Archived - A thread about nothing....

[Wayfinder]

[Note: I am not trying to be insulting by any means. But in the evolutionist postings here, not only have claims been made that are without basis, actual disrespect has been shown God. Now if I were an evolutionist and not an atheist (ie, if I thought there was a CHANCE that God might exist)... I personally would be very careful of insulting the Guy before I found out for sure. So since some seem to feel it proper to be very direct in their opinions about God and even scoff and jeer and make fun of Him... I feel it proper to openly expose misconceptions and fraudulent claims without pulling any punches.]


[QUOTE]Originally posted by Xyress
Sure, you can interpret it any way you wish to bend it to your beliefs. The problem in this instance is that the word "generation" was not the only account of Jesus' prophecy. He specifically said that those that pierced him would see him come back.

Now that we're talking Bible Xyress... perhaps you'll remember that those that pierced him, when he died, stated, "Surely this was God's Son." Which means they just might have become believers at that time. Then you'll recall that Jesus, on the third day, was resurrected from the dead and at one time appeared to upward of 500 people.

On a spiritual level however, the term "those that pierced him", as worded, rather than applying to the guards holding the spears... would in actuality refer to the Jewish people who condemned him... and then later repented and became Christians... their eyes opened to the truth and "seeing" Jesus for the first time. Beyond that, they too, now having converted due to the signs that occured at Jesus' death, may have been among those who physically saw him in his resurrected state.

So on either level, both physical and spiritual in context... how is it that you feel comfortable in declaring this prophecy did not come true?

I don't have my quotes handy, but generation is not the only thing you will have to wave your hand over.

No, but it sure shot a big, gaping hole in your generation claim, didn't it?

In short, Nelson disproved your claim regarding a Biblical contradiction, and just as you did with my valid responses to your claims of Biblical contradictions-- you refused to accept it.

With all due and earnest respect, I ask: How come? Why is it when you state, "The Bible contradicts itself" and both Nelson and I logically prove that it doesn't, it doesn't mean anything to you? What is it within you that so forcibly restrains you from accepting evidence that's right in front of your eyes?


I would like to present a scriptural answer, for your serious consideration:

"For Satan blinds the minds of the unbelievers."

[hnelson59]

here's one for evolution

[Xyress]

You've seem miracles... but God doesn't make miracles anymore:

Again, we're talking about two different things. And that's going to be difficult or impossible to explain to you, because you discount the existence of the Holy Spirit and the part it plays in our lives and you have no concept of how it works.

:crooked: You consider this to be a "clear and logical explanation"?!

Wayfinder, when we started this discussion, it seemed like you actually had given thought to both sides of the story, but more and more often I find myself just laughing at your posts. Any third-party observer could see how stubborn and irrational you're being.

You equate made-up statistics to "hard facts" and "statistical evidence". You make a direct contradiction and then say that I'm not reading close enough.

I think you are right in one thing though - this discussion is nearing its logical conclusion. Your flaws have been pointed out to you ... your own arguments against evolution can be directly applied to your own beliefs and you can't even see it.

You condescend evolutionist ideas and use words such as "bogus" or "impossible". You call us stubborn and unwilling to accept the truth. You think for evolution to be proven true, you need to observe a fish evolve into a bird right before your eyes ... but even if that happened, you'd just say "God did it". I think you need to spend some time doing a little introspective analysis on your own stubborness and unwillingness to consider others' arguments.

[hnelson59]

some interesting reading . . .


Piltdown man: Found in a gravel pit in Sussex England in 1912, this fossil was considered by some sources to be the second most important fossil proving the evolution of man—until it was found to be a complete forgery 41 years later. The skull was found to be of modern age. The fragments had been chemically stained to give the appearance of age, and the teeth had been filed down!


