Thank you Dane,

Not just fossils. As I noted earlier,

" .... not just by using the vast fossil record, but by corroboration from thorough DNA studies.

"Fossils + DNA.

"Disparate branches of science corroborating each other's accounts."

Fossils (material evidence, bones, bits and pieces which can be put in chronological sequences and fairly accurately dated) + DNA which can be examined for all species down to amoeba and up to Homo Sapiens.

Vast amounts of fossils - I've seen entire floors of boxes of fossils in one museum, probably hundreds of thousands of them, mostly still waiting to be catalogued.

And DNA which is in every living creature, every wonderful, amazing creature which, through random mutations, have survived where countless other have not (and the remains of many who are now extinct), in the purposeless, chaotic, randomness of evolution, out of which only the 'fittest' survive, and for who knows how long. A completely messy lack of order, but that's life.

Fossils + DNA. That does it for me :)

Cheers,

Joe

Sorry, Dan S de Merengue. That's just not good enough.

>>For your question, perhaps look at what I’ve already said (try starting Feb 29.)<<

Ok.

You began, on Feb 29, with this:

>>Through design in nature (that many including you admit is apparent) we clearly see God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature.<<

Which caused me to ask the question, how are these invisible qualities, eternal power and divine nature evident in the Design of the toenail?

To which you responded, entirely unconvincingly:

>>What’s with toenails? Well, I was glad I had a set today when someone stepped on my foot on a busy train<<

Unconvincing, of course, because the toenail in no way forms protection for the toe. Quite the opposite, in fact, since it is far more vulnerable to painful and lasting injury, than a toenail-less toe would be.

But you at the same time attempted a cover story:

>>While we see evidence of design in creation everywhere, we also see many things that are far from ideal and very much undesired. The world is spoiled and fallen from its original state... We get a picture of the original state that God created when we read about the Edenic garden<<

This can surely indicate only that either a) Adam had no toenails, and they grew later as the world fell "from its original state", or b) that Adam had toenails, which are of a patently poor Design.

I think you may have recognized this as a serious problem, as your next contribution tried desperately to change the subject.

>>To say a toe is poorly designed because it suffered an injury is analogous to saying a Mercedes is poorly designed when it was damaged after skidding on a drizzly day and hitting a tree<<

We're not talking the Design of toes, we're talking the Design of toenails.

We are also, of course, talking Design in relation to gay Christians. I'm not suggesting that Adam was gay, of course. But his kids were somewhat incestuous, I understand.

Is incest part of the Design framework too?

Pericles,
In my discussion with Rhian, I pointed out that the Anglicans don’t really have an official position on evolution. I told him about the lecturer in Old Testament at one large Anglican Bible College in Melbourne this year, when asked whom did Cain marry, said he leaned towards the theory that he likely married one of his sisters. The assumptions behind this are that all people were descended from the original created pair, Adam and Eve, and therefore there was no one else for Cain to marry.

I don’t count this as incest for several reasons. The prohibitions against incest were established in law at the time of Moses, and not before. This is understandable scientifically, as mutational load on the genome is building up over time as mutations are accumulating. In the same way, looking backwards in time, mutations would have been decreasing. At the beginning, Adam and Eve would have been formed perfect without any mutations. As mutations increased, with family members sharing similar types of mutations, it would be required at a certain point in time to prohibit close family members from marrying. This is why prohibitions against close relational intermarriage were introduced in the Mosaic Law. Previous to this, it is notable that Abraham, the father of the faith, married Sarah who was in fact his half-sister. So here our modern understanding of science is confirming the Biblical account.

And since your questioning about toenails is so persistent, next time I see my friend who’s a podiatrist, I’ll ask her to corroborate the protective qualities of toenails or otherwise in the design of feet. But as I said, from my perspective I was glad that I had a set the other day when someone stepped on my foot

Joe,
Disparate branches of science will corroborate each other's accounts when we’re carefully selecting or arranging the evidence to fit into a particular mindset or worldview. This is what Thomas Kuhn referred to as a scientific paradigm.

Yet much evidence will not easily fit. For example, it requires special conditions to form a fossil. The vast amount of fossils we can observe, many shown in intricate detail, are likely to have been formed quickly. This is testimony to a cataclysmic flood which would have provided ideal conditions for biota to be trapped in the resulting mud and silt and deposited in layers. How do you account for the large number of marine fossils found on high mountain ranges?

Some claim the small percentage difference in DNA between apes and humans show our relatedness. But even a small percentage (even one or two percent) would still amount to a huge amount of genetic information. How billions of units of complex genetic information arose from the chaotic environment within random processes evolutionists have difficulty accounting for. Similarities within different kinds are more likely accounted for by a similar (or same) designer.

You reveal your philosophical preferences when you describe evolution as ‘purposeless’. This is a religious idea imposed upon the evidence and not intrinsic to it.

Hi Dan,

This is getting away somewhat from the original purpose of the thread, but never mind.

I'm surprised that you raise the issue of the multitude of fossils (while others of your persuasion might keep going on and on about 'not enough fossils', where is the missing link ? etc.)

If you think about it, how many kangaroos and bettongs and numbats have wandered over the very piece of ground that you are on, and every other piece of ground in Australia ? And sooner or later, they all had to die and their bones go somewhere.

On his voyage in the 'Beagle' in the 1830s, Charles Darwin stayed in Chile for a couple of years and wrote extensively - as a budding Anglican minister - about finding fossils up in the mountains and, after experiencing an earthquake and observing the massive lifting of the ground, started to understand how there could be marine fossils in mountainous country. But only by taking into account vast periods of time, far longer than the six thousand years that he had believed. He spent the next twenty five years wrestling with all the implications of what seemed to be him incontrovertible evidence of the vast time spans that geomorphological processes required.

So your question has already been answered :)

You write: "Disparate branches of science will corroborate each other's accounts when we’re carefully selecting or arranging the evidence to fit into a particular mindset or worldview."

I don't think that archaeologists and palaeontologists and geneticists collaborate to the extent of " .... carefully selecting or arranging the evidence to fit into a particular mindset .... " The evidence is there to be found: on the one hand, the fossil evidence; on the other, the DNA evidence. Palaeontology and genetics don't exactly 'fit' together conceptually. Academics in these disparate fields would most likely work in different buildings, and rarely encounter each other.

[TBC]

[contd]

But there it is: one lot comes to one conclusion about human evolution from its body of evidence, the other lot finds much the same thing from its evidence, i.e. from an entirely different angle.

It's a bit like two independent teams of detectives working on the same case, each team oblivious of the other. If they each came up with the same conclusions, perhaps from different bodies of evidence, then each of their sets of conclusions would be that much stronger, corroborated.

That triangulation does it for me :)

And yes, 'purposelessness' is something we impose on the evidence for evolution. Out of chaos, and the incredibly random and reckless waste of life and brutality that is 'nature', comes dominant forms of life, in the competition for existence. Horrible. But that's how it has been. The natural world does not dance to our preferred tunes of love, sweetness and light.

Cheers,

Joe