Domestication — Proof of Darwinism?

If mutation can provide enough novel material for artificial selection to act on, it can provide enough novelty for natural selection to act on. It’s that simple. There are only two differences: natural selection at any given time will only be moving toward local goals, whereas artifical selection may be moving towards a distant, long-term goal; and natural selection is a much slower process. The latter difference is largely a consequence of the former.

I’ve actually really been hoping for you to start another discussion on this topic, because Matthew and I were, I think, finally getting somewhere in the last two evolution threads, and this is in fact a great point to continue that discussion on, though it is a small step ahead in my train of thought from where we left off.

I wrote:

Well, even small, demonstrated increases in “information” still don’t change the scene. The point is determining whether we are working with a system that has enough randomization dampening AND enough information input to increase the net total.

Would you then be willing to come to the position, then, that the generation of functional novelty in living systems through unguided evolution is not in fact contradicted by mathematical theory, but only by biological reality?

I am under the impression that I demonstrated sufficiently clearly that CSI is not a barrier to evolution (whether it is a barrier to abiogenesis is another question). Matthew, your position seems now to be that the infrequency of beneficial mutation would cause deterioration faster than advance; this would lead right into the topic Nathan has brought up. Can we start here, or do we need to return to CSI for a while?

I’m sorry, the quotes didn’t quite work in that post. Matthew had written:

Well, even small, demonstrated increases in “information” still don’t change the scene. The point is determining whether we are working with a system that has enough randomization dampening AND enough information input to increase the net total.

I had then replied:

Would you then be willing to come to the position, then, that the generation of functional novelty in living systems through unguided evolution is not in fact contradicted by mathematical theory, but only by biological reality?

I guess nested quotes don’t work here.

I had a pedigree beagle once our purchased for top price at a mall, and that dam dog was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. He was vicious, and eventually had to get rid of him after he put some stiches in one of my children’s face.

Stick with the samller toy breeds if you have young children, my advice. Then work your way up. Beagle’s can be extremely strong and overwhelm kids.

Better yet, try as a pet this example of domoestic evolutionary breeding:

http://www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/sheep/jacob/index.htm

Oh, and if anyone hasn’t here yet shown you how the sheep at the speckling posts got the way they did, let me know and I’ll tell you.

Did you guys ever notice that you seem to talk about Darwin’s theory more than the Bible’s theory on this blog?

Just an observation.

Great post - a very necessary point of departure on an often confused topic.

George said:

“”There are only two differences: natural selection at any given time will only be moving toward local goals, whereas artifical selection may be moving towards a distant, long-term goal; and natural selection is a much slower process.”"

While I might quibble about the wording, I basically agree. There is nothing in artificial selection that “makes up” more genetic material (unless you are in molecular and actually splicing genes!). Of course you can’t trivialize the difference between selection methods (randomized variation of selection criteria - as in natural selection - versus non-randomized selection criteria in artificial selection).

In either selection, however, and in fact in all selection methods, error catastrophe still can’t be stopped if the randomization rate is too high.

Years ago scientists realized that the same phenotypical trait (external characteristics) could be coded by many different genotypes - making both natural and artificial selection very limited in scope for directional modification of the genome.

Think of the external trait as some function “A” (for instance, A = 10 would be greater height then A = 9 if height were given by the function A). Selection criteria generally work by, say, taking the maximum value for that trait “A.” But in reality, because each trait is actually a combination of various metabolic pathways, we should note that “A” is a function of, to be simple, sub-traits “B,C,D”. Thus A = F(B,C,D) - it could be one of various functions like A = Bmax + Cmin + Dmax.

The problem arises when we recognize that the same value for “A” can be given by a potentially infinite number of different combinations of variables B,C, and D. This is why, even after artificial selection for the same trait for generations, two separate lineages will still have a significant difference in genotype.

This, of course, is bad enough if we consider all the variations of the sub-traits as informationally equal - but when we recognize (as do all geneticists) that “additive” mutations are as rare as maybe 1 in 10^6 (or worse), even a non-phenotypic selection criteria cannot eliminate enough of the population to prevent error catastrophe. (Imagine having 5 kids, each of which had 3 heritable diseases, and 1 of which had a slightly higher IQ than you - no matter who you kill, you have an informationally negative generation).

So basically dogs have lost genetic information overall - and then one specific set of phenotypic traits has been maximized/minimized.

-Matthew

Matthew:

(Imagine having 5 kids, each of which had 3 heritable diseases, and 1 of which had a slightly higher IQ than you - no matter who you kill, you have an informationally negative generation).

But surely you do not suggest this is a typical generation? I should think that having 5 children, none of them carrying additional heritable diseases (it isn’t an information loss from one generation to the next if the diseases they carry were inherited from you, is it?), and one having a slightly higher IQ than you, is far more likely.

You are right, however- and this is a point ignored by too many arguing for either side- that selection, natural or otherwise, does not generally act on single phenotypes, much less single genes- directly. Many if not most biological features are the results not of single genes but of groups of genes acting in concert. Nor are these groups even necessarily discrete, for a single gene may contribute to a number of different features. But none of this means that natural selection cannot distinguish among individual genes to trim the wheat from the chaff. It must only do so in a roundabout way. Richard Dawkins’ crew team analogy is useful for conveying this indirect process:

Imagine yourself as the coach of a crew team. For those unaware, crew is a sport consisting of the racing of long, thin boats called “shells” which are propelled by teams of rowers. These boats can have anywhere from one to eight rowers, but for the purpose of this analogy we will only consider eight-man boats, which I myself raced in high school.
Anyway, you, as the coach, are analogous to the ‘blind watchmaker’ of natural selection. There is no direct way by which you might judge the ability of any one rower. You may pit boats against each other, but every boat has eight athletes, each contributing to the boat’s speed. The only way to determine how fast an individual rower is, is indirect. By staging repeated races between boats of constantly shifting lineups, you may build up a set of statistical data allowing you to find the relative speed of each rower compared to the rest of the team. But wait! It is not so simple. A good crew coach will not just perform such a test and then stick the fastest rowers together. They will instead use the combination of rowers that was fastest. Certain rowers will perform better in certain seats on the boat, and in specific combinations with certain of their teammates who may not be the fastest rowers in the overall rankings. Just so, natural selection will, over many, many generations, tend to favor groups of genes that perform well. Recombination is not uncommon, as far as mutations go; over long periods of time, many of the possible combinations of a given set of genes will be tried. The best combinations will be more likely to survive. When you race each lineup of rowers against each other, a single poor rower in an otherwise good boat may cause that boat to lose, but eventually you will put together the same combination with the exception of that one rower. Similarly, in the short term, a single negative gene may drag down a set of otherwise beneficial genes, but in the extreme long term this need not be so.

George,

Your analogy is completely different from real reproduction and selection.

It is interesting, nonetheless, because it represents a common misconception… I was actually just discussing this with one of the computer science/physics professors at the university a bit ago - what you are outlining is a standard computer genetic algorithm.

GA’s, however, are not randomization + varying selection. They are optimization algorithms. They have a specific curve to which they try to maximize the data, and they always select this way.

Real natural selection/mutation does NOT lock in better and better combinations of genes. This would imply constancy and/or specification of the selection criteria (which is basically intelligent design).

You said:

“”But surely you do not suggest this is a typical generation? I should think that having 5 children, none of them carrying additional heritable diseases (it isn’t an information loss from one generation to the next if the diseases they carry were inherited from you, is it?), and one having a slightly higher IQ than you, is far more likely.”"

I’m afraid you are believing a fantasy. Geneticists already recognize that there may be as many as 100-300 (or much more, depending on who is counting) non-equivalent base changes PER person PER generation - and you are well aware that mutation rates in “lower” life forms are generally much higher. What’s worse though, is that most of them have almost no immediate phenotypic effect - they are just barely negative, but not enough to get selected out. Even if they were, at 100-300 per person per generation, selection would be futile.

You might remember reading in modern biology journals and seeing geneticists speak of how stupid the early 20th century eugenics programs were - because there was no way to sufficiently cull enough bad people to actually modify the populational genome sufficiently. Very similar reason here.