Nebraska man: A single tooth, discovered in Nebraska in 1922 grew an entire evolutionary link between man and monkey, until another identical tooth was found which was protruding from the jawbone of a wild pig. This fossil was part of the evidence entered to substantiate evolution in the famous "Scopes Monkey Trial" (source: Henry M. Morris & Gary E. Parker, What Is Creation Science?, [Master Books 1987], pp.155-156)


Java man: Initially discovered by Dutchman Eugene Dubois in 1891, all that was found of this claimed originator of humans was a skullcap, three teeth and a femur. The femur was found 50 feet away from the original skullcap a full year later. For almost 30 years Dubois downplayed the Wadjak skulls (two undoubtedly human skulls found very close to his "missing link"). (source: Hank Hanegraaff, The Face That Demonstrates The Farce Of Evolution, [Word Publishing, Nashville, 1998], pp.50-52)


Orce man: Found in the southern Spanish town of Orce in 1982, and hailed as the oldest fossilized human remains ever found in Europe. One year later officials admitted the skull fragment was not human but probably came from a 4 month old donkey. Scientists had said the skull belonged to a 17 year old man who lived 900,000 to 1.6 million years ago, and even had very detail drawings done to represent what he would have looked like. (source: "Skull fragment may not be human", Knoxville News-Sentinel, 1983)


Neanderthal: Still synonymous with brutishness, the first Neanderthal remains were found in France in 1908. Considered to be ignorant, ape-like, stooped and knuckle-dragging, much of the evidence now suggests that Neanderthal was just as human as us, and his stooped appearance was because of arthritis and rickets. Neanderthals are now recognized as skilled hunters, believers in an after-life, and even skilled surgeons, as seen in one skeleton whose withered right arm had been amputated above the elbow. (source: "Upgrading Neanderthal Man", Time Magazine, May 17, 1971, Vol. 97, No. 20)

[Wayfinder]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by hnelson59
wayfinder, may i suggest that this passage from the niv is appropriate at this point . . . if seeds have been planted, you can do nothing more.

You know H... it's a funny coincidence. Just this moring the Spirit brought me to that same conclusion. I sadly agree.

But as you stated... the seeds have been sown. Perhaps as this worldly system degenerates further into chaos, as mankind's bastions fall one by one... those seeds will sprout and flourish. We can only hope.

[hnelson59]

another article i found and the link follows

One of the most persistent criticisms of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis lies in the statistical challenge to the randomness of the emergent processes.

Darwinian evolution is most unlikely to get even one polypeptide right, let alone the thousands on which living cells depend for their survival. This situation is well-known to geneticists and yet nobody seems prepared to blow the whistle on the theory. Evolution from Space, F. Hoyle & C. Wickramasinghe

The literature is hopelessly confusing here, because it tends to depend on prior assumptions. Beware of quibbles that distract attention from the basic intent of the critiques, which are surely confirmed now that we see that very complex processes must be invoked that aren't random. The critics, with their own mistakes, have won the argument, though noone really says so. The real issue now seems the origin of the basic 'toolkit' and the body plans visible after the Cambrian. One of the most persistent arguments has been the implausibility of random change in DNA molecules. Such arguments have been attacked repeatedly, but they won't go away. The fossil record doesn't look uniform, nor does random tinkering with genomes look promising. What's more, serious scientists don't go to Las Vegas to get rich, except in Darwinian theory. One of the most notable critiques of the past generation is that of Evolution from Space, by F. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, with their famous Boeing airplane argument. This argument has been frantically 'refuted' so many times, I tend to yawn when Darwinists speak on the subject. This is a challenge to natural selection, not necessarily to naturalistic evolution, although Evolution from Space tends to be attacked for the perhaps wrong spiritual conclusion it draws from its hard-to-refute argument.

Also there is Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, and more recently on probability issues, Senapathy's Independent Birth of Organisms, who finds the statistical arguments to be insuperable. Denton's original book is constantly attacked and may be slightly out of date, but its basic reasoning has not been shown to be wrong.

