She shows you can make it work, if you really try, with the dinosaur extinction:
When things did settle back down, the pace of evolution would return to a virtual standstill. That’s the pattern we observe in the fossil record: disruption, change and then long periods of stasis. However, it took many years for scientists to accept this pattern. It contradicted the Darwinian paradigm, where evolution should occur through slow and gradual changes. Under the Darwinian view, the diversity of life can be explained by simply adding up many, many small inherited changes over a long period of time. Such gradualism was believed to be a necessary part of adaptation by natural selection – the process by which some variants of traits are lost each generation, because their bearers leave no offspring.
But this persistent focus on natural selection as the sole mechanism of adaptive evolution has always been a sticking point. It can’t properly explain how anything new arises. After all, natural selection is a process that eliminates unfit variants – it doesn’t create, but changes the prevalence of what’s already there. Instead, novelty must come from the purely random process of genetic mutation. The problem is that when new mutations appear, they’re usually not a good thing. They are more likely to disrupt well-adapted systems than to improve them, especially if they have a big effect. The upshot is that the evolution of something new, such as eyes or feathers, requires a heck of a long waiting time. Not only is there a long wait for a beneficial mutation to come along, but then there’s the long process of accumulating enough of them to build up, step by step, a complex new structure.
Renée A. Duckworth, “Catastrophes and calms” at Psyche
Duckworth does a good job of setting forth all the Darwinian “epicycles,” how various difficulties are papered over or ignored. But then…
There’s a remarkable similarity between patterns of dynamic stability observed in evolution on the one hand, and diverse human-engineered and natural systems on the other. This suggests that there might be universal principles for how stability is maintained – even at the level of entire species. If so, taking a systems approach to evolutionary dynamics could drastically alter how we view evolution as a process. First and foremost, it makes it clear that explaining how species stay the same is just as important as explaining how they change. It also suggests that the mechanisms underlying both might be inextricably linked.
Renée A. Duckworth, “Catastrophes and calms” at Psyche
Yes, indeed, Professor Duckworth. It’s called design. The design of life. Design is the outcome of intelligence.
She does a good job of pointing out how much of the history of life is really stasis:
The pattern of evolutionary stasis dominates the history of life on Earth. Yet, too often, we’re more focused on explaining change instead of understanding how things stay the same. The irony here is that the key to both of these problems might be the same. A better understanding of how populations remain stable – the feedbacks and feedforwards, the built-in flexibility and responsiveness of the system, the redundancies and mechanisms of resiliency – might enable us not only to better understand evolutionary stasis, but also allow us to predict how organisms change when their stable state is disrupted.
Renée A. Duckworth, “Catastrophes and calms” at Psyche
But then whatever happened to Darwin’s claim?:
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
Apparently not. And ever so slowly, that fact is beginning to sink in.
See also: Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen
Later in the article:
The prolem is, according to the fossil record, nature simply never had that kind of time to come up with the major macroevolutionary innovations. The greatest example of this is of course the Cambrian Explosion of the basic animal body plans.
Being a good Darwinian, the author conveniently ignores and never really addresses the basic problem – that time after time in the fossil record sudden macroevolutionary innovative jumps occur that could not possibly be explained by rm + ns. According to the fossil record, evolution simply didn’t have the hundreds of millions or billions of years the Darwinian process is supposed to take.
This writer never really engages with this devastating problem for Darwinism. And I don’t think Gould and Eldredge ever really did with their punctuated equilibrium theory.
There’s one more important driver in both situations. PURPOSE or intention or wishes or dreams.
A Cambrian snap happened in technology in 1906. From 1896 to 1906, radio used spark-gap transmitters and coherer detectors. The setup was ‘irreducibly complex’. Both ends worked nicely for Morse, and both ends evolved huge numbers of variations which were selected by fitness.
But this pair couldn’t possibly work for audio or music. Audio requires a precisely tuned steady sine wave that can be modulated by the audio, and audio requires a rectifier for detection.