-Matthew

If you’ll notice in the text, both Laban and Jacob exhibited some knowledge of selective breeding as Laban took steps to isolate the herd and cull out the undesirable traits of speckled and spotted sheep, which he kept three days journey away from Jacob’s flocks. Since domestication of sheep had been practiced for 6000 years prior to their time (8000 BCE to 2500 BCE, approx.), the basic mechanics of selective breeding had already been reasonably worked out, though they did not understand the science of genetics, of course, they had a best available working knowledge based on cause and effect observation. Obviously they were influenced by a natural misunderstanding based in eugenics, and the text bears this out.

Clearly, Laban would not have given Jacob breeding stock that had not already been selected to produce the desired traits, unless he was incredibly stupid, and I doubt that. The flock was started with suitable specimens (phenotype) and as the story goes Jacob b egan his breeding program at the water troughs where the animals were seen to mate most often, and we see him place the poplar rods into the troughs. The rods were a cultural myth, an urban legend if you will, a superstition, and Jacob either believed the myth or he did this to focus Laban’s attention on the rods rather than on the details of the breeding itself. Because of the limited population of the flock, out-breeding was unlikely, and in-breeding was the norm. Statistically, undesirable color variations in off-spring would present themselves in the flock in significant numbers, and Jacob bred these accordingly for his own flock increase. When he noticed the breeding stock were those of the stronger group (phenotypic), he would put the rods on the troughs in an attempt to affect heritability, and when he saw that the breeding was of the “feeble” group (genotypic) he removed the rods. So, rods = attempt to change color from dominant to recessive when strong dominant specimens are mating, and no rods = weaker or “feebler” specimens produce off-color offspring as Jacob desired.

Now, of course the rods were irrelevant. The point I want to make is this:

The story about the sheep is to convey a point, the point of God’s blessing of those He predestines and elects to a divine purpose, and cursing of those whom He chooses to use a “vessels of wrath” by which he makes that point obvious.

Two evident factors were at work in Jacob’s flocks increasing while Laban’s decreased.

1) The first should be obvious, Jacob controlled the flocks, not Laban. Even giving Jacob unusual assumption of integrity in this story, just the pressure of being in control of the flocks and by the way, clearly attempting to manipulate the outcome of the population traits (out the window goes that integrity theory, I guess) drove down the ratio of Laban’s desired heritability.

In scientific terms Jacobs actions created heterosis or hybrid vigor. The term heterosis, describes the increased strength of different characteristics in hybrids; the possibility to obtain a “better” individual by combining the virtues of its parents.

From wikipedia:

Heterosis is often the opposite process of inbreeding depression, which increases homozygosity. Although it is believed that heterosis is the action of many genes of small effect, whereas inbreeding depression is the action of a few genes of large effect. The term often causes controversy, particularly in terms of the selective breeding of domestic animals, because it is sometimes believed that all crossbred plants or animals are better than their parents; this is not necessarily true. Rather, when a hybrid is seen to be superior to its parents, this is known as hybrid vigor. It may also happen that a hybrid inherits such different traits from their parents that make them unfit for survival. This is known as outbreeding depression, typical examples of which are crosses between wild and hatchery fish that have incompatible adaptations. Heterosis can be classified into mid-parent heterosis, in which the hybrid shows increased strength which is greater than the average of both parents, and best-parent heterosis, in which the hybrid’s increased strength is greater than that of the strongest parent. Mid-parent heterosis is more common in nature, and it is easier to explain (by mechanism of gene dominance; see below).

2) The above scenario is a evidentialist observation, which you know I dislike, but when it’s applicable it’s appropriate to use. Second and more to the point of the story is the blessing of God increased Jacob’s flocks supernaturally (or simply manipulating the natural) for the purpose of showing that laban’s attempted treachery in dealing with Jacob during the course of their relationship did not go unnoticed by God and man, and led to his flocks and wealth being diminished and Jacob the righteous prophet being exalted over him, as it should be.

The evidentialist aspect of the story is oviously secondary to the primary point of the narrative, God’s providence in the lives of His people.

Careful readers of the text may notice an apparent contradiction in my analysis, when in fact it is an inversion of words by the text itself:

37And Jacob took rods of green poplar and of the hazel and chestnut tree, and peeled white strips in them and made the white appear which was in the rods.

38And he set the rods which he had peeled before the flocks in the gutters, in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink.

39And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth animals ringstreaked, speckled and spotted.

40And Jacob separated the lambs, and set the faces of the flocks toward the ringstreaked and all the brown in the flock of Laban; and he put his own flocks by themselves, and put them not with Laban’s flocks.

41And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger animals conceived, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the animals in the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods.

42But when the animals were feeble, he put them not in; so the feebler were Laban’s, and the stronger Jacob’s.

Notice the inversion in v. 42:

“42But when the animals were feeble, he put them not in; so the feebler were Laban’s, and the stronger Jacob’s.”

Notice in part a of the verse, “feeble” refers to animals that were producing speckled, spotted, and brown off-spring. But in part b of the verse, he inverts the meaning of “feeble” to mean the breed pure specimens, black ones, which were becoming increasingly less dominant and numerous, and the “stronger” were the spotted and speckled and brown, which were winning the gene pool war.

This “heterosis” had been achieved, and v.40 makes it clear that Jacob “separated the lambs” and “kept his flocks separate” presumably to avoid outbreeding depression. He was likely to obtain specimens from other populations by trading and so forth, and these he would herd with Laban’s flock, increasing gene flow leading to less vitality in Laban’s flocks.

The use of the language here can be tricky if your not paying attention.

I can see that you haven’t read my subission you asked me to provide you, or you would know that I don’t deny the evident evolutionary process in nature, I affirm it as an aspect of the Fall.

Secondly, although Jacob did not have the modern understanding of genetics to effectively control selective breeding as well as we can, he nevertheless had enough primitive knowledge to exert pressure on the gene pool to his advantage over time, minimizing Laban’s population traits and increasing his own.

While I’m not as hip to the science as you guys obviously are and probably botched some of the science explanation, the point I’m trying to make is simple:

1) the text, while not meant to become an evidentialist apologetic for Jacob’s knowledge and use of selective breeding as an explanation of how he turned the tables on Laban, the text does provide at least a suggestion that he manipulated the outcome using a rudimentary knowledge of breeding; the text also indicates he either ascribed superstition or magic to his breeding method, or he used the superstition as a ruse to deceive Laban as to what he was actually doing so Laban would not circumvent his efforts (he could have stopped Jacob from using the rods, but that would effect no chsnge, only make Laban aware this wasn’t the cause and he would look for another cause, and so on). Jacob was being true to his nature if the latter is the case, he was known as the “deceiver.”

2) the point of the passage is God’s providence in the story, of lifting up His righteous prophet (despite his inate use of deception, which is not necessarily a bad thing in the righteous, Biblically speaking, Abraham lied to Pharaoh about sarah, so did Issac. Moses killed the Egyptian and lied about it too. The use of deception by the people of God is quuite an interesting theme in Scripture), over the plans of the wicked.

The primary theme of the passage remains presuppositionally supernatural based, not empirically based, is what I’m saying.

As for “microevolution”, “macroevolution” and speciation, one of my main arguments against the YEC evidentialist argument is that in order to promote a young-earth floog geology model, the creationist must show how we got from the Ark with an upwards population of some 25,000 species (according to that idiot Woodmorappe) to over 20 miillion extant species on earth today without major macroevolution and speciation occuring within an absurdly short period of time. Progressive Creationism answers the problem by invoking constant and miraculous special creations by the millions throughout history, but if one understands the absurdity of that construct against the necessity of their self-imposed evidentialism, it becomes a odd bedfellow with theistic evolution, indeed.

If you are going to invoke millions of miracles to create an evidentialist apologetic, why bother?

How’s that any worse than saying what I’m saying, that there is a comprehensive deception at work in the universe preventing us from seeing God’s design, and actually telling a tale of evolution, much of which is caused by the effects of the Fall, and some which never happened at all but appears it did (don;t confuse that “apparent history” with the Omphalos doctrine, however, I didn’t say God designed in the deception, at least not by comission, with the apparent exception of limiting the visual evidence of the global Flood to protect Free Will. I’m still thinking through that proposition. I don;t believe it’s a knowable concept, or rather a rationally arguable one in today’s academic environment.

Yeah, maybe I’m nuts, but not on this issue. My theory may be out to lunch in the big picture, but I provide some seriously good arguments against the logic of the other models, right or wrong on my own.

And also, on a different note, in all the years that I been bouncing this concept of PC off people, novice and expert alike, no one has ever given me any significant criticism of my logic and theology of the theory.

