Re: The Utility of Evolutionary Theory Revisited

John and all,

I'll do my best to answer all the questions posted. I'll say you guys
are a tough, harsh bunch, but I'm still confident. I've seen all of
the objections before and defended against them, at least to my
personal satisfaction. Many people won't be satisfied because they are
highly confident about events that happened in the first 10e-43 of a
seconds of time some 10e9 years ago.

>John Harshman wrote:
>... And please don't patronize scientists by attributing their
> beliefs to habit.

Sorry If I come off a little harsh myself.

What I mean to say is that the paradigm of Darwinian evolution has
deeply permeated the fabric of our society. It is taught from grade
school to the highest levels of academia. Television programming, books
and magazines, news, social icons and authorities... I don't' need
to tell anyone how deeply entrenched it has become.

The result is that a person can apply this like a filter to their
thinking. It can lead to inflexibility, short-sightedness, or "in the
box thinking."

I've found that many of the arguments against ID/YEC are arguments
from the "box." What I mean is the argument is based on the fact
that some particular point of ID/YEC doesn't follow the guidelines or
doesn't fit the model of Darwinian evolution. To point this out
doesn't prove much.

Not to pick on you John, I like you, but here's a good example of
what I mean. You wrote:

> Also, if kinds are only around 8000 years old, mutation rates have to be
> many orders of magnitude higher than are observed in the present day
> just to account for genetic differences among species within kinds.

You'll recall that the in model I presented included the following:

>> 2. The biblical kind is engineered with a high degree of robustness.
>> The consequences of geologic and environmental pressures have been
>> considered by a creator who is intimately familiar with his creation.
>> Reactions to these pressures and adaptations are programmed into the
>> DNA before the creation event.
>> When a minor change to a species occurs, it is solely because it has
>> been accounted for in the code initially. Beneficial adaptations to
>>complex biological, informational systems are never the result
>> of copy errors. There is no place for mutations in the positive
>> adaptation of any organism. Note that these adaptations would be
>> called micro-evolution in the evolutionary paradigm.

Your statement about the need for drastically higher mutation rates is
true from a Darwinian point of view. In the creation model a mutation
is a degradation of DNA and plays no role in the adaptations of life.
The argument jumps models and only proves that Creationists and
Darwinists are at odds. Check back and see how many objections fall
into this category.

Now I anticipate that some will completely miss the point of the above
and fire off a one liner like "Where's the mechanism?" I will
certainly address that issue.

I'll also get to all the other issues form the other posts. Sorry I
can't offer more tonight, but right now I'm going to go be with my
kids and play my guitar.

Shawn

.

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