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The fact that you believe that you can say that shows that the term evolution is being used to mask unfalsifiable pseudo-science which made no specified predictions to begin with. Such a pattern shows up time and again in anything from the Darwinian habit of simply imagining things to cases in which critics have to try to define what was never defined in a conceptual way in the first place, e.g.:

…when does evolutionary theory say that a protein-protein binding site should evolve? What non-arbitrary situation would cause that? In fact, evolutionary theory says nothing about specifics of what should or shouldn’t evolve. Therefore, we need to get our ideas about what should or shouldn’t evolve not from evolutionary theory, but from evolutionary data. And what we see in our best set of data from malaria is that no such protein sites evolved by Darwinian means in an astronomical number of opportunities.

Behe, on Amason

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What a load of nonsense!

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A lot more people will like what you have to say if you keep this up, but that doesn’t make it right. I might go around saying I saw Tony Woodlief and he’s a short and chubby blonde. Since this is far from the truth, you may not appreciate it – I am not speaking truth about you. In the same way, I think God appreciates those who care enough to study the details He decided to reveal about Himself in His Word. True theolgians know they are not saved by works or their intellectual thoughts, but grace alone, so this should not be an issue with them. I’ve been a Christian for over twenty years, and hands down the smuggest people I’ve met are those that judge theologians simply because they see things differently – maybe more black and white – than most.

On the other hand, let it be said that no one has perfect theology and he who thinks he does has deceived himself. We are all equally sinners, equally incapable of pleasing God. Just don’t bash theologians simply because your theology didn’t make you a good person. Theology makes no man good – but that doesn’t mean that theology itself – the study of a perfect, holy God – isn’t good. Most Christians studying it are simply living in obedience to the principle to “meditate on the Word day and night.” You are not in a place to judge them.

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Strike this little pose
Chin up in the air
Lips together tightly
Nostrils in a flare
Now look like you care
Very nice!

(chorus)
Hey mama hey mama lookee what your little babies all have become…
Rome is cooking
My, we’re looking smug

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You also have a LOT of misconceptions about the state of evolutionary science, and your citation of multiple anti-evolution books as sources explains why you do.

Consider this: Darwin created his theory long before DNA was discovered. but in the 60 or so years since the discovery of DNA, science has made great advances in understanding both the genome (the arrangement of genetic material on the chromosomes) and genetics (the identity and function of individual genes.)

Every discovery in genomics and genetics has supported evolution and none have challenged it.

What Qwerty quoted in #60 is an excellent example. The odds that a SINE would appear in the same spot in the genomes of different organisms by chance is astronomical. When multiple SINEs appear in the same places, the odds against that happening by chance only increase.

That confirms Darwin’s idea of common descent. The SINEs appeared in the common ancestor of whales and hippos and other species. Once there, they propagate through successive generations.

This is confirming evidence of Darwin, and it is only one of many.

How much evidence do you need before you will admit that Darwin was right?

Unlike Qwerty, I don’t hold that evolution demands atheism. It’s entirely possible that God created the heavens and the earth and evolution was the mechanism God chose to work through to create and diversify life. Francis Collins is one very intelligent scientist who does not see a need for a conflict. Even Michael Behe, whom you cited, accepts evolution in most cases, though he holds out cases he insists must be exceptions.

But evolution does demand that the Genesis myth cannot be literally true. And those who continue to argue that it is look increasingly silly and irrelevant as the rest of the world goes on with discovery and learning.

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It’s also ironic that virtually every judgment that New Atheists make is reliant on Judeo-Christian history, including much of their skepticism. It’s as if Protestantism evolved to protest its own history, yet it seems that some protest too much. For what God was it that condemned all graven images/patterns and declared that they were just wood and stone and so on?

Christian theism undermined false pattern recognition historically, yet New Atheists try to pretend that skepticism of this type is reliant on atheism. Or they pretend that iconoclastic truths which do away with false gods and ghosts can somehow be perverted to do away with belief in the God that forbid graven images:

At this point we could easily make the mistake of jumping to the conclusion that getting rid of gods either necessitates or is the same as getting rid of God. Far from it. For Moses and the Prophets it was absurd to bow down to various bits of the universe such as the sun, moon and stars as gods. But they regarded it as equally absurd not to believe in and bow down to the Creator God who made both the universe and them. And here, it is to be noted, they were not introducing a radically novel idea. They did not have to have their universe de-deilied as did the Greeks, for the simple reason that they had never believed in the gods in the first place. What had saved them from that superstition was their belief in One True God, Creator of heaven and earth. That is, the idolatrous and polytheistic universe described by Homer and Hesiod was not the original world- picture of humankind — an impression that is often gained from the fact that most books on science and philosophy start with the ancient Greeks and emphasize the importance of the de-deification of the universe, singularly failing to point out that the Hebrews had protested against idolatrous interpretations of the universe long before the time of the Greeks. This serves to obscure the fact that polytheism arguably constitutes a perversion of an original belief in One Creator God.6 It was this perversion that needed to be corrected, by recovering, not by jettisoning, belief in the Creator.

