Originally posted by Paul of Eugene:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Scott J:
No Paul. We have evidence successfully explained by evolution. There is a very, very significant difference. A plausible explanation may or may not be true. For something to be evidence in favor of one particular concept, it must lead to that conclusion and only that conclusion... or a very reasonable approximation thereof.
OK Lets look at some alternative plausible explanations and see how they fare.
Lets take the alternative explanation of seperate creation of kinds by an omnipotent and omniscient being, for example.
Whales, then, would be created independently, by this omniscient being, Who would be free to make them any way He wanted. For example, He would be free to make the tails horizontal instead of vertical.
But then you have to consider the fact that whales have those hip bones left floating in there. Some whales don't have them, you know, so we can't say they are essential. What kind of omnipotence adds scraps of bones that cannot possibly be required? </font>[/QUOTE] Three fallacies to answer here. First, just because you don't know the function doesn't mean there is none. Could these be useful in reproduction or something else? Maybe.
Two, I didn't say that God
did create it that way. Maybe He did or maybe whales did in fact have rear appendages at some point and lost them due to a radical deletion... which provides no help to your idea of the ascension of species.
Third, your rhetorical question at the end implies a metaphysical proposition about God. God is sovereign. He can create a whale any way He chooses for any purpose He chooses. Your question is dealt with at length in the book I suggested. It was the idea that "God wouldn't have done it that way" that largely gave rise to evolution in the first place.
Primates in general have a defective gene for making vitamin C. It has been identified, the same defect is shared by us all. Defects in genes happen randomly, not systematically, so it is no use saying they all got that way after the fall due to the curse; the damage is too uniform, to much exactly the same between species. Something else caused the same damage over the whole primate class. Evolution explains it by common descent from a single defective gene in the common ancestor.
The problem with this is that statistically the mutation is just as likely to happen twice as it is to happen once. Seeing that similar genetic design was used for humans, apes, and monkeys only makes it far more likely to have occurred under the right environmental conditions. Before you scream foul... consider that evolutionists believe that evolution accounts for the eye... via 12 lines of convergent evolution whose boundaries aren't always as distinct as would be expected. Further, they believe that Tasmanian wolves and a few other species developed by convergently because they have a marsupial reproductive system... yet otherwise they belong with others of their type.
If you want a speculation, I would offer that a plague among primates before they were well dispersed wiped out the ones who didn't have this mutation.
Vitamin c gene damage has occurred independently in guinae pigs and in fruit bats, and the gene damage has been shown to be of a different kind in those cases.
I am not confused about the fact that guinea pigs and bats are far more different from humans than apes and monkeys... Are you?
The hypothesis of inpendent creation could be rescued by assuming defective blueprints at the time of creation.
Nope. Very effective blueprints actually.
God created it perfectly and sin has deteriorated it since the fall. Had the blueprints been the least bit defective, all life would have ceased. Instead, it simply began to die.
BTW, I caught something very interesting in UTE's last post concerning the origins of exons and introns. He even said the latter was once active but is now "junk". That sounds to me like genetic complexity, order, flexibility, and code that was lost in the past. IOW's, the answer to your question lies in the current construction of the gene itself. It isn't the same. It isn't as good perhaps. But it still functions.
The "creator" using a common blueprints for the chemical subroutine in the creature could put it together with those defective blueprints and make the same mistake over and over for a while - while working on the primates, say . . .
Again assuming what God could or couldn't do and for what reasons huh?
This does not square with my theology of God as being omniscient.
It very well should if you can swallow a camel so large that you would believe that He could originally spark the universe, leave everything else to chance combinations of natural events, and still accomplish the universe and creation that He intended 5 billion years later.
You believe God
could omnisciently create something apparently very simple... but would struggle with creating perfect kinds capable of surviving the corruption brought by the fall?
But it is a nice rescue interpretation for that particular issue. In your desire to avoid accepting evolution, are you willing to go that far?
No. It is a nasty little straw man typical of folks who really don't want to deal with the key points of another side's arguments.