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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Krowbar who wrote (25946)	11/15/1998 10:28:00 AM
From: Sidney Reilly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Delbert, You asked several questions and made declarative statements in your last post. I chose how to respond. Yes God is omnipotent and omniscient. Now I suppose you will proceed to blame Him for all suffering. God created a universe with free will for man and He established the laws that govern it so that there is a random element to the order of the universe. If He set aside the laws that govern the world by intervening He would be nullifying the reason He created that random element. I am not God so that I know His mind and can explain exactly why He did it this way, but I can see that He did. God will never intervene and thwart your free will. He gave it to you and He will let it run just as he lets this random element in the universe run. On mutations, you state an example that is driven by man's intervention. And it is not a mutation but just a resistance that is developed. Our immune systems develop resistance to some disease or illnesses for us, but we did not mutate. The templates for resistance to disease are passed from mother to child in humans in the mothers milk during the first few days. These templates would have to be made again by a child that did not breast feed. Our DNA was not changed for our benefit. For evolution to be possible any observed mutation must have happened naturally and the DNA must have changed for the benefit of the organism and be able to be passed down to the next generation. But this does not happen. The DNA is fixed in every organism. Any mutations that were observed were in fact damage to the DNA. The damage was either deadly to the organism or benign enough to allow the organism to live out it's life. The DNA cannot mutate, it is fixed for each species. If DNA cannot beneficially mutate evolution is impossible. It is proved it cannot and therefore evolution is an impossible myth. Please don't slander me by calling me Rush. He is an idiot and it's reactionary on your part. I would have to read the book "A brief History of Time" again to find Hawking's exact quote. He makes references to God and His role in the universe throughout his book. The age of the universe and the world as put forth by "scientists" cannot be confirmed in any scientific way. It is just a guess. The age of the universe is determined by it's observed rate of expansion now. But at the big bang we don't know at what rate it expanded initially. There was no one there to observe it. If the universe expanded a lot faster than scientists predict (guess) that it did then it is much younger than the guesses that have been made. What if the expansion was nearly instantaneous to near the point we are at today and then it slowed, the universe could easily be as young as biblical history predicts. Without an observer to record it there is no way to know. Your assertions are based on faith. There is no real science to back you up. Bob

To: Krowbar who wrote (25946)	11/15/1998 11:15:00 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Hi, Delbert. Here, pasted from a msg I posted to Rick on Sept. 14, are some quotes discussing how evolution works-- over millions and millions of years. I'm sure you'd enjoy this book, btw. It's actually a response to an earlier post by Bob Sturgeon. I am going to answer your post by quoting from Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, one of my Top Ten Most Interesting Books Ever and Fun To Read, Too. It's subtitle is "Why We Are The Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology." He begins this section with a quick explanation of Darwin's theory of natural selection... then answers, in effect, the questions you raise about how marvelous entities came to be. I am taking the liberty of "bolding" the parts I think are most responsive to your point. The argument is much fuller and clearer in the book, but even this length is going to make everyone but you click right by it! and look at all the typing I did... Quote: "Fitness" is the thing that natural selection, in continually redesigning species, perpetually "seeks" to maximize. Fitness is what made us what we are today. ...Your entire body-- much more complexly harmonious than any product of human design-- was created by hundreds of thousands of incremental advances, and each increment was an accident; each tiny step between your ancestral bacterium and you just happened to help some intermediate ancestor more profusely get its genes into the next generation. Creationists sometimes say that the odds of a person being produced through random genetic change are about equal to those of a monkey typing the works of Shakespeare. Well, yes. Not the complete works, maybe be certainly some long, recognizable stretches. ...Suppose a single ape gets some lucky break-- gene XL, say, which imbues parents with an ounce of extra love for their offspring, love which translates into slightly more assiduous nurturing...So long as this thin advantage holds, the fraction of apes with gene XL will tend to grow, and the fraction without it will tend to shrink... ...Thus does natural selection beat the odds-- by not really beating them. The thing that is massively more probable than the charmed lineages ["charmed" meaning the ones that over eons proved the fittest, and survived. E.] that populate the world today-- an uncharmed lineage, which reaches a dead end through an unlucky break-- happened a massively larger number of times. The dustbin of genetic history overflows with failed experiments, long strings of code that were as vibrant as Shakespearean verse until that fateful burst of gibberish. Their disposal is the price paid for design by trial and error. But so long as that price can be paid-- so long as natural selection has enough generations to work on, and can cast aside scores of failed experiments for every one it preserves--its creations can be awesome. Natural selection is an inanimate process, devoid of consciousness, yet is a tireless refiner, an ingenious craftsman... Unquote [Apologies for the length of this. Think millions of years! E.]