A few inventors were driven by the WISH to send audio, and finally realized that vacuum-tube transmitters and semiconductor detectors (catwhiskers) were the chicken-and-egg pair needed for audio. Suddenly spark gaps and coherers disappeared, and all the variations thereafter have been in tubes and semiconductors.
The Cambrian explosion wouldn’t have happened without the INTENTION or dream of sending and receiving voice and music. Morse was well-established, with a large commercial and cultural structure around it after 60 years of wired telegraphy. There was no fitness-based reason to switch.
No matter how hard Professor Duckworth may work to make Darwinism coincide with the history of life, she will fail.
The reason for her failure is because the history of life, as revealed by the fossil record itself, is the complete opposite as Darwin himself had predicted. That is to say that the fossil record reveals a ‘top-down’ pattern of appearance rather than a ‘bottom up’ pattern of appearance.
Thus no matter how hard Professor Duckworth may try, she will simply fail to ever make any form of ‘bottom up’ Darwinian reasoning compatible with the ‘top down’ fossil record.
The following video touches upon that ‘top down’ pattern of the fossil record
As Dr. Wells pointed out in the preceding video, Darwin predicted that minor differences (diversity) between species would gradually appear first and then the differences would grow larger (disparity) between species as time went on. (i.e. universal common descent as depicted in Darwin’s tree of life). What Darwin predicted should be familiar to everyone and is easily represented in the following graph.,,,
But that ‘tree pattern’ that Darwin himself predicted is not what is found in the fossil record. The fossil record reveals that disparity (the greatest differences) precedes diversity (the smaller differences), which is the exact opposite pattern for what Darwin himself had predicted.
As Erwin stated, “The fossil record suggests that the major pulse of diversification of phyla occurs before that of classes, classes before that of orders, orders before that of families. The higher taxa do not seem to have diverged through an accumulation of lower taxa.”
And as Valentine stated,
And as Goldschmidt and Lewin remarked
And as Chen stated,
Moreover, as Stephen Meyer pointed out, there are ‘yawning chasms’ in the ‘morphological space’ between the phyla which suddenly appeared in the Cambrian Explosion,,,
Moreover, this top down pattern in the fossil record, which is the complete opposite pattern that Darwin himself predicted for the fossil record, is not only found in the Cambrian Explosion, but this ‘top down’, disparity preceding diversity, pattern is found throughout the fossil record subsequent to the Cambrian explosion as well.
Thus, Darwin’s theory is falsified as being the correct theory as to explaining what order the fossils should appear. In fact, Darwin’s ‘bottom up’ theory gets the order of appearance of the fossils completely backwards from what it actually is, i.e. ‘Top Down’!
Of supplemental note to “Top Down’ vs. ‘Bottom Up’ causation. As George Ellis points out, “Top Down” causation is the sole province of the immaterial mind infusing immaterial information into material substrates, As Ellis stated in the last sentence of the following article, “The mind is not a physical entity, but it certainly is causally effective: proof is the existence of the computer on which you are reading this text. It could not exist if it had not been designed and manufactured according to someone’s plans, thereby proving the causal efficacy of thoughts, which like computer programs and data are not physical entities.”
Here is further comment on Ellis’s article,
Off-topic: Once someone posted a great comment about number of deaths worldwide caused by atheists under communism, holocaust, etc. Do you recall that comment?
Speaking of 1906, here’s a remarkably open and objective discussion of evolution in Popular Science mag, written by a scientist working for the US Dept of Agriculture.
https://books.google.com/books?id=EtDUAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA445#v=onepage&q&f=false
He says straightforwardly that evolution can account for variation in species, but can’t create new species.
Could any paid scientist say such a thing now?