The only exception was Professor John Munday, prof. of Mathematics and Science at Regent University, who reviewed it in 1998 and offered some very productive questioning of how I would explain an apparent issue of law discontinuity. I already had incorporated instrumentalism and rational non-realism, but I failed to expand on the topic adequately.

I need THINKERS who can understand Scripture and solve real universal church issues, not just talk about the mechanics of evolutionary biology all day long, no offense intended. but really, where are you going with that discussion anyway? Can you see a destination, or even a direction you are headed with that? I mean, where are you going if not theistic evolution, and if that, why bother with the whole Christian theology thing anyway? If you can’t grasp that God can’t have had a hand in this process of evolution AT ALL, or he cannot exist AT ALL, then you are still in theological kindergarten, guys, and i’m outa here, again, no offense intended. It’s just what it is. But, this may be too much of an imposition on you, I mean after all who the hell am I, just some whacked out voice from cyberspace.

But then again, you wouldn’t have created this internet universe of yours, this black hole of discussion sucking in whoever gets near it’s event horizon, if you didn’t want to attract the attention of all kinds of weirdos out there. It’s Christian voyeurism. You want people to engage your life, but when the demand comes that you significantly engage them in return, well, then you kinda feel a little put on the spot, don’t you?

I am not your average Christian Joe out there.

Engage me, and your entire view of God and the Word, and the world, will change.

But really, you should probably never talk to me again, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble. As long as you’re saved, that’s all that matters, really.

One thing abut reality, there’s only one. And that’s how God sees things. All other viewpoints are illusions and meant to delude you from your being fully awake and acheiving your ultimate intention in Christ.

It may be arrogant to assert I know those ultimate intentions.

But I do. And it’s cool as hell, when it’s not killing me.

LOL. I know you are busy, but let’s either engage and get something done, slowly as you can, or let’s forget the whole thing.

I guess I’m saying that the old creationist/evolution/ID discussions are not making any sense to me at all, I can’t see any purpose to them for a Christian who has acheived any competency at all in the subject, because all those ideas lead to theistic evolution, nothing else. It’s as useless as tits on a boar. I can’t believe people are still having the same old discussions and arguments. I bail out for nearly a decade, come back and everybody is still having the same discussion, it’s bizarre.

NOBODY has progressed in this topic except some YEC’s who copped to the demise of their system and grabbed the title of my theory as if the title alone can keep them afloat while their Totanic sinks. I’m laughing at the absurdity of the Christian’s position in the world right now, whether their aware of it or not.

Sheesh, forget it. Just ignore me, man, you’d be better off really. Too much work, too much relearning. Listen to your pastor, I’m sure he’s got the answers. None of mine ever did, and I can’t think of one I know that even knows what the issues are, let alone knows how to solve them.

Can you believe a man can be as arrogantly sure of himself as I am?

The whole Bible is filled with nuts like me who thought they were the only ones right. That’s the Biblical prophetic perspective, man. Where’d all the prophets go?

Are you a prophet Nathan?

I’ll answer that. If you are really a born-again man, and not just a nice guy pretend Christian in a big mega-church social group, then yes, you are a prophet.

That’s pretty cool, huh? No. actually it sucks, a LOT. But it’s a job, dude, somebody’s gotta do it.

The following blog address is a new blog I started in the past couple days. i had two other blogs that had over 300 highly graphic (picture and language) posts more political then theological. it was a parody of structuralism in mass media, and it was funny as hell. but I deleted it because too many polite Christians can’t stand irreverant, satirical, gutter humor and commentary from a Christian, they only allow that from unbelievers. So I decided to stop bucking against the pricks (literally) and tone it down somewhat so people will at least think I’m just crazy instead of crazy with Tourrette’s syndrome and a manaical desire to assassinate leading United States Senators of the communist-conmtrolled Democrat Party and leaders of the Looney Left.

No really. I am the founder of the Church of America and Manifest Destiny. And I am the only member. The church simply isn’t mature enough yet for real discussions and ideas about the Kingdom,

If you leap, you have no idea how deep this rabbit hole goes, Alice.

http://thegospelofsonny.blogspot.com/

Before you blast this off to all your secret e-mail group pals to laugh over a beer at my lunacy, remember that Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, and many members of the military and civilian underground patriot movement resisted communist insurgency in Latin America during the 1980’s, and their strategies, informed by their faith, and some basic theology that I am alluding to, theologies that rarely see the light of day in polite Christian conversation, let alone church, generally undiscussed and thought un-Biblical by the mass of Christian lemmings, defeated a serious threat to the security of the United States and the free world and caused the collapse of Soviet bloc communism. I was part of some of it, in Iran, and in Latin America. These great Christian heroes and leaders are few, but they show what guys with their heads on straight can accomplish.

We are again at those crossroads, even more dire in nature then before, right here at home. People, most people, are totally oblivious to the precarious situation they live in today, both here and abroad. It’s frightening, if you are given to that sort of thing. I’m like a pit bull on the leash, ready to go and rip the throat out of the other dog.

Oh. I forgot, that sort of talk isn’t allowed anymore. Michael Vick found that out, and that’s about stuoid stuff. I’m talking about the only real stuff. The feminized American male, castrated by the homosexual, metrosexual, and liberal elitist communist social movement in this country, which includes a huge portion of the Christian church, won’t allow that sort of talk from us anymore.

Ha! I’ll kill them all, and let God sort them out. If only there were some Christian soldiers here at home to back me up. There’s a bunch overseas doing lots of killin’, and they know why too. Good theology is taught in the Special Forces Warfare Center, believe you me. You want to be a Green Beret? The best of the best are Christians, and they ruthless killers, because they know the issues.

Good theology is LIFE and DEATH, pardner. Let’s not screw around with it.

Watch this video: http://freehovind.com/watch-id-5207159640493874061

By the way, can you imagine a wolf evolving into a chihuahua?

OMG, so what are you saying, Nathan?

What’s your point here? So far on this blog, all I have heard you do is affirm that there is evidence of evolution is the natural record, which we are all in agreement on.

Is Austin a YEC that has not agreed to this stipulation yet?

Yes, massive evolutionary diversification must have occured between the Ark and modern dogs, that is clear. The problem with their view is that they have never defined what is a species (other than to invoke speciation as a barrier, which doesn’t work either, because speciation in nature has been proven to occur even b y observation, Drosophila as an example), a kind, a type, or whatever. Classification is a subject no YEC has ever attempted to tackle, because to do so would set them up for falsification. They aren’t stupid, well, not completely anyway. they are smart enough to realize how to maintain their subterfuge and keep their deception going.

They have no answer to science’s hard hand of testability of evidential theories, so to blur the lines of definition is their only option.

Presuppositional Creationism, which is an alternative six-day quasi young-earth model, solves that issue. Yeah, speciation occured after the Ark. The modern dog thing, why is that so difficult a concept? If you had 5000 years in which to selectively breed all the dog breeds, do you think you could do it with the tools of genetics available to you?

So why would it be incomprehensible that the Fall, the most powerful event in the universe to effect change on the matrix of creation, since the original creation, cannot be responsible for say, 51% of the evidence of neo-Darwinian philosophy? And let’s imagine also that it is not incomprehensible that the other percentage of the evidence for neo-Darwinian theory rests in the noetic deception that the Fall is responsible for imposing on our ability to understand the creation and it’s processes, and that Satan somehow has at least some powe to effect the physical record to make it appear to affirm the Darwinian construct, an athiesst, anti-God assumption based in fallen human reasoning. Not an unreasonable assumption, just a wrong one because they kept God out of their thinking process, just as it says they would do in Scripture.

Am I taking crazy pills here, or am I the only one making any sense here of the data here?

Back to my insistence that you reveal yourself, Nathan, where the hell are you going with this?

Theistic Evolution?
Progressive Creationism?
Intelligent Design? says nothing about process, or defines any of it’s most basic propositions, so agreeing with them is relatively impossible to do anyway, except to admit that they really are just an offshoot of theistic evolution. So forget that one.
YEC? we know you’ve copped to that error.

Well?

I ask you, Mr. Christian Thinker, where are we going with ALL THIS DISCUSSION that most of us here already stipulate the basics on?

Do you know the way to San Jose, baby? or are you just trying to bide time?

