Comment on Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit by pauluc.
A biblical account of downward progression? I think not.
Gen 2:8 Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.
Gen 3:7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Gen 3:21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
Gen 4:22 Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron.
Gen 6:14 So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.
Genesis 13:3 From the Negev he went from place to place until he came to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent had been earlier.
Exodus 26:7 Make curtains of goat hair for the tent over the tabernacle—eleven altogether.
1 Kings 5:17 At the king’s command they removed from the quarry large blocks of high-grade stone to provide a foundation of dressed stone for the temple.
Leviticus 25:3 For six years sow your fields, and for six years prune your vineyards and gather their crops.
Isiah 65:18 But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I will create,
for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight
and its people a joy.
19 I will rejoice over Jerusalem
and take delight in my people;
the sound of weeping and of crying
will be heard in it no more.
20 “Never again will there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not live out his years;
the one who dies at a hundred
will be thought a mere child;
the one who fails to reach[a] a hundred
will be considered accursed.
21 They will build houses and dwell in them;
they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
Revelation 21:15 The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. 16 The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long. 17 The angel measured the wall using human measurement, and it was 144 cubits[d] thick. 18 The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. 19 The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, 20 the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. 21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass.
Revelation 22:22 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city.
The trajectory of bible history is not at all a history of degeneration but of technical advancement from a garden to a vast cubic city that is 2,200 kilometers in each dimension. (That is 250x the height of Mt Everest. Not sure what docking that on the earth would do to tectonic plate movements, the rotation of the earth or how the residents at the highest level would cope with the vanishingly small oxygen tensions)
To me the narrative is of growth in knowledge, understanding and technology not in degeneration but does that reflect the writers vision of the good life or has God decided that a really really big city is much better than a garden.
And don’t try to dismiss this vision of the end as symbolic as you will then also need to dismiss the account of the beginning too.
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pauluc Also Commented
Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit
@AzGranpa:
I think you should read the critique about the assumptions implicit in the simulations looking for the common ancestor before using this to support your model of YEC.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7008/full/431518a.html#f1
Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit
@Sean Pitman:
“Do you really not see the exponential nature of the problem? There is really no point in further discussion if you will not discuss this particular question.”
I may well be dense in not understanding your view of the primacy of mathematical modelling.
We have had this discussion before apropos of the paper by ferrada on novel function in proteins.
As I see it your modelling and statistics is largely based on the premise that functional sequence/s must derive denovo and that the probability of this is infinitely small is akin to questions surrounding abiogenesis. I do not have any knowledge of that and do not think it is a question worth asking. To me it must at this time be relegated to the realm of non-science as there is no obvious mechanism for testing it. A conclusion perhaps reinforced by the lack of any significant literature on this, a finding that you have articulated on this thread and attributed to the lack of insight by scientists.
In terms of the reality of speciation and the associated functional change in existing sequences your statistical inferences premised as they are on assumptions about denovo production are not really helpful, at least in the mind of practising scientists.
The reality is that we agree that speciation has occurred largely due to new mutational changes in your case you say accumulating within 4000 years.
Now that is a question that can be addressed and will be addressed with rapid genomic sequencing and analysis. My predication is that there will be at the genomic level no essential qualitative difference in the process of genetic change for speciation/genetic diversity between subspecies like Neandertal and Denisova and between primates.
If you disagree the onus is on you to provide the evidence within this or other mammalian groups to show that there is some qualitative barrier at the level of a “kind”. If you think there is a 1000fsaar limit then show where that would apply in primate phylogeny.
Southern Adventist University opens Origins Exhibit
Sean
1] I’m afraid I am going to once again have to pass on your suggestion for wasting more time than I have in responding to your mantra about probability and complexity. Like accountants statistic is my servant not my master.
I disagree with your bottom up approach of looking at data from some preconceived theoretical reality. You model sequence space as being the arbiter of reality and your basis for accepting it is an immovable faith position not an attempt to model real observations. I approach the reality of speciation in a top down fashion the same way as Darwin did; we have evidence for speciation (which you do seem to accept) but how did this happen at the genome and molecular and is there evidence of limitations?
2] Your fixation on the front loading of genetic information ina a breeding pair seems impervious to logical or mathematical argument and you do not seem to be able to accept what any population geneticist would immediately see. 2 individuals is a gene puddle not a gene pool and arguments about evolution by allelic selection is completely unrealistic.
3] I do not think you have actually read the references I have suggested as relevant to discussions on mechanisms of speciation. If you have, you seem to have read them as an apologist not as a scientist and see only what you want to see instead of reading the publication for what is the message of that publication.
4] When I ask for an example of instances of 1000fsaar limitation in the human vs chimp comparisons I was, as a scientist, thinking perhaps you would give me a relevant response with some specificity including minimally a gene ID or base sequence ID so I can actually check what you are talking about.
Recent Comments by pauluc
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Bob Helm: With that said, I find your views to be spiritually dangerous and often scientifically weak. I detect a lot of smoke in your posts, but very little light. I hope you will continue to ponder these issues and try to have an open mind.
You are most welcome to your opinion and I know you would like nothing better than that anyone who takes Christianity and the Bible seriously but not literally to just go away. It is much better not to know of any possible problems with one current views. It very hard to get to the science when we cannot even agree on what is science. What passes as science on this site is so completely dismissive of its methodological basis and history and is entrained in a specific supernatural world view that allows arbitrary acceptance of any observation as miraculous. I think Roger’s paper may well be relevant to Adventist that believe that Christianity has and must respond to a careful study of physical reality by reconsidering its interpretations of the word of the Lord, but as Sean has indicated you are exception to that characterization. I still do not really understand why you should be interested at all in any science. It seems a bit messy to worry about facts. It really seems an unnecessary bother to argue whether the precambrian/cambrian boundary or the upper cenzoic (is that really what you meant?) as the evidence of a divine intervention.