(God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?
by John Lennox :49)

Philosophy can lead to similar conclusions, as the rather theistic Xenophanes said of the superstitions of his day: “The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, while the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
And could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.” Yet he also concluded that there is “One God, greatest among gods and men…” because that is the conclusion that philosophy logically leads to if one seeks the truth.

As Chesterton noted, when people stop believing in God they generally do not start believing in “nothing”/oblivion like good atheists, instead they’ll believe anything. I.e. polytheism which in modern times it can take many forms, even reptilian alien “gods” capable of transfiguration that came down from their UFOs to help build the pyramids and other wonders, etc.etc. As history shows only a small minority of atheists insist that they ultimately believe in nothing/oblivion, the general population begins to believe anything as Chesterton said. For example, leading Nazis said things like:

The Christian churches build on the ignorance of people and are anxious so far as possible to preserve this ignorance in as large a part of the populance as possible; only in this way can the Christian churches retain their power. In contrast, national socialism rests on scientific foundations.

(The German Churches Under Hitler: Backround, Struggle, and Epilogue
by Ernst Helmreich
(Detriot: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979) :303)

Yet generally they would fall into paganism and their association with the occult is fairly well known. For them science was the equivalent of naturalism, which turned out to be a form of Nature based paganism which led them to try to kill the “biological substance” of the Jews through which a message that condemned Nature based idolatry, superstition and false images had come.

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As you said:If you read the book I recommended in #79 you would understand how scientists can see the entire history of life in the DNA of animals and plants.

The only way one can “see” such a history is by (once again) looking through Nature for similarities and then imagining things. That is almost the epistemic equivalent of ancient creation myths and far from the theory of gravity, which is why you don’t offer any support for the claim that the theory of evolution is like the theory of gravity. Yet there is no reason for biologists’ failure to study trajectories of adaptation empirically given that the creative powers of random mutation and natural selection they imagine in history can be modeled and tested:

…E. coli work has pointed in the same general direction. The lab bacteria performed much like the wild pathogens: A host of incoherent changes have slightly altered pre-existing systems. Nothing fundamentally new has been produced. No new protein-protein interactions, no new molecular machines. As with thalassemia in humans, some large evolutionary advantages have been conferred by breaking things. Several populations of bacteria lost their ability to repair DNA. One of the most beneficial mutations, seen repeatedly in separate cultures, was the bacterium’s loss of the ability to make a sugar called ribose, which is a component of RNA. Another was a change in a regulatory gene called spoT, which affected en masse how fifty-nine other genes work, either increasing or decreasing their activity. One likely explanation for the net good effect of this very blunt mutation is that it turned off the energetically costly genes that make the bacterial flagellum, saving the cell some energy. Breaking some genes and turning others off, however, won’t make much of anything. After a while, beneficial changes from the experiment petered out. The fact that malaria, with a billion fold more chances, gave a pattern very similar to the more modest studies on E. coli strongly suggests that that’s all Darwinism can do.

(The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism
by Michael J. Behe :142)

In contrast, you cite your own imagination as evidence: For example, there are landmarks in specific places in DNA, produced by accidental insertions of junk DNA sequences near genes. These insertion events are unique to a species and can be found in every species descended from it.

The only way that one can make conclusions about descent based on perceived “landmarks” is by assuming they are such markers and imagining historical scenarios based on questionable assumptions, the notion of “junk DNA” being the most questionable. Yet history shows that if a function is found then that will be incorporated in the hypothetical goo that you’re overwhelmed by just as easily as supposed “junk.” The history of science also shows that if people are allowed to cite their own imaginations as evidence then the evidence will seem quite “overwhelming” to them. In fact, it will seem that a theory based on such reasoning can never be contradicted because that is how elastic the human imagination is, not that it really cannot be contradicted with evidence or has not been. Here is an entirely too charitable summary of a form of such “reasoning” as it is commonly practiced in biology:

The viewpoint of Coyne et al. (1988) is one in which past events are argued to explain, in a causal sense, the world around us. Such explanations cannot be verified or tested, and the only biological observations they require are that variation and differential reproduction occur. This is not a caricature, as a reading of Coyne et al. will verify. In keeping with this general viewpoint, proponents claim that species are explained with reference to history. Important characters are hence “mechanisms” that have established and maintained the separation between diverged lineages of an ancestral population. According to Coyne et al., even the adaptive purpose of the changes that resulted in these mechanisms is irrelevant.
We would ask where biology enters into this schema. The answer is that it does not. Rather, biology is interpreted in terms of a range of historical processes, including selection of variation over time.

(Points of View
Species and Neo-Darwinism
By C. S. White; B. Michaux; D. M. Lambert
Systematic Zoology, Vol. 39, No. 4. (Dec., 1990), :400-401) (Emphasis added)

Similarly, the only observation that you require to begin imagining things is that a similarity exists. Again, there is no reason for biologists to sit around imagining things instead of demonstrating them empirically. It almost seems that they fear that foundation which they have built the Darwinian creation myth will crumble if random mutation and natural selection are put to the test.

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You just wrote 3 very long comments and you don’t have more time? Too bad. I would have liked to have known what I was imagining.

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