Sherlock at 5, I don’t know off hand who made the comment, (there have been many good comments on the subject), but here are the references that I use,
The unmitigated horror visited upon man, by state sponsored atheism, would be hard to exaggerate,,, Here’s what happens when Atheists/evolutionists/non-Christians take control of Government:
Moreover, all of these totalitarian atheistic hell holes are found to be based, more or less, on Darwinian ideology:
Moreover, that number does not even take into account all the abortions
footnote: the body count for abortion is now over 50 million in America since it was legalized, by judicial fiat, not by public decree, in 1973 (i.e. legislation by liberal justices from the bench!):
Of related note, Muslims have given atheists a run for their money.Although it took centuries instead of decades, Muslims have exceeded atheists in deaths by murder –
Professor Duckworth should be commended for observing the glaring issues with Darwinian evolution. For rapid adaptability, she only needs to consider the single-generation changes to the beaks of Darwin’s finches and the role of epigenetics together with environmental pressure such as a reduction in food supply.
As to body plans and the Cambrian explosion, here’s how a Canadian source on the Burgess Shale puts it:
Ahhh. The most important evolutionary event! This explains it all. And here’s how the 16 February 2016 issue of Nature puts it:
An evolutionary burst! Yes, of course! Isn’t science wonderful? And the article continues to wax eloquent with the following:
Oh, wow! A small increase in oxygen is all that it took for a burst of complex body types! Brilliant! Perhaps an experiment demonstrating how this actually would work might be of casual interest here?
Oops, I forgot. This is evolutionary biology, which is a branch of philosophy. :-/
-Q
Bornagain77 @7,
These are stunning figures. I believe the total for Communist China is much higher when including live organ harvesting of minorities, dissidents, and religious groups, not to mention forced abortions.
Regarding abortion in the U.S. as a form of voluntary genocide, it has reduced the African American population in the U.S. by about 20-25 million people since 1973. According to the CDC, abortion among African-American women is about five times the rate compared to white women.
Makes you wonder.
-Q
Querius,
Lol! Atheists/ evos are appalling philosophers.
Here’s a new “theory” to rescue Darwinism from those anti-science types:
As the article in this post says, random mutations generate new features and functions over time by accumulating in the genome. To make this work, I posit the existence of “Darwin’s demons” (similar to Maxwell’s) that hide in living beings, constantly monitoring the mutations that come along. When they see one that, in their Darwinian view is good, they latch onto it in one of those “junk DNA” strings we all know about. Waiting for the next fortuitous mutation, they add it on. After millions of years collecting good mutations, voila, a new enzyme or protein (or group of proteins) making for a new function and feature. New genetic info? No problem for our clever demons. The demons are, of course, passed down from generation to generation during reproduction, with their knowledge of what makes for a good mutation, and their memory of what has already been collected intact.
OK, can I now apply for a nice grant to expand on and look for Darwinian support for my new theory? Aren’t those demons cute?
then there’s the long process of accumulating enough of them to build up, step by step, a complex new structure.
I always chuckle when I read things like this. Forget about all the examples of why this is implausible. I’ll spot all the other stuff. I’ll spot all the problems described in Denton’s and Behe’s and Meyers’s books. I’d like a blow-by-blow explanation of all the steps it took to go from something like a chimp brain to a human brain. The physics of the two brains are nearly identical. I’ll spot that too. It’s the programming that I’m interested in. The “wiring” differences, as it were, that simply must (in materialistic terms) account for the radical differences in function. Nobody knows what programming is needed to account for the differences, let alone how it could have come to be. Except for OOL, all the rest of it is quite boring by comparison.
Fasteddious @11,
Haha! Love the “To make this work, I posit the existence of “Darwin’s demons” (similar to Maxwell’s) that hide in living beings, constantly monitoring the mutations that come along.”
Mike1962 @12,
Good point! Of course, I’ve read the hyperventilating descriptions about tool making chimps, possibly sharpened sticks and fractured rocks . . . but then there are the corvids that seem to have remarkable intelligence in smaller brains! Here’s something interesting:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xyw99k/the-unexpected-genius-of-corvids
-Q
BA77, thank you for the much posted list of atrocities laid at the doorstep of atheists. In the interests of balance, however, let me provide once again a list of occasions when God or his followers saw fit to ignore their own Sixth and other Commandments.
