"God could have chosen whatever starting point He willed including making everything exactly the way it is now."
Agree. We should not put God in little boxes of our own creation. We cannot understand His ways.
"I am open to the idea that God recently created all living things in such a way that they would adapt and populate the world as He divinely ordained."
Closer. You are willing to admit that God could have allowed the present diversity of life to come about through adaptation. But you are still constructing a box into which you place God.
But it is still stunning that you do not seem to have problem with ALL artiodactyls possibly being one "kind." That is a lot of speciation! Once you allow for that much change, then you really do not have a basis to claim that such change falls under minor variations with a "kind." There is no wall preventing higher groups from coming about through the same purposes.
This leads into a couple of other subjects. The first is all the talk about interpretation. We are ALL interpreting things about which we cannot be fully certain. Now the question is which set of interpretations are correct. As I see it, there are two possibilities. The first is that the creation account IS literal and that God for some unknown reason made His creation just look like he used inflation and billions of years of geology and common descent to create. The second is that God really did use long periods to create and the the creation account is meant to convey truth through non-literal means.
Now my person al opinion is that the latter is the most reasonable. As someone pointed out above, it is close to heretical to suggest that God would deceptively create as some sort of test. It just does not seem to be in His nature. Second, we do see that God has used non-literal language in other parts of the Bible to convey truth. In addition, we do see other things in the OT told in a manner that would make sense to the people who received and wrote the OT but that we see differently today. Saying that the sun stood still for Joshua rather than the earth. Discussion about storehouses for the hail and snow and of windows that open in the heavens to cause rain, dividing the water above from the water below.
The second and completely different discussion gets back to the science. You did not seem to object to hard when I said that your view of the whale data sounds like you are open to all the artiodactyls being related. This IS what th data show. They can all be traced back to the same common ancestor. They all share genetics, even down to the same junk DNA. The whales have pseudogenes, development and atavisms consistent with ancestry among the other artiodactyls.
You suggest that perhaps a rich genome allowed an original artiodactyl "kind" to diversify. A big problem for you. In whales we see atavisms and psuedogenes of the land dwelling aspect. But, if your suggestion were true, then we would expect to find in the lad dwelling artiodactyls pseudogenes and atavisms of all those genes that were necessary to make the whales crop up occasionally. We just don't see deer with tail flukes or camels with a nostril on the top of the head. Such things would be profound evidence that you ideas are correct, but we do not see such. Instead, what we see is only consistent with common descent as envisioned by the mainstream.
"Nor have we seen a proof that any of the whale's ancestors acquired new genetic complexity that resulted in at becoming a new species."
Just discussed one. The evidence is clear that whales have a land dwelling ancestor. The other descendants of this ancestor do not show that they have a latent capacity to make any of the specialized whale traits. This shows that they developed these genes and abilities independently.
I'll also remind you of something unpleasant. Over the coming years, we will be genetically sequencing the genomes of much of earth's life. Right now we cannot point to the genes that make whales different. But that may not always be the case. You are hanging you hat on a brabch that is likely to be cut off in a couple of decades.
"I did. You simply didn't like it."
No, you simnply made a genral statement about genetically rich adaptable initial populations. You never tried any explanation of what this meant until now.
"That would depend on how many of the original types of animals went extinct before being taken on to the Ark."
Problems for you.
First, most young earthers realize that if the flood were global, then there would not be ebough room for all the species to fit so they say that only "kinds" were carried aboard and they later speciated.
They also say that the flood created essentially all of the fossils.
Do you see a problem here? I do. How could all those various species get drowned and fossilized in the flood if they did not speciate until afterwards?
You are running into a similar problem. You are allowing for some speciation pre-flood. But then you say that some then went extinct before the flood. If they are extinct beforethe flood, then no fossil for us to find! If they are alive up till the flood so we can get fossils, then you have to take two of all these species aboard. You are back to the problem that led to the "kinds" solution to the ark to begin with. This numerous diversified species take up too much room. They also require vary specific diets which greatly increase storage space for feed and complexity of care. Its a logical problem for you.
"You would have much more than if you accept evolution's idea that all life arose from a single celled organism of unknown origin that was genetically simple in the extreme."
Nope. I have the observed mechanism of duplication and mutation to generate new information. Did you know that the recent human geneome project had to reduce by thousands its initial estimate of the number of human genes because there were so many duplications? Did you know that many diverse families of genes can be traced to repeated duplication events?
"Which I theorize is a result of reinforcement of an "off" or "on" by breeding, non-catastrophic mutation (downward in nature), and environment, ie. disease that attacked a population with only those with specific "on"s and "off"s being preserved."
Sorry, but all those genes would still be there. Not what we see.
"No it wouldn't. In fact, the remaining existence of variability is an indicator that more, not less, should have been present in the past."
Nope. You cannot have any more variability than what you had at the bottleneck since you do not allow for for new, beneficial mutations. Your bottleneck happens with two individuals. No way around it.
"If what happened is completely different from what He said happened then truly how can we know what is real about us?"
God can convey truth non-literally. He does so in other parts of the Bible. You limit God.
"Then you turn around and propose that He did exactly that in Genesis... except it isn't potential information, it is actual.
"
God can convey truth non-literally. He does so in other parts of the Bible. You limit God.