Noting the way in which selectionism (originally proposed and rejected earlier by Edward Blyth) triumphed, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe note:

There was no general perception that the real issue of controversy, as it had existed decades earlier between Blyth and Darwin, had still to be resolved. The difficulty for the few who wished to come to grips with the real question of whether random mutations and natural selection had been sufficient to explain the origin of species, and by implication the origin of life, which Darwin maintained but which Blyth did not, was that in the nineteenth century the theory was impossible to quantify. Before modern microbiology, the evolutionist simply pointed to the long time-scales of geology and there was then no way to demonstrate that it would need a time-scale 10^40,000 times as long to produce the effects that were being claimed. p.133
Again, P. Senapathy, in Independent Birth of Organisms, in a calculation of the probabilities of random changes in gene sequences claims that

1. The genome of an organism is closed and locked with respect to evolution. The variability of a creature is confined to the closed framework of its genome.
2. Random mutational processes cannot lead to the evolution of new genes and genetic networks needed for new organs and appendages.

Not even one gene!? What to say of thousands. And the issue, as he notes, requires equal independent parallel change in developmental processes of great complexity.

The statistical unlikelihood of natural selection has always haunted the Darwinian theory of evolution. The Genome is one of the most elaborated systems of machines imaginable, with every function clearly given a mechanical sequence, yet the crucial part, its genesis, we are to believe, is purely random. Books by experts can be disingenuous here, so it seems a lost cause to clarify the issues.

This statistical argument has been pointed out so many times that it is essential to the history of the debate, in any case, along with the persisting difficulties in the fossil record, notwithstanding many successes as to fossil gaps, but overall it is difficult to understand how the theory maintains its hold in such a flagrant disregard of intuitively obvious problems.

The answer is that these attacks endanger the whole game and are the subject of as many counterattacks, none very convincing. A close look shows the nature of the subject has simply moved on, tacilty acknowledging the point, with its emphasis on new processes of development, hox genes, etc...

These statistical arguments could be incorrect, but it is strange that textbooks are virtually silent on the problem!

Thus, we have I.L. Cohen, Darwin was Wrong (Greenvale, NY: New Research Publications, 1984), a self-published 'howl of protest', now vanished, and a good treatment of gnomic probabilities. Arguments using Natural Selection seem oblivious to what happens to the reciprocal (one over.. as 1/2) of a large factorial (N!= N factorial= N x N-1 x N-2 x ...3 x 2 x 1). I.L. Cohen, in Darwin was Wrong, illustrates the issue of the permutations and combinations of the basic CGAT molecules in the DNA code. He indicates that as few as 84 items evenly divided into 21 each of C, G, A, T, (representing nucleotides) translates into a probability of occurrence: 2.08 x 10 ^-51!! As Cohen notes, mathematicians consider any probability beyond 10^-50 as automatically being zero. Thus any strand of DNA having over 84 nucleotides is beyond the range of random occurrence. Yet, for example, a mammalian cell is estimated to have about 3 billion nucleotides in its DNA.

Most efforts to overcome these arguments, such as the claim (cf. Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker) that a cumulative effect defeats these odds, remain unconvincing, and unproven. Cf. R. Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, p. 75.

Dawkins claims that while variation is random, natural selection is non-random. But that is a distraction, confusing the issue. selection remains 'random' in the sense that no directional macroevolution is invoked.

Here, S. Kauffman, cf. At Home in the Universe, chapter 2-3, starts with the theme of self-organization, after acknowledging the problem. This is a new process, if real, ceding the point about natural selection. This work can be useful for its straightforward acknowledgement of the problem. Too many books beat around the bush and waste your time.