Biblical events
GE 6:11-17, 7:11-24 God is unhappy with the wickedness of man and decides to do something about it. He kills every living thing on the face of the earth other than Noah’s family and thereby makes himself the greatest mass murderer in history.
GE 19:26 God personally sees to it that Lot’s wife is turned to a pillar of salt (for having looked behind her while fleeing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah).
EX 9:22-25 A plague of hail from the Lord strikes down everything in the fields of Egypt both man and beast except in Goshen where the Israelites reside.
EX 12:29 The Lord kills all the first-born in the land of Egypt.
EX 17:13 With the Lord’s approval, Joshua mows down Amalek and his people.
EX 21:20-21 With the Lord’s approval, a slave may be beaten to death with no punishment for the perpetrator as long as the slave doesn’t die too quickly.
EX 32:27-29 With the Lord’s approval, the Israelites slay 3000 men.
NU 15:32-36 A Sabbath breaker (who had gathered sticks for a fire) is stoned to death at the Lord’s command.
NU 16:27-33 The Lord causes the earth to open and swallow up the men and their households (including wives and children) because the men had been rebellious.
NU 16:35 A fire from the Lord consumes 250 men.
NU 16:49 A plague from the Lord kills 14,700 people.
NU 21:3 The Israelites utterly destroy the Canaanites.
NU 25:9 24,000 people die in a plague from the Lord.
NU 31:9 The Israelites capture Midianite women and children.
NU 31:17-18 Moses, following the Lord’s command, orders the Israelites to kill all the Midianite male children and “… every woman who has known man ….”
NU 31:31-40 32,000 virgins are taken by the Israelites as booty. Thirty-two are set aside (to be sacrificed?) as a tribute for the Lord.
DT 2:33-34 The Israelites utterly destroy the men, women, and children of Sihon.
DT 3:6 The Israelites utterly destroy the men, women, and children of Og.
DT 7:2 The Lord commands the Israelites to “utterly destroy” and show “no mercy” to those whom he gives them for defeat.
DT 20:13-14 “When the Lord delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the males …. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves.”
DT 20:16 “In the cities of the nations the Lord is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes.”
DT 21:10-13 With the Lord’s approval, the Israelites are allowed to take “beautiful women” from the enemy camp to be their captive wives. If, after sexual relations, the husband has “no delight” in his wife, he can simply let her go.
JS 6:21-27 With the Lord’s approval, Joshua destroys the city of Jericho–men, women, and children–with the edge of the sword.
JS 8:22-25 With the Lord’s approval, Joshua utterly smites the people of Ai, killing 12,000 men and women, so that there were none who escaped.
JS 10:10-27 With the help of the Lord, Joshua utterly destroys the Gibeonites.
JS 10:28 With the Lord’s approval, Joshua utterly destroys the people of Makkedah.
JS 10:30 With the Lord’s approval, Joshua utterly destroys the Libnahites.
JS 10:32-33 With the Lord’s approval, Joshua utterly destroys the people of Lachish.
JS 10:34-35 With the Lord’s approval, Joshua utterly destroys the Eglonites.
JS 10:36-37 With the Lord’s approval, Joshua utterly destroys the Hebronites.
JS 10:38-39 With the Lord’s approval, Joshua utterly destroys the Debirites.
JS 10:40 (A summary statement.) “So Joshua defeated the whole land …; he left none remaining, but destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.”
JS 11:21-23 Joshua utterly destroys the Anakim.
JG 1:4 With the Lord’s support, Judah defeats 10,000 Canaanites at Bezek.
JG 1:17 With the Lord’s approval, Judah and Simeon utterly destroy the Canaanites who inhabited Zephath.
JG 3:29 The Israelites kill about 10,000 Moabites.