Let’s move on up, to the East Side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky, high. Movin’ on Up! Da de Da Da……

This is fun, isn’t it?

Constant and unceaseing stimulation of our cerebral cortexes, sort of like mental you know….

C’mon, Nathan, we gotta end up somewhere, to some conclusion.

Your choices are slim buddy. You either agree that God doesn’t exist, because you know that death before the Fall is a fatal construct to Christian doctrines of soteriology, or else you are sticking your head in the sand about it, like the other models do.

Or you adopt a Presuppositional approach that leaves you looking like a fool for Christ, sorta like Paul and Peter and them other guys.

I don’t expect you to answer.

It’s really too much to ask of modern man. It’s a leap they can no longer make.

And that’s the way the Devil wants it.

Hey, you know what would be productive, dude? Switch the topic to eschatology. I think at this point you are stuck in theological quicksand in your intellect.

You’ve discovered that current traditional Christianity doesn’t have your answers for the materialist anti-God construct. Congratualations. But because of your educational training in that construct, you are unable to bring yourself to accept God’s demand that you not let your reason become carnal and stop you from exercizing faith in His Word.

So, instead of struggling against the quicksand, you need new information.

I have provided the beginning of that new information.

In order to continue, you must become multi-disciplinary, just like you would on the topic of scientific evolutionary theory.

You have to discuss and think through many topics, and get even more new information to get you beyond the failed Christian boxes that are stagnating your development. You must rethink your sin-based soteriology. You must think through whatever false escahtology you have been taught. You must think through to a proper Christology that seeks to elevate the Primacy of Christ as the raison de etre of the universe, not fallen man as the center.

Can you see through the darkness dude? Can you see through the looking glass darkly to even understand anything I’m saying?

Stand up and act like a MAN!

Make a choice to get off your ass and take this topic somewhere!

Be a leader!

Or kick my ass out of your world, because this training program ain’t gonna get any nicer, recruit!

LOL

Austin- please, PLEASE do not link to anything associated with Kent Hovind if you wish to be taken seriously here. Everyone else here, even the YECs (correct me if I’m wrong about anyone) considers him a joke.

Ok, thank you,, finally a question that gets straight to the heart matter.

1) PC does exactly the opposite of what you assume, although it is completely understandable why you would think that way. First, all other creationist models require suspension of belief and critical investigation at the point where they diverge from neo-Darwinian theory. For example, progressive creationism agrees with modern cosmology, but disagrees with modern anthropology concerning the evolution of the human species. Thus, progressive creationism requires it’s adherents to refute science at the point of divergence, because acceptance of the data and conclusions of an opposing evidentialist position is antithetical to common sense. One cannot agree and disagree with oneself at the same time in a model ruled by empirical methodology. Thus, as long as the science agrees with the presuppositions of the progressive creationist within his evidentialist model, he’s a good scientist. As soon as science disagrees with his presuppositions, he suddenly must suspend belief and stop investigation in order to spend time finding a way to refute the evidence that offends his model.

2) PC does exactly the opposite. Since it is not based in empiricism and strong evidentialism, it is not a requirement of the model to refute the neo-Darwinian theory at the point of divergence in order to validate itself. It is a philosophical and theological construct, just like the Gospel is. It cannot be proven by appeal to materialism, it only seeks to answer from a Biblical perspective (rather, to find a Biblical and philosophical methodology in which to maintain traditional Judeo-Christian cosmogony in a materialist-dominant academic environment) why the evidence of modern science contradicts the traditional Judeo-Christian view. Thus, the Christian who uses this model has no responsibility to the model to provide a evidentialist refutation of the evidence at the point of divergence. Thus, in the case of the Christian who is a scientist, they are free to adopt the methodological materialist view in the practice of their science because PC proposes a eschatological timeframe in which the materialist view is the only one which is empirically verifiable, it is the only functional method in which to pursue investigation of the universe.

This does not mean that the Christian practicing methodological materialism in their science is a Darwinist. It means that they have appropriately identified the theological and philosophical issues of the problem of faith and reason and determined appropriately that they are not reconcilable at this point of salvation history. Most methodological materialists would agree with this in principle, as they make the claim that faith and reason is reconcilable, as long as you keep them separate in their respective specialties, faith sticks to philosophical issues, while reason sticks to the empirical.

The Christian scientist is then free to allow his faith to inform him of the conclusions of his science as they relate to his theology, and he can critically think of how to use his theology to think God’s thought after Him and use his science practically as if his theology was correct. In other words, he is attempting to find practical uses of his empirical science that agree with his understanding of the ethics and nature of God, as if sin and death did not exist in the world and had not affected it physically, it attempts to reverse the affects of the Fall and defeat the affects of evil in the universe. This is going to be a limited enterprise, because we can only see so much and think so far at the current point of salvation history, it is not a question of “suspending belief” that stops investigation, it is a limit of knowledge and the nature of the data itself, it is an eschatological limitation.

Likewise, that does not stop the Christian from investigating the data as far as the materialist methodology will allow him to go, which because they have no limiting ethic but the advancement of the knowledge of good and evil itself, there are no boundaries to knowledge under that construct.

This means that the presuppositional creationist can inform their children of the methodology of evil, and practice it wholeheartedly, because they have a construct now from which to define the contradictions between both worldviews, and they can apply themselves to both in their proper spheres of influence. I can do Darwinian science, no problem, because I have an answer for why the material universe is the way it is, and I have an answer how practically my conclusions should conform to the nature and ethics of God, and I have an eschatology that informs me of how my theological views will one day be validated.

Is that too hard too grasp?

Hey, Nathan, I think these contributions should qualify me as a “Dangerous Questions” Hall of Fame candidate, don’t you?

We are only scratching the surface here, too.

This is really going to be a gas, dude, you have no idea.

Nathan,

“My main problem with Presuppositional Creationism is that it requires you to positively suspend your critical faculties. You must stare dead in the face of opposing evidence and BELIEVE that it didn’t happen the way it looks. It truly is looking at the grass and saying it’s blue.”

I am a bit opposed to repeating something that has been told you so many times… so I won’t. Before you keep repeating what you apparently don’t understand (no offense intended) - take a course in epistemology.

-Matthew

Wow, I got burned. LOL!
I recently ran across the Hovind videos and still haven’t made time to watch a full episode, but the ideas in some of the videos intrigued me. (btw, after reading about his legal troubles, i see one reason he isn’t credible) It is nice to know what others think of him.
As far as the Chihuahua comment, I do believe in micro-evolution(at least)but the visual tranformation from a wolf to the 3lb rodent-ish thing in someone’s purse is hilarious.
As far as my beliefs, I chose to believe the bible, and that it is the word of God. As far as creation, it doesn’t ddistinguish if the earth was created in 6 literal days or 6 Xs of time. (from what I gather about ancient Hebrew translation)
I believe that God told us everything we need to know. So, I’m trying to accept that we don’t know and leave it at that. It doesn’t matter much in the salvation of men. No living person will prove one way or another.
By the way, Nathan, thanks for the themes and I’m enjoying the discussions on your blog.

As far as the Chihuahua comment, I do believe in micro-evolution(at least)but the visual tranformation from a wolf to the 3lb rodent-ish thing in someone’s purse is hilarious.

Keep in mind that that “3lb rodent-ish thing” is the same species as a Great Dane. If we can breed such different creatures from the same ancestors, is it really too hard to believe we bred those ancestors from wolves? And is it then too hard to believe a similar process bred those wolves from rodent-like creatures over a vastly longer span of time?

I certainly don’t think that there is any obvious sense in which a St. Bernard’s genome would have ‘less information’ than a wolf’s.

James McGrath said:

“”"I certainly don’t think that there is any obvious sense in which a St. Bernard’s genome would have ‘less information’ than a wolf’s.”"”

Selective breeding is, by definition, a removal of the genetic material for specific traits from the general population. How else do you suggest we got St. Bernards?

Nathan,

“”"I’m specifically talking about Presuppositional Creationism in the sense that it accepts the scientific data as apparently true, but rejects the findings fundamentally because it is presupposed to be untrue, no matter how true it seems to be.”"”

Again, before making statements of this nature, you would benefit from a course on epistemology.

You are talking about entirely different objects of knowledge. Scientists do not reject objects of empirical data. But an object of empirical data does not become an object of “knowledge” (:accepted truth) in a simple 1:1 manner - the empirical object is plugged into a framework of reasoning, the rules of which are dictated subjectively, and a conclusion is reached.