The argument by statistics has a long history, cf also the report of a symposium at Wistar Institute and Murray Eden’s hard to obtain, "Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory", which concludes, p. 109, "It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws," from Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution. Also discussed in David Berlinski's Black Mischief. Cf. also, David Berlinski in Commentary magazine, June 1996, and follow up, September 1996.

http://eonix.8m.com/etc/statistics.htm

[hnelson59]

Originally posted by Wayfinder
You know H... it's a funny coincidence. Just this moring the Spirit brought me to that conclusion. I sadly agree

coincidence is just God's way of remaining anonymous ;) (t-shirt philosophy)

[Wayfinder]

I was gonna say something here, but I want a sandwich. :p

[Bulldog]

I just started reading, read the first page and last at the moment. Anyway maybe this was said before. The english language and our thinking processes are very limited compared to an unlimited universe and God. My impression is that God is/was controlling Darwins theory of evolution and that he has his own time frame that we just don't understand. How long is a "day" for God anyway?

Just something else to think about with that sandwich

[Wayfinder]

Originally posted by hnelson59
here's one for evolution

Nelson, whose side are you on? How am I going to refute THAT???

:p

[Jwilker]

Originally posted by Wayfinder
And yet you swallow down evolution whole when it is nothing more than a questionable theory and offers you no future at all.

I don't sawllow it hole. It presents more and better evidence. I'm not looking for something to provide a future. I can do it myself.

[Wayfinder]

Originally posted by Bulldog
I just started reading, read the first page and last at the moment. Anyway maybe this was said before. The english language and our thinking processes are very limited compared to an unlimited universe and God. My impression is that God is/was controlling Darwins theory of evolution and that he has his own time frame that we just don't understand. How long is a "day" for God anyway?

Just something else to think about with that sandwich

Heya Bulldog. You know, actually I have quite a bit of repect for those who beleive that God used evolution to "create"... because that's at least admitting that there is a God (whoever or whatever He may be).

The next logical step is to ask a couple of questions:

1) If this is true... then does that God care about his work (ie, mankind)?

2) If He cares about us but for unascertained reasons cannot communicate directly with us (best not to get into that ball of worms at this time), does it make sense that he would provide us a set of instructions?

3) If this is the case, is the Bible that set of instructions?

The Bible has survived 3,500 years. It is the most widely published book on the planet. It at least warrants investigation. Which is all that I'm really encouraging anyone to do: don't take my word. Research the Bible like you would research science.

Good to see a new voice on the thread. It's not dead yet... just gasping. :p

[Wayfinder]

Originally posted by Jwilker
I'm not looking for something to provide a future. I can do it myself.

I dare ya. Prove it. Look me up in say 2,000 years.

[Wayfinder]

Originally posted by Xyress
:crooked: You consider this to be a "clear and logical explanation"?!

One further answer to this, then I'm giving it a rest. I've spent enough time on this one thought.

What if you told a blind man that the color blue is beautiful... but he, because he was blind and had never seen, absolutely refused to believe there is a color blue? Is there ANYTHING that you might say to such a person that would make any difference? Not likely. He's set in his opinion and ignores plausible evidence.

I know the analogy isn't perfect... but it's the best I can come up with at this time. You keep harping, over and over, regarding the supposed miracle contradiction (in my mind, because you're runing out of legitimate things to harp on-- grin)... but I can't see what's so difficult to understand about this.

I make a statement about a construction worker: He doesn't build anymore. But later, you find out he assembled a shelf in his home, and you tell my I am wrong.

What is missing here? Is my statement wrong, or are you failing to comprehend the reality of what I said?

The man DOESN'T "build" any more... in that he no longer works in the construction field. Assembling a shelf in his home, or even BUILDING one from scratch... does not invalidate my statement.

Does that give you any help at all in explaining your supposed "miracle contradiction" claim?

I sincerely hope so, because I can't help someone who insists on remaining sightless.


Nelson and I answered all your other supposed "Bible contradiction" claims and didn't even work up a sweat doing so. Haven't you gained anything from that? You want to throw some more Bible "contradictions" at us? How much more will it take before you begin to perceive the truth?

[Jwilker]

Nelson and I logically prove that it doesn't

I wouldn't say logically. You simply intertpret the text to mean something different than what is written. If one interpretation (literal) doesn't work you switch to the Biblical meaning or which ever other interpretation best fits.