JG 19:22-29 A group of sexual depraved men beat on the door of an old man’s house demanding that he turn over to them a male house guest. Instead, the old man offers his virgin daughter and his guest’s concubine (or wife): “Behold, here are my virgin daughter and his concubine; let me bring them out now. Ravish them and do with them what seems good to you; but against this man do not do so vile a thing.” The man’s concubine is ravished and dies. The man then cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends one piece to each of the twelve tribes of Israel.
JG 20:43-48 The Israelites smite 25,000+ “men of valor” from amongst the Benjamites, “men and beasts and all that they found,” and set their towns on fire.
1SA 11:11 With the Lord’s blessing, Saul and his men cut down the Ammonites.
1SA 14:31 Jonathan and his men strike down the Philistines.
1SA 14:48 Saul smites the Amalekites.
1SA 15:3, 7-8 “This is what the Lord says: Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass ….’ And Saul … utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.”
2SA 8:13 David slew 18,000 Edomites in the valley of salt and made the rest slaves.
2SA 10:18 David slew 47,000+ Syrians.
he Lord said that it would be alright to eat and drink there.
1KI 20:29-30 The Israelites smite 100,000 Syrian soldiers in one day. A wall falls on 27,000 remaining Syrians.
2KI 1:10-12 Fire from heaven comes down and consumes fifty men.
2KI 2:23-24 Forty-two children are mauled and killed, presumably according to the will of God, for having jeered at a man of God.
2KI 14:5, 7 Amaziah kills his servants and then 10,000 Edomites.
2KI 15:3-5 Even though he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, the Lord smites Azariah with leprosy for not having removed the “high places.”
2KI 15:16 Menahem ripped open all the women who were pregnant.
2KI 19:35 An angel of the Lord kills 185,000 men.
Ancient Pagans
As soon as Christianity was legal (315), more and more pagan temples were destroyed by Christian mob. Pagan priests were killed.
Between 315 and 6th century thousands of pagan believers were slain. Examples of destroyed Temples: the Sanctuary of Aesculap in Aegaea, the Temple of Aphrodite in Golgatha, Aphaka in Lebanon, the Heliopolis. Christian priests such as Mark of Arethusa or Cyrill of Heliopolis were famous as “temple destroyer.”
Pagan services became punishable by death in 356. Christian Emperor Theodosius (408-450) even had children executed, because they had been playing with remains of pagan statues. According to Christian chroniclers he “followed meticulously all Christian teachings…”
In 6th century pagans were declared void of all rights.
First Crusade: 1095 on command of pope Urban II.
Semlin (Hungary) 1096 thousands slain.
Wieselburg (Hungary) 1096 thousands SLAIN
Up to Jan 1098 a total of 40 capital cities and 200 castles conquered (number of slain unknown)
Jun 1098 Antiochia (then Turkish) conquered, between 10,000 and 60,000 slain.
Jun 1098 100,000 Turks (incl. women & children) killed. Here the Christians “did no other harm to the women found in [the enemy’s] tents—save that they ran their lances through their bellies,” according to Christian chronicler Fulcher of Chartres.
Jerusalem conquered Jul 1099, more than 60,000 victims (Jewish, Muslim, men, women, children). The Archbishop of Tyre, eye-witness, wrote: “It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished.”
Battle of Askalon, Aug 1099. 200,000 heathens slaughtered “in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ”.
Total killed during Crusades estimated 1,000,000 – 9,000,000 (bear in mind world’s population much smaller then)
Heretics
Already in 385 C.E. the first Christians, the Spanish Priscillianus and six followers, were beheaded for heresy in Trier (Germany)
Manichaean heresy
A Christian sect was exterminated in huge campaigns all over the Roman empire between 372 C.E. and 444 C.E. Numerous thousands of victims.
Albigensians
The Albigensians viewed themselves as good Christians, but would not accept roman Catholic rule, and taxes, and prohibition of birth control. On command of pope Innocent III (arguably greatest single pre-Nazi mass murderer)in 1209, Bezirs (France) destroyed, all the inhabitants were slaughtered. Victims estimated 20,000-70,000.
Carcassonne thousands slain. Other cities followed.