Basic logic shows us that a “valid” argument may have a false conclusion, depending on the veracity of the premises used to reach that conclusion. The issue at hand, of course, would be the appropriateness of the premises used to find the conclusion (i.e. the completely refuted principles of uniformitarianism or upward descent with modification, or an allegedly true historical account given by the Bible along with a well-observed mechanism of decay).

So no, Presuppositional Creationists and Presuppositional Uniformatarianists and Presuppositional Darwinists do not necessarily deny objects of empirical data.

-Matthew

The language you are using is somewhat confusing, and I’m unaware of what position you represent so I taking a stab in the dark here at attempting to address your comment to Nathan. Traditional evidentialist creationist models make the assertion that both views are looking at the same data and coming to different conclusions based on their presuppositions brought that they use to filter the data. The creationist claims their view is a more valid handling of the data because they have better presuppositions and so forth.

Thius is NOT what my theory says. Please don’t fall for the ruse that creationists are using today that attempt to use my title because their evidentialist views are failing, and then claim all along that they were always presuppositionalists. This is a lie. I know this because I’m an expert of this topic, have been for 28 years, I read every book on the subject from the late 70’s forward, including the history of creationism dating back to the 1st century. NO ONE was using the term together in the same sentence befopre 1999 when I coined the term.

The point I’m making here is not about ago, it’s about content of the argument.

Modern science uses something called the “explanatory filter” in their collection, analysis, and conclusions of their data. This methodology is the basis of most of modern society’s business models, economic models, demographics, criminology (detectives and forensic scientists use it to solve crimes), insurance actuarials, and so forth. Without the explanatory filter, modern society would come to a screeching halt and be in chaos. The explanatory filter of science WORKS because it is reading the data correctly.

What you are possibly failing to see is that according to rational non-realism and instrumentalism, a correct reading of data doesn’t necessarily represent reality.

If you are confused on that issue, just plug those terms into your search engine and read up on them, especially instrumentalism and the explanatory filter.

My theory is the only one which is stating that modern science isn’t mishandling the evidence, they are handling it expertly. It is the evidence itself which is tainted, and two other levels of detection problems which I’ve explained elsewhere already on this blog.

Another thing, you used the term “Presuppositional Creationists” as if there is more than one. Again, I wish to expand on that ruse. Andrew Sandlin was the second theorist to use the term together, publishing his book in 2001. Others afterward again adopted the term for both of us, and then started claiming they have been PC from birth.

The issue here is that in order to be a proponent of my theory, and to even make any kind of PC theory work, one has to abandon supra and infralapsarianism, the two dominant soteriological models in Christianity (mine, called the Hypothetical Question, is the third soteriological model and the correct one). They will not do this. Secondly, they must abandon their eschatological models of Postmillennialism and Dispensational pretribulational premillennialism. They will not do this either. Thirdly, they must abandon strong evidentialism. They will not do this either because to do so will relegate their cottage industry to mere philosophical writings, rather than pretend experimentation, and they weill lose millions of dollars in donations to their institutions for all kinds of field trips and equipment and labs and stuff they are pretending to do research with.

This is deep stuff, you have no clue.

This makes me a very lonely, but very unique individual in the world of Christian cosmogony.

I’m right, their wrong.

There’s nothing more typical of creationism in all its varieties (except the humble sort that embraces science fully but sees God behind it all) than the conviction that one is right and the rest of the world is blind, ignorant, stupid or hard-hearted. I wonder how long it is possible to keep that up for. As a professor in a department of philosophy and religion department, we regularly get unsolicited self-published works intended to at long last show the world how wrong it has been to ignore the greatness of the wisdom of ________________ (insert individual’s name here).

As for selective breeding, it seems to me that it imitates what separations of geography and environment can do, but much less quickly, namely isolate small groups so that their unique characteristics come to predominate. It is not as though dogs have fewer genes than wolves. The amount of information is the same. What is lacking in a given dog population is a full representation of the spectrum of genetic differences present in the wolf gene pool, as well as in other dogs that they are prevented from interbreeding with. Evolution works on gene pools and not merely individuals.

Wow. Another genius from academia representing yet another theistic evolutinst viewpoint. Tha’s going to go far towards helping Chiristinity solves it’s false doctrine issues.

What did you say in that post that we don;t already know here about evolution? That’s the real point, you guys never listen, and when people present fresh ideas to you punks of Chritian communism, all you can do is raise your nose and flip your wrist like a sissy. At least I have ORIGINAL thoughts, big boy. Go back to dating one of your students, that’s what guys like you do best. Leave the theology to competent folk. The internet is a wonderful thing, isn;t it Padre? Distance learning keeps you healthy.

Seminary, scheminary. With guys like you teaching our kids, who needs the Devil?

I’m so glad we can have an intelligent discussion here!

Oh, Herr Professor, you want to talk about intelligence?

Let;s see if I can paint a picture of the wonder of Christian education in the world.

Guys like you have been teaching students about philosophy and religion for hundreds of years. What is the result?

Europe has been secularized completely so that it’s churches are nothing more than hotbeds of Marxist ideology. Europe, with all it’s Christian history, is useless for solving real problems in the world. In the United States we are much closer to our spiritual reformations, and do you see any major Christian leaders or churches offering our society any serious answers for it’s issues? NO. We are farther from holiness today than ever. Christians are about as useless as tits on a boar. Why? Because of guys like you.

Let’s go to the next extreme. South Korea is more Christianized than America. One church alone in Seoul (Paul Yoggi Cho’s church) has over one million members, and that was 20 years ago. Is North and South Korea any closer to unity today? NO.

You produce how many graduates each year? Graduates of WHAT, may I ask? Watered down, confused Christian crap.

Oh, you have no idea how much you do not want to piss me off.

Personally, I think that it is the lack of a state church in the U.S. that has more to do with the church’s continued vitality here as opposed to in Europe. Education has a long legacy in Christianity, and many of the world’s major universities have such roots, and a significant number still have some church connection.

It is only fundamentalists, who seem incapable of responding to new information in any other way than shouting insults, who have problems with education. What they offer instead are claims to believe the whole Bible and take it all literally that are utterly false and won’t stand up under close scrutiny. In short, fundamentalism is a PR exercize aimed at self-promotion. That it finds mainstream Christianity and most of Christian history repugnant just shows how far from the Gospel fundamentalism has departed.

I am committed to doing theology in dialogue with the best theories and conclusions that mainstream science has to offer. I am persuaded that we have much to learn from past attempts to argue against new scientific data on the basis of a desire to maintain Biblical literalism.

I was a young-earth creationist as a teenager, and the reason I am not any more is simple. I read books by mainstream scientists who explained where young-earth creationist literature was not only mistaken but seemed to be willfully misrepresenting the facts.

There’s a lot more about my own story, experiences, and views on my blog at http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com
I hope you’ll pay it a visit and leave a comment there, so that the conversation can spread!

James,

I am most interested in a mathematical description of just how selection would work without removing information. I have never heard of such a thing - it would be quite interesting to learn about. Please explain.

Here’s an interesting piece on dogs and wolves I just happened across…

http://archaeozoo.wordpress.com/2007/09/23/the-origins-of-the-domestic-dog/

New information is what I have been doing here. As opposed to endless discussion about old ideas. PC is unique concept, and the discussion of it here has challenged the readers thinking about the validity of strong evidentialism as an apologetic in the creation evolution debate. All other creationst theories that have any establishment today are strong evidentialist views. Not only that, I am beginning to show that Christianisty’s popular soteriological models are inferior and require theological reform, and I completed the work of Duns Scotus and thought the issue through to a new model that solves the probems of free will and the meaning of freedom and destiny in the context of the doctrine of salvation. Her eschatological models in addition, need to be overhauled as both Postmillennialsim and pretribulational premillennialsim are impediments to the church actually discovering it’s social spiritual destiny. There’s three subjects the I have addressed with Christian readers for over 20 years that I have given then NEW information on, althouh two of those subjects have not really been addressed here in any depth yet.

What new information are you offering Prof?

This “fundamentalist” will kick your intellectual butt all over the map when it comes to producing “new information” for others to benefit from. Snide son of a ………

No need to discuss this further, Sonny. Your “arguments” have settled everything. All research can cease, all attempts to understand and study other viewpoints are now no longer necessary. I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.

