human fossil remains, and the relatively low amount of human remains all made me feel like I had been duped by the establishment. So I gave up my evolutionary "religion" and went looking for facts.
(c) many of the creationist claims make sense, at least on the surface. This is not to be poo-pooed as mere deception. Simple exercises like showing how the law of entropy lines up better w/ the creationist model than the evolutionary one are powerful, and make you think. I mean, if the whole "closed system v. open system" and many other arguments (Wolfram included) for self-organization and complexity from simple equations convinces you that life as we know it could happen by chance, that’s fine. But sometimes Occam whispers to me "creationism might be the right answer – evolution looks more like a hopeful monster than a compelling model."
7. Religion and Science
I totally agree with evolutionists on one thing – religious or superstitious claims, if not founded in historical and/or empirical data, have no place in science.
However, a religious world view, with its foundational assumptions, seems to me to be as valid as an atheistic one – some of our greatest scientists had a religious world view that informed their science. If it is grounded in principles, not doctrines, faith can and has bolstered science. We should remember that.
Your comment about antedilluvian people living to be 900 is poorly thought out. Using Biblical standards of dating, we have a rough idea of how long ago Noah — if he really existed — was alive. And by that time, there were already, undeniably, people living in virtually every corner of the world, with very different, traceable genetic lines. Even if these antedilluvians *did* live hundreds of years, there's simply no way to account for the vast propagation that this "deleterious microevolution" would need in order to effect the entire human population.
And this is, logically, the primary problem with the belief in a global flood story. It doesn't account for the fact that these very separate genetic lines have existed all over the world in historical times that pre-date the existance of a 'Noah'.
by that time, there were already, undeniably, people living in virtually every corner of the world, with very different, traceable genetic lines
I have no problem with that statement. Of course, if you believe the biblical account, all of these people died and the only people left were Noah and his family, from which all modern day humans have descended. Here's an article estimating the pre-flood population from a biblical point of view. Also, Here's an article discussing how the current population of the world is consistent with the idea that Noah's family started the counter again after the death of all other humans during the flood.
there's simply no way to account for the vast propagation that this "deleterious microevolution" would need in order to effect the entire human population.
There are plenty of suggestions for accounting for this, and just because we can't think of any method for accounting for this doesn't make it untrue – esp. if we haven't looked for an answer. The combination of any or all of the suggestions below may explain the change in lifespan of all creatures, including humans:
– the pre-deluge atmosphere had a much higher O2 pressure, so all life would benefit from this – think of the world as one big hyperbaric chamber. This could easily speed healing and lengthen lifespans.
– the pre-deluge athmosphere may have protected from deletrious effects of solar radiation better – think of a better ozone, if you will
– this article, interestingly, says that the above environmental factors could not account for the proposed loss of lifespan, but suggests that lifespan is somehow controlled genetically, and that these genes were lost progressively due to the bottleneck of humanity (starting again from Noah's small family).
These are not conclusive, but they do show that there are possible explanations that people are exploring regaring the age of the Patriarchs.
I am not sure, however, that I have answered your last statement, which I don't fully understand. Why would various genetic lines around the world before Noah be a problem?
The links you posted are hugely unscientific, a fact that they attempt to mask by using lots of bogus math. On of them actually argues that nine *billion* people is a conservative estimate as to how many people were alive on the Earth before "the flood", with 137 *billion* being the upper limit of his crazy-math.
Maybe it's fun, as a Christian, to imagine a fantastic, pre-flood world where people lived hundreds of years and the chemical composition of the Earth's atmosphere was significantly different, but those sort of suppositions don't hold up very long under actual scrutiny.
If you, as a creationist, think that evolution is missing necessary evidence, then you're just being silly to support any kind of theory that suggests nine billion people lived on the planet before 1600 BC. Not only are is the archaelogical evidence of such an absurdity entirely absent, but the logistics of supporting such a population before the iron age is completely inconceivable.
In fairness to you, you didn't actually propose these arguments; you merely offered them as "possible explanations", however they're not really "possible" under any measure of reality. If we're going to allow for the kind of wholey unsupportable hypotheticals (magically unexplained ozone protection, worldwide flooding without any evidence, people springing into existence from nowhere, thousands of species of animals fitting onto one boat, etc…), then there's virtually *nothing* that's off-limits. I could suggest that people all had fifty-foot, biodegradable wings during the time of Noah, and there'd simply be no way to disprove it.
Fortunately, that's not how legitimate arguments work. It's the argument's proponent, not his critic, who bears the responsibility of establishing fact. I'll grant you that you have exactly that right to demand such facts from evolutionary supporters, but these "possible explantions" fail in many, many worse ways, by making enormous assumptions that are simply unfounded in scientific reality.
But, to answer your responsive question to my original challenge: The reason that these genetic lines around the world contradict a flood-based regenesis of humankind, is because they are evidence that people werel living in all corners of the world before the flood; this we know from innumerable archaelogical and textual records. We also know that people were living in exactly these same places *directly after* the time of the flood.
So, in your version of the world, the entire human race was wiped out in 1600 BC or so. Then an insignificantly tiny sample of people (Noah's small family) managed to repopulate the world in exactly the same places, building eerily similar societies, picking up where the previous inhabitants left off, in spite of the fact that no trace of their cultural knowledge should have been left after the flood in any interpretable way.
In reality, by mapping the DNA of modern, indigenous humans, scientists and archeologists have been able to chart the paths of original human movement throughout the world, and there's absolutely nothing to suggest that it happened in the last four thousand years.
What's more, it doesn't take DNA mapping to know this. Common sense consideration for the facts of existing civilization is enough to tell us that a post-flood regenesis of the world is simply not a possibility. Ancient Chinese dynasties, for example, can be accounted for further back in time than traditional flood dating would allow, and China is certainly not alone in this respect.
Biblical flood theorists suggest that we imagine every civilization in the world (minus Noah, of course) was instantly wiped out, and then Noah's family moved out across the world — at impossibly unheard of speeds — and took over *exactly* where these existing people left off. Now how exactly do you account for that kind of striking gap in possibility?
Those are interesting ideas. I will look into them.
Seeker,
I am curious if you looked into Stewart's ideas, and what you found out.
Both Christianity and evolution take faith. There may be missing links and some physical evidence in both sides, but there is no proof that the hominids are not a separate species, or that miracles did not happen from natural causes. Evolution needs to show why evolving organs or parts would be helpful and be selected for if they had no function at the time. Christianity has no physical evidence that the miracles did happen by miraculous causes, since there were no witnesses at the time, save for the people back then who recorded the information in the Bible. There is no way to disprove or prove either, and choosing between the two is personal choice and belief, whether a almighty being created us from perfect design or intelligence, or we derived from simple, unadvanced unicellular creatures.
Cyborg,
I would agree, but I would caution that not all types of "faith" are equal – there is a huge difference between reasonable faith based on existing evidence, and blind faith.
See The Atheist's Caricature of Faith