Dont worry I do have an open mind which is why I still peruse this site to see how more knowledgable fundamentalist Adventists think. I wont worry you further.
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Sean Pitman: So, you do see the need for a police force and a military to maintain civil society, but somehow Christians should not provide what is an otherwise necessary part of that civil society? I’m with Abraham Lincoln on this one when he noted the inconsistency of such a position – like Orthodox Jews paying others to turn their lights on for them on Sabbath
On that logic you should not have any issue with working on Sabbath in any profession serving 24/7. Be that computer support, utilities firefighters. Those giving up those jobs because of inability to have sabbath observance were all deluded. They as Christians should be prepared to “provide what is otherwise a necessary part of civil society”
You cant have it both ways. You cant because of a moral postion claim that Adventists should have exception from working on Sabbath and at the same time deny me the right to consider immoral some occupations that may be very utilitarian in a world full of selfishness and the human acts of evil that comes from that.
Lets for a moment step back from lala land. Where are we and where did we come from on this thread?
1] You posted a rehash of all your usual arguments in response to an article about the more mainstream Adventist positions that may impact the way Adventism reacts to conventional science. All very straight forward.
2] The contention was that Adventism has accepted process for the orgin and evolution of the inanimate world. The birth and death of galaxys and stars and planets in black holes supernova and impacts of spiralling planets. This is where it gets really strange.
3] You contend that Adventism has always accepted the conclusions of that process but then expand on your view of the process which involves a little bit of order and natural law but large amounts of magic. God waited a few billions years until the interstellar material generated by the big band condensed into planets onto which God created life mature and complete. This included Heaven the place of his throne-room which he populated with physical being angels which it is implied have both mass and composition and metabolism.
4] When it was suggested that the same processes and natural law resulted in life on this planet this was claimed inconceivable and would never be done by any process involving life and death. Instead the life we see now is in reality designed to live for ever and has be chemically changed because it is deprived of a particular form of nutrient from a tree that existed on the Earth some 6000 years ago.
5] The inconguity of practicing medicine by the principles of process of natural law and the technology resulting from both the processes of the innanimate and the animate world rather than accepting the much more important process of divine intervention seems to be completely obsure.
6] When someone says that the process of life and death that gave us the physical substance of our universe is also the basis of the creation of life here he must be animal hating sadistic psychopath who cannot belieive in a God of love and grace and is lying when he says that non-violence characterizes the children of the heavenly father for one must always recognize that peace and freedom are only obtained over the bodies of 1/3 of the angels of heaven and the eternal physical and violent struggle against those who would practice violence.
I really cannot understand you Sean. Your ways are way beyond me. I am just sorry that Bob seems to be drawn into your twighlight zone.
Grace
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
@Sean Pitman: sorry but your curious amalgam of magic and biology is not really comprehensible to me as a biologist or as a Christian . it. is neither logical or biologically feasible
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Sean Pitman: However, according to the Bible and Ellen White, before the Fall God specifically directed nature so that all sentient life was protected in a manner that there was no suffering or death. By eating from the “Tree of Life” God provided constant renewal and regeneration that worked against what would otherwise be inevitable entropic changes, decay, and death. It was by deliberately stepping away from the true Source of eternal life that mankind stepped away from God and into the full workings of mindless natural law alone – which does in fact inevitably lead to suffering and death.
And this interpretation is precisely why you need a theodicy. Where is the justice in killing all for the sake of the sins of one woman+man? It makes no sense logically. If they were conditionally immortal because of eating of the tree of life then did all the animals in all the world congregate around this tree like beasts around a water hole on the serengeti. how exactly do you as you are wont to do translate the account into a literal reality. And which beast had to come and eat. Or was it symbolic? Oh now that’s a thought.
Avondale College Arguing in Favor of Darwinian Evolution?
Sean Pitman: Come on now. Even I can imagine limitations to reproduction or the turnover of sentient carbon-based life. Surely you can at least imagine something similar? I know God can since such a world is described in the Bible and in the writings of Ellen White. Think about it…
Of course I have. This is not simply about reproduction. That is trivial. This is about metabolic process. Show me a carbon based life form that does not grow or metabolize anything and I will show you an organism in stasis as a spore “living” millions of year in amber. That is; effectively dead.
Real life cannot exist without metabolic process in a carbon based world and God has sanctified all this by a process of making good out of evil from the death of one comes life for others. Just as in the biological world so in the spiritual. By his death we have life. Just as God sanctified the practice of sacrifice of appeasement practiced by most cultures for thousands of years before and showed that in the Judeo-Christian tradition these same acts of sacrifice were emblematic of a monotheistic God that would become incarnate and bring life from death. So also he took the preceding accounts of creation derived as they were of the mesopotamian valley and recast it as an account of the monotheistic God who is above all but comes and dwells among us to become one of us. Participating in our life and death but showing us the importance of the transcendent life of the spirit that supercedes carbon based life and its inherent death. It is no fairy tale of 6 impossible things before breakfast. It is not pie in the sky by and by. It is rooted in a real world and it is about the transcendence of love and grace that is acted out in a real physical world by the incarnate God and us as we follow as His disciples.
That is the message I get from the images and visions of the Canon and EG White. But of course I read it for the message that it conveys not as a scientific text. That is where we fundamentally differ.