Ok, Nathan, you and my wife are right, time to back off and let you fellas roll in the hay together without me. I’m fighting off a early stage pneumonia. I’, gonna take a week off and come back when I feel better. Later.

George? GEOOOOOOORGE????!!!!! Where’s George? As much as I make fun of him, he’d be a breath of fresh air right now. Seminaries and stale secular college classrooms always did smell like outhouses to me.

Hey, you want to hear something funny before I go? You guys ever see the movie Omen II? Well, I went to that military academy where Damien the antichrist is shown to be going to school in the movie. Me and my fellow classmates are extras in the movie marching around in Eisenhower uniforms and all. It’s was called Northwestern Military and Naval Academy, it’s in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

I just thought, knowing a little about me from posting here, in the context of my strange relationship with Christianity all my life, that the image of me and the Antichrist in the same movie might give you a chuckle. Me and the anitchrist system, duking it out. But that reeeeaaaalllly off subject, isn’t it? …..nah.

I’ve subscribed. You’re welcome to even consider me a friend - if you don’t think that will cost you too many other ones!

Here are a couple more thought-provoking blog entries on dogs and evolution:

http://richarddawkins.net/article,1360,Inferior-Design,Richard-Dawkins

http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=1623

They should keep the discussion going!

Hello James- (and Sonny, apparently you missed me?) You seem to be well informed on the subject of the creationism-evolution debate. Most of here have, however, read both of those articles, and the creationists here do not seem to consider them convincing. At the moment, Matthew and I are in the middle of a long discussion on the nature of information and how selection and mutation may or may not affect it in the genome. Right now the focus is not on irreducible complexity. You are of course welcome to initiate a new discussion on that subject, but I am under the (perhaps mistaken?) impression that I had the final word the last time we discussed IC, and that there was no substantial disagreement with my IMO conclusive point. Why an admission that IC is not a useful indicator of design was not then forthcoming from anyone, I do not know.

I am certainly happy to have another debater on my side, though I should inform you that we do not have quite the same position. I gather that you are a theistic evolutionist, while I am an atheist. I assume you don’t have a problem with that, since you linked to a Dawkins article.

I don’t have a problem talking with anyone - and I’ve learned the most from people who have disagreed with me. I was a latecomer to the discussion, and I certainly don’t want to beat a dead horse (or should that be dog?) and prolong a conversation that had run its course.

Let’s talk about something else!

Hey George, I’m sorta fine, thank you for asking. I have some kind of viral thing that’s physically got me pretty sick, three surgeries in the past year have left my iummune system really weak, but otherwise I’m still ticking.

Hey, I’m tired of debate, but got a riddle for you, just a little offbeat trivia for fun.

What animated comedy TV show uses the Christian typology of resurrection in every episode?

Should be easy, let’s see how long it takes everybody.

Hmm, I’m not sure, the opening sequence of each episode of Robot Chicken involves a dead chicken being brought back to life by technological means… not sure if that’s what you meant. It’s a hilarious show, anyway.

(i.e. the completely refuted principles of uniformitarianism

Define uniformitarianism. As far as radioactive decay goes, uniformitarianism is entirely backed up by supernova observation. So please, show me how it is completely refuted.

I was thinking of South Park, you know Kenny gets killed and brought back every episode, my son likes robot chicken too.

He’s thinking of the uniformity of result, which obviously has been refuted since the 19th century. Sort of a pedantic thing to say though. The uniformity of law, kind, and degree obviously have to be used in every application of science in order to address any data at all. The exception to this of course is theoretical physics, which is often no better than creationism at dreaming up possible solutions to past events for which the current laws of ohysics may have no truck. I’m thinking here of Quantun physics, and of attempts to traverse Plank time.

Why is it that when guys like Frank Tipler get all religious, nobody minds, but when a “fundie” like me proposes something like PC, he’s called “uneducated”?

Just wondering.

Well, I didn’t follow that, sorry. Hey, Humphreys never did reply. Since after ‘96 when I was publishing their views in public, and they were cooperative, they have not answered one of my queries since ‘99 and publishing PC.

But wouldn’t it be funny if in 3 months he publishes something under the guise of a theological answer to c and claiming to have brilliantly thought up an answer to the creationist dilemma of starlight and time?

You are my witness on this one, Nathan, save that e-mail.

Dr. John Munday of Regent and a couple other friends are my witnesses on my authorship of PC. But since I have no standing, it will probably be a moot issue anyway. I waited 8 years on that one because no one was ready at the time for a real PC theory, the Reformed version from Sandlin which appeared in 2001 won’t solve the problem, because they have to defend a deterministic universe under their construct of supralapsarianism. A true PC can’t work unless you solve the soteriological problem of freedom, and the only way to do that is to use The HYpothetical Question, mine also.

I got a lock on this, if “this” ever really becomes anything. But it has to in my view, because evidentialism is an impossible construct for creationists. Underlying their views is the concept of the miraculous, any way you slice it.

And as for what George is getting at, I think, is that supernova activity, or any observable astrophyscial activity for that matter, is absolutely uniformitarian in that the processes are repeatable events that we can track and analyze again and again. Geologic uniformitarianism is also true, but modified from the 19th century viewpoint to include catastrophic events, such as cometary impacts, glacial flooding (Scablands), and so forth.

Say, any of you guys poker players?

Oh, the idea of uniformitarianism and the fossil record, although modified by Gould to include punctuated equilibrium events, is no different than say that biological leaps and events events in history are “catastrophic” in nature.,

I tend to think of PC in this light, if that’s not too egotistical. PC is the creationist form of punctuated equilibrium. LOL.

Oh, and on this discussion of loss or conservation of information in genetics, the issue really is semantics.

The classic creationist response is that no additional information is added, it was all there to begin with. But this begs the questioon, doesn’t it? Of course the information was all there, where else would it come from, outside the universe? Progressive creationists say exactly that, God created them all using millions (or trillions) of indiviudal miraculous creations to account for every point of divergence in the boilogical development of the animal kingdom. Again, that doesn’t say much, does it?

Is the new two-headed fly you just mutated from the previouis one headed fly a nes species with new information, or is it just a deviation of the old fly? Well, then you have to define what constitute a new species and if you say speciation, than it’s a new fly. If not, then it’s still the old fly. But you still have two files that are radically different, because I dare say if I saw two Nathan Rice’s running around, one with one head, and another with two heads, I’s call that a new species, unless it was in a circus or something, and then we’d just call it a freak show. LOL.

So, how do you solve the semantical argument? Consider the Hawkings Paradox. Is there a loss or conservation of information in a black hole? Well, how did Hawking solve the loss of information he had to admit the data supported?

Create another universe where the information is conserved, one wih no black hole.

Shazam!

LOL.

When I said speciation, I meant if the two flys couldn’t mate, then they would be two different species. But what one headed fly in his right mind would want to mate with as two headed one? So how would you know?

Well, I guess the answer to that is that some guys would mate with anything, wouldn’t they? Three breasts, a homaphradite, whatever. LOL

Hmmm. Either you are out playing golf, or you don’t like my line of reasoning.

You know, sometimes the way we approach subjects stagnates our ability to think through the subject to a superior conclusion rather than “homeostatic” one (please forgive the misuse of the term, but I like it). Learning is often about perception, rather mathematical precision.

Awhile back, I brought up the subject of incest. Or somebody did anyway.

How do we account for the contradiction of incest in Scripture, where on the one hand God blesses incest in the early chapters of Genesis, and when we get to the later chapters and into the Mosaic Law in Exodus, He condemns it as unethical and worthy of death?

Well, there have been typically two very unintelligent approaches to this subject, the homeostatic view suggests that God ignores the incest when it’s convienent in the early chapters, because there is essentially no other option for Him. He’s only got two people to work with.

The other view is that it was okay to lay with your sister, but that as the general population grew and the genome bacame a little mnore complex and diluted by the curse of sin, it became necessary to separate human production to provide a little less depression in the species, you know, trailer trash syndrome.

But there is another solution. Other ways to figure things out, that maintain God’s etics, not based in convieniance or based on foreknowldge of sin and all that. Basing all religious answers on sin is like saying that God is a weak Diety, only presenting ideas to us (the world) that are already based on our own future actions (the Fall). This is why supralasarianism and infralapsarianism are incorrect (which means everybody, except me).

