The record is full of obvious transitional forms for all sorts of critters, but if you actually understood the evidence for evolution you'd know that every form is transitional, by definition. The "absence of transitional forms" argument is completely specious. Even when obvious transitional forms are produced, creationists and IDers respond by pointing to the gap between them. You're never going to be content.
You don’t get what I said. The fossil record of a transitional form would start with species A and through gradual, slight, successive changes, slowly turn into species B, with no gaps. That’s the point. The fossil record always shows gaps. It always shows stasis, not change.
There's another thing you're not getting. The notion of a creator is disqualified because it isn't useful, explains everything (i.e. God did it) and illuminates nothing.
No, it’s disqualified because that’s a whole lot easier than actually having to argue against it.
ID is a conclusion based on an open minded study of where the evidence points.
Bullshit. It's a pre-existing religious position that looks for confirming evidence and ignores contrary evidence.
Not so. There is a pre-existing religious conviction that finds confirming evidence and debunks contrary “evidence”. On the other hand, the naturalist position is a pre-existing naturalist conviction that looks for confirming evidence and glosses over or ignores contrary evidence, and disallows any other conclusion from the outset.
Evolution's tested every day, nothing in any modern biological laboratory makes sense without it. It's used to guide research into new antibiotics and antiviral medications, for instance, and the over-use of antibiotics in recent decades, and the arrival of resistant infectious agents, is an ongoing experiment in evolution.
Evolution of large life forms cannot be tested in the way that gravity can, by observing the process so the theory needs to be extrapolated from the fossil evidence. That is not a test.
I read an article about how antibiotics attack bacteria, how bacteria develop resistance and the work that is done to continue developing effective antibiotics. Very interesting. I don’t recall enough to go into detail, but at the time I didn’t think it was anything like evolution. [Incidentally, I also heard a few years ago of a completely new method of attacking bacteria, nothing to do with antibiotics, which will circumvent the problem of resistance. I’m surprised it isn’t in use yet.] Aside from that, the idea of microevolution is fairly well established, as are the parameters that enable the process [size, reproductive rate, population numbers]. Nothing much larger than bacteria can do it.
The experts disagree, the theory's not complete. That's not evidence for your position. Your position's a cop-out: God did it, that covers everything we don't know and don't understand, without being at all helpful as a guide to further investigation and thought.
You’re completely missing the point. Two explanations of how evolution works, each cannot work without the other, and each contradicts the other. That’s far beyond anything like “the theory’s not complete.”
He danced around the question for a few posts and finally admitted that there weren’t any real ones
So he's as ignorant as you are.
Well, prominent textbook writer, Douglas Futuyama only used fakes in his graduate level book [Evolutionary Biology], so I guess he was ignorant too……
When Dawkins was confronted with the fraudulent examples, he admitted that he had known for 20 years that they were fakes...
You're going to have to provide a citation for that, with full contextual information.
I’m sorry, I was wrong. It wasn’t Dawkins. It was Stephen J. Gould who had admitted that he had known for more than 20 years in the March, 2000 issue of Natural History magazine (pp 42 – 49) referring to the fraudulent drawings of embryos by Haeckel that are still in use in textbooks. He also wrote a book [Ontogeny and Phylogeny] in 1977 on the history of the subject.
If you leave out the word only, you leave open the possibility of other explanations, and if that's true of you, you must be the only person in the creationist/ID camp who'd allow that.
Other than the fundamentalists, all the others in the creation/ID camp that I’ve heard of leave out the word only. What they say is; Based on the evidence, ID appears to be the most likely explanation.
Sure, a creator is a possible explanation for it all, but not a useful one. It provides, as I've said before, no new insights, no explanations, points to no new hypotheses to be tested, it closes the door on all of it. God did it, that's all we can know.
Is it supposed to be useful in some way? In what way is a naturalistic explanation useful? Believing in a creator does not close the door on further research. We are an insatiably curious species and will continue to try to learn how it all works. I can’t see the quest for knowledge ever ending, except perhaps in the unlikely event of a fundamentalist conversion of everyone in the world.
Six days of creation, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals? Is that what you mean? The true order of events was just the opposite. God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day, but he didn't make the light producing objects until the fourth day. Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes. And there's much more. You're claiming that bullshit coincides with the physical record?
I guess you forgot about my earlier post:
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The creation of light and the sun happened independent of each other, and there were 'days' before the sun was created for the Earth to rotate around.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”
This refers to the big bang, the creation of all matter, energy, time and light, including the sun and earth. Our point of observation is from without the creation, in other words, from “heaven” with the creator.
“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”
Important change here. Our point of observation is now on the surface of the new earth. The atmosphere is opaque, and no light reaches the surface.
“And God said,”Let there be light”; and there was light.”
The verb used in the original Hebrew would be better translated as, “Let the light appear”. Unlike the verb used for the creation of the universe which refered to making something out of nothing, it refers to something which already exists. The atmosphere is cleared enough to allow light to reach the surface.
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The order in which animals, plants and other elements of life appear in Genesis contradict the order that appears in the fossil record and the order of creation of the stars, the sun, etc, also contradict what we know scientifically.
No, you’re reading it incorrectly. For example, the stars, the sun, etc. were created in verse 1. They appear, become visible on the surface of the earth in later verses.
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The logic is flawed behind the 'day of rest', an all-powerful God does not need rest
Right you are. But there is another meaning to the word rest, which means to stop. Currently we are still within that 7th “day”, and there is no more creation going on.
The word that was taken to mean "day" in the original Hebrew is "yom". Unlike English, with its 4 million words, Hebrew has only a few thousand, and ancient Hebrew, about 3000. The word "yom" has 3 meanings; the time between sunrise and sunset, a 24 hour period, or a long period of time of no fixed duration. [Age, epoch, eon, in English].