Science often has the same mental block that religion does. They live in homeostatic union with each other, talk like each other, and pretty soon they all start thinking like each other and suddenly you have several years, decades or whatever of no progress on an issue. It then takes a maverick (like Galileo, or Gould, or Hawkings, or whoever) to step outside the mold and rethink the issue for everyone.

Often they are within their own communities and accepted, sometimes they are not. Like Tesla for example. No ones views were more productive then Tesla’s, yet Edison got all the press and the money.

Expecting to find some answers to questions, using the same language, only listening or accepting analysis from tenured folk within their own schools, or making some kind of universal judgment that says knowledge can only be advanced if you follow certain proscribed methodologies, is madness. History won’t support that. While science has been largely a progression of little ideas built up over time, each paradigm shift is a relative overturning of earlier ones.

If theistic evolution is the inevitable winner of this debate for today’s modern Christians who I think have been taught to think only one way by their forbears and teachers, there’s a lot of life left in me that I should be out living, rather than worrying about other people’s ability to make sense of their world and their relationship to a traditional Christian God. What do you think?

Am I wasting my time here? Am I wasting your time here?

That’s all I want to know. Throw me a frikkin’ bone, people.

Oh, I know, but you know me, a hopeless motormouth! I think the posts I made here though today, if properly understood, are meant to indicate the following:

1) on the subject of creationism, I have provided enough background here to show that the current creationist theories have serious epistemological and theological problems, first of which is that they really are not scientific as they propose, but versions of a god of the gaps approach.

2) I assume that on this blog there are at least a few Chistians who desire to maintain a traditional Christian construct, and not so easily abandon themselves to a couple of versions of theistic evolution, which is the basic idea behind progressive creationism and of course regular Bube-type theistic evolution. Traditional YEC is history, everyone knows that (except them, I suppose). Intelligent Design is not a theory in specific sense of the term, it is theistic evolution wrapped in subterfuge that essentially says nothing other than that their might be a Designer of some sort lurking behind it all if they someday happen to discover the elusive Irresistably Complex thingamajoby.

That leaves traditionalists with only one option. Find another interim view that is beautiful. Now PC is certainly not beautiful, as I have presented it so far. That’s because you have to lead people in steps. You can’t just lay paradigm shifting stuff on them all at once and expect them to get it. They’ll eat you alive while they jump to unfounded conclusions. It’s the old pearls and swine thing.

Complicating the matter is the fact that not everyone in the discussion is honest. Most of them have prejudiced reasons for maintaining the status quo. Not pointing any fingers, but educators rank high on the list. They have very selfish reasons for wanting to control the language and conduct of the arguments.

Secondly associations have selfish reasons as well, donor funding. They often cannot back up on previous ideas, because they would lose millions of dollars. So, attempting to teach a new concept, set aside for a moment it’s ultimate veracity, is difficult stuff to say the least.

The big problem is that these influences have built walls to learning that have to be broken down carefully, if they can be taken down at all. I think the historical situation in YEC is a classic example of that phenomena. Let’s not assume either that the rest of us are so far ahead of these others, either.

Prejudiced thinking is everywhere.

Except in my head, of course.

Um, as an example of how hypothetical thinking can solve problems, I’ll answer my own rhetorical question about incest.

First, let’s assume everyone agrees that having sex with your sister is some real Joe Dirt stuff. But why? Why is Joe Dirt trailer trash stuff do get nasty with Sis?

Cain and Abel did it. God didn’t seem to have a problem with it then. But later He commanded the sanction of stoning to death those found frenching their cousin (first cousin, anyway).

How did God get from one ethic to the other?

Well, there’s two views, as I siad, in Christianity.

The first would be the supralapsarian view. God is the author of evil, including boning your brother, girls, but He puts the responsibility of that evil on you. He created the evil, but you go to Hell for it.

If anyone thinks that’s not the Reformed position you deserve to be slapped.

Second is the infralapsarian view. Yeah, it was ethical, but sin created problems in genetics so God had to change His ethic in the Law to act like He’s really miffed when we do it inter-familia. This view is the foreknowledge view. God foreknows you’ll sin, and has to adjust His universe accordingly. This view fails on the stumbling stone of the doctrine of immutability however. God ethic’s don’t change.

Now, I can’t take up anymore of your time today as I’ve dominated the discussion (forget the inconvienient fact that I’m largely talking to myself right now), but I will give you solution.

Now, I warn you, immediately jumping to the conclusion that you are smart enough to have thought through in ten minutes what took me years, hurling insults and accusations of this solution being obtuse would be a mistake. Later, if the swine wish for more, then perhaps we can explore it further and it’s relevance to solving the proble of a traditional cosmogony.

Here it comes:

It was God’s will for Cain to marry his sister. It’s not God’s will for you to marry yours.

Nathan, I’m sure you have asked yourself the question, is my wife the one God had destined for me? Is she my soul mate, or did I get it wrong?

Only a God of infinite power can control a world of personal choices where some of us get this right, and some of us get it wrong.

Also to help you, think this way. Pretend Adam never sinned. How would the world have developed? What things would remain in that theoretical construct, and what would be lost?

Would there still have been a Law of God? Well, there was law in the Garden before Adam sinned, wasn’t there. Don’t eat of that Tree. Adam and Eve would still have had children, right? Be fruitful, and multiply the earth. We’ll stop at those two for now, but assuming the timeline got all the way down to you, would you still have married your wife? Yes, you would, because she’s God’s choice for you, she completes you as a person, just as my wife of 24 years completes me. But what if you and your wife had been born, say, 100 years after Cain and Abel when they were still intermarrying? Would marrying your sister be okay, because she is (whatever your wife’s name is)?

Well, in a context of a world without sin, God’s ethics would not change if at some point in the human tree of propagation nobody’s sister was anymore their soul mate, somebody else farther apart from their gene pool was. In this context, not doing “that which is evil in the sight of the Lord,” becomes “do that which is good.” Good meaning to live in God’s destiny for you, which of course marrying the right person is a big one.

And again, if none of this seems helpful to this audience, just say so. I realize that “fundamentalism” is practically extinct, so attempts to solve fundamentalist problems may not be applicable to “progressive” people. Frankly, I can’t figure out where most of you are at. Probably because some of you don”t know yourselves.

Hey Sonny,

I tend to think of PC in this light, if that’s not too egotistical. PC is the creationist form of punctuated equilibrium. LOL.

That’s an interesting comparison, could you elaborate a bit on what you’re getting at?

Gould and Eldrige overturned the former uniformitarian view of phyletic gradualism by introducing the novel idea of cladogenesis as a localized event, rare in most cases, followed by long age stasis resulting in transformational anagenesis.

What gave them these ideas were the discovery, actually many discoveries cataloged over time, known as the “missing links” in creationist circles, in other words the intermediate transitional fossil record. Creationists have long cired, “show us the money!” when it came to the transitionals, and we of course know that they are there and in lists of hundreds. These “punctuations” in the long record of gradualism show leaps in biological evolution that stagger the mind. Sometimes they show small changes, sometimes big changes.

The point I making is that Gould and Eldridge took the old evolutioionary hypothesis, turned it on it’s head so to speak, and made every change their thinking about how evolution works.

What I am attempting to do is turn parts or all of creationist theory on it’s head.

Theistic evolutionist? What are you really adding to the creationist subject? NOTHING. You are a functional atheist. Death before the Fall is a fatal construct to Christian philosophy and theology. This is also a god of the gaps construct, just the gap is before the big bang instead of after.

Progressive Creationist? You are a functional theistic evolutionist whether you admit it or not. Saying that God is behind trillions of little miracles, all following the evolutionary record through the ages, says NOTHING. Death before the Fall is a fatal construct to Christian philosophy and theology. That is God of the gaps, by definition.

Young-earth Creationist? Well, need I say more? Biblical Creationism, yes. Scientific Creationism, in the trash bin. Evidentialism doesn’t work, period. There’s been enough time for all of us to learn this simple point. EVIDENTIALISM IN CHRISTIAN COSMOGONY IS BATTING A ZERO BATTING AVERAGE.

Hmmm, hit the wrong button or something.

Anyway, all of these models are strong evidentialist models, and all of them fail the test of rationality, from both a materialist perspective, as well as from a perspective of Biblical Theology.

Why go through all that just to come up with theories that can be easily shown to not work, and then you lose the traditioonal approach anyway. What are you gaining by using failed apologetics?

You may as well stand up like a man, admit your limitations, and perhaps you’ll discover a new and grand and beautiful universal theory.

It may not convert the materialist, but you know what? We can’t even convert our own members at this point, the arguments are so unconvincing and self-refuting.

I guess that’s what I’m saying is that I’m not so egotistical to think that I have thought out everything that needs to be thought of under a presuppositional construct. But, dammit, I was the FIRST, and I have provided some damn good foundationa;l ideas from which others smarter than I and better trained than I, can extrapolate a real model.

I want men (or women) who can think better than the old guard to take these concepots that I can teach them and apply real disciplined explanatory poer to, and revolutionize the Christian world with it.

And it doesn’t stop at creationism, it runs right into soteriology and christology, and eschatology as well, subjects that if reformed, could transform Christianity completely.

Oh, btw, I won $200 bucks tonight playing hold ‘em. My Momma gave me fifty bucks for my birthday back on the 11th, but I wasn;t well enough to go anywhere till now. Haven’t played any poker in six months. I gave my wife half of it and I think I’m gonna take a stab at a tournament tomorrow, but I don;t know if I can sit upright for 4-5 hours. We’ll see.

Later

Ah, I see what you’re saying. Hope you feel better

Sonny’s Poker Update:

I played 5 hours yesterday, big mistake. I ran out of gas about 2.5 hours, and they had to wake me up in between each bet, not fun when you are one of the other players trying to get to the next hand because you threw away 27os before the flop and you had the same hand 30 hands before that. Waiting in-between while some geriatric boob slows down your game can be real torture.

Next, I stayed so long because there was a football pool, the Cardinals game. Now my numbers were real crap, you know 6 and 2, stuff like that. But aren;t we all hopeless optimists when it comes to our numbers? Keeps you there. I have reason to be optimistic, about two years ago I won $1500 in a Suns basketball pool at the same place when my numbers hit the big pick-your-name-out-of-a-barrel-of-one-thousand-other-names- miracle

My wife always complains when I gamble, which about 2x a year now, because losing $60 or $100 is simply nothing nmore than losing one more mall trip to her, which is about 52x a year. So it’s really unfair to her when I do it. But when you come home and count out 15 one hundred dollar biulls into her palm, which I did that time, I’m a HERO!!!!!!

I like being a HERO.

But not this time. I stayed even through most of those 5 hours and died a quiet death sometime in the third quarter.

And then, to top off that misery was the Scottsdale idiot sitting to the right of me in the number 8 seat. This brilliant strategist didn’t want his football ticket (free) for some reason. Perhaps gambling is against his religion, I don’t know. He was losing every hand in poker, so that wasn’t really gambling, was it? It was charity.

Anyway, during one quarter he grabs his ticket, looks at it, tosses it back to the dealer (who cannot give that one out to anyone after he’s throw it back to her). 7 and 0. !!!!!

He could have given it to me, but NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Damned communist.

Anyway, of course, his numbers hit. $400 down the rabbit hole. He was in the restroom when the quarter ended, and when he got back I said, “Nice goin’ Sherlock Holmes, your numbers just hit.”

He didn’t care. He’s got a social security check to burn through. Not that he needs the social security, he’s a Scottsdale millionaire who uses the SS check for chips once a month.

So, as my last chip splashed the pot in disgust, I contemplated my latest move to try and get out for some entertainment.

I had AA, naturally. You always get the best pre-flop hand, right before they take your last ten dollars. Naturally they crashed and burned.

I limped home dejected, still having profited $40 for two days, but somehow that didn’t help my depression. Should have gone fishin’

Now I remember why I shouldn’t gamble. LOL.

Evolution is like a big poker game. It looks beautiful at first, wonderfully complex and intertwined with each other iun seemingly endless permutations of future possibilities.

Then it kills you and eats you for lunch.

Question for Sonny (off subject)- I had a friend who went to Northwestern Military and Naval Academy back when they filmed Omen II. I saw the movie on AMC a couple of weeks ago and I tried to spot him because he told me at the time he was in the movie briefly. His name is Pete LaRocca and he’s playing a drum in the scene where Damien’s brother is practicing with the marching band inside the school. Did you know Pete? I haven’t talked to him in 20 years. I’d like to know how he’s doing.

Sorry for the delay…

I don’t remember his name, maybe if i saw a photo. The Drum and Bugle Corp Major was a guy named Cosmo who looked like he belonged in one of those old beach blanket movies, blonde and buffed, with an IQ of about -10. He used to drink straight rubbing alchohol! The band lived on the third floor of the academy and were sort of aloof to everybody else, so we didn’t fraternize which is probably why I don’t remember him. The Company Commander was a black guy named Timmons.

My roomate’s name was Steve Gutman. I have old Polaroid photos of us in our dress blues on the day we filmed that scene on the parade field, and in the rotunda.

I was on the wrestling team, and the baseball team, and the rifle team. I have tried to find that academy on the web a couple years bqack and couldn’t find it. I don’t know if it’s still a military academy or what, but the building has to be there i’m sure, it was huge and made out of granite, had old roman columns and every inch of that place was cold stone. Don’t gtme started on how much physical pain I endured at that place under the sadistic authority of the cadet officers. When the staff went home at night, the seniors ruled, and they were not nice. I saw a kid beat to death one night in a latrine, at least he looked dead and they carried him off and we never saw him again. He was jumped by 12 senior cadets, one of them threw a frozen soda can and hit him in them neck and busted his vein. His face wa unrecognizable when they carried him out.

I probably did over a million push-ups while I was at that school. It was not unusual for me to drop and do 100-200 push-ups at a time, several times a day. At age 14, I could drop and do 100 push-ups in a minute, no lie.

Okay, that’s enough reminiscing.

Maybe you also knew a guy named Tom Long. His dad owned Tom Long’s car dealerships and Tire Shops I think, really rich, they had a mansion right there in Lake Geneva I believe.

Two more memories and then I take the Long Walk of Shame again:

I marched behind that Drum and Bugle Corp three times a day to every meal, I was woken up every morningby a bugler blowing Reville and went to sleep every night to one playing Taps. A bugle in that stone building standing in the middle of that rotunda sounded like he was right next to your bed blowing that thing in your ear.

The most comforting and haunting sound I know is the playing of Taps.

My Dad was a Coast Guard Trainer in San Deigo when he was a young guy four six years, and he was also a bugler, having learned to play the trunpet in church when he was a boy. Between his memories passed on to me of him playing reville and Taps over the Coast guard Station in San Diego, and hearing that music every day in military academy, and then hearing it throughout my Army enlistment. The guys in the band were the best buglars I have ever heard, in terms of military band music, anyway. They never missed a note and could hold the last note of Taps for at least a minute.

Eerie!!!!!

Sonny - I’ve done some searching myself on the Internet and unfortunately the original campus of Northwestern Military and Naval Acedemy is no more. From what I have been able to find - enrollment at the school slowly declined during the 1990’s and the school got into some financial trouble. The board of directors voted to merge with another military academy located north of Lake Geneva in the town of Delafield, Wisconsin. St. John’s Military Academy - I guess they were a big rival. The campus on lake Geneva was closed down about 10 years ago and was vacant for a long time. Now the land is being developed - building condos on it! If you were a wrestler then you may have heard of his older brother Joseph LaRocca. Joey is about 10 years older than Pete and I and at the time I thought he looked like Arnold the way he was so muscle bound! He graduated in 1969 and ended up going to the Citadel. He was a great wrestler and almost made the 1976 Olympic Team.

I wrote a reply yesterday but it failed to post. Thanks for the info, I’m sad to hear the Academy was replaced by condos, just like in the movie Taps!

What a waste of tradition.

I have a pic of myself here in front of the Cannon that was on the front side of the Academy, I wonder what they did with this artifact of history and all the other artifacts in that place.

There was a huge pipe organ (phantom of the opera style) in the Chapel area, with a secret room large enough to hold a couple people, we used to hide out in it when we didn’t want to be found. LOL.

Lorocca’s brother sounds like a great guy, he attended St. John’s at the same time Jim Lovell’s (Apollo 13 commander) son did, apparently. I used to wrestle there.

Danny Gable was the god of all American wrestlers at that time, we all said a prayer to Dan before every match, lol.

I wonder if they played Taps over the Academy before they bulldozed it.

Later