Cathar heresy
Estimated one million victims (Cathar heresy alone)
Other heresies: Waldensians, Paulikians, Runcarians, Josephites, and many others. Most of these sects exterminated, estimated 100,000 victims
Religious Wars
15th century: Crusades against Hussites, thousands slain.
1568 Spanish Inquisition Tribunal ordered extermination of 3 million rebels in (then Spanish) Netherlands. Thousands were actually slain.
1572 In France about 20,000 Huguenots were killed on command of pope Pius V. Until 17th century 200,000 flee.
17th century: Catholics sack the city of Magdeburg/Germany: roughly 30,000 Protestants were slain. “In a single church fifty women were found beheaded,” reported poet Friedrich Schiller, “and infants still sucking the breasts of their lifeless mothers.”
17th century Thirty Years war (Catholic vs. Protestant): at least 40% of population decimated, mostly in Germany.
Jews
Already in the 4th and 5th centuries synagogues were burned by Christians. Number of Jews slain unknown.
Council of Toledo 694: Jews were enslaved, their property confiscated, and their children forcibly baptized.
The Bishop of Limoges (France) in 1010 had the cities’ Jews, who would not convert to Christianity, expelled or killed.
First Crusade
1096, Estimated 12,000 Jews slaughtered in various towns in what is now Germany
Second Crusade
1147. Several hundred Jews were slain in Ham, Sully, Carentan, and Rameru (France).
Third Crusade
English Jewish communities sacked 1189/90.
1257, 1267: Jewish communities of London, Canterbury, Northampton, Lincoln, Cambridge, and others exterminated.
1290 in Bohemia (Poland) allegedly 10,000 Jews killed.
1337 Starting in Deggendorf (Germany) a Jew-killing craze reaches 51 towns in Bavaria, Austria, Poland.
1348 All Jews of Basel (Switzerland) and Strasbourg (France) 2,000 burned.
1349 In more than 350 towns in Germany all Jews murdered, mostly burned alive (in this one year more Jews were killed than Christians in 200 years of ancient Roman persecution of Christians)
1389 In Prague 3,000 Jews were slaughtered.
1391 Seville’s (Spain) Jews killed (Archbishop Martinez leading). 4,000 were slain, 25,000 sold as slaves. Their identification was made easy by the brightly colored “badges of shame” that all Jews above the age of ten had been forced to wear.
1492: In the year Columbus set sail to conquer a New World, more than 150,000 Jews were expelled from Spain, many died on their way
1648 Chmielnitzki massacres: In Poland about 200,000 Jews were slain.
Given this history, I seriously doubt the Nazis needed Darwin’s theory as anything other than a scientific figleaf to cover their deeply-ingrained anti-Semitism.
We could go on to look at the depredations of the Christian colonists in the Americas but I think the point is made.
@Seversky
Richard Dawkins(a k.a. “one darwinian clown”, thank you Martin_r! https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/lawrence-krauss-and-richard-dawkins-on-free-will/) and The God of The Old Testament
https://strangenotions.com/richard-dawkins-and-the-god-of-the-old-testament/
Do you love paradoxes, Seversky?
___
Hypocrisy is thy name.
Seversky at 14 states,
The sixth commandment reads as such
And yet Seversky purposely, and repeatedly conflates Man’s acts of murder with God’s capital punishment on man’s evil deeds (although Seversky has been corrected on this many times,,
For instance of man’s evil during Noah’s day, the following scripture is the God’s justification for destroying mankind during the days of Noah,
Seversky goes on to list the Canaanites.and others who the Israelites were commanded to conquer and kill.
And yet,, as with the people during the days of Noah, God judged and destroyed those nations because they were evil,
Then Seversky goes on to list several examples of supposed ‘Christians’ murdering people.
And although I dispute that many of the killings listed by Seversky are completely unjustified, (for instance the Crusades which came only after the Muslims relentless attack on Christians for centuries), none-the-less I do concede to Seversky that some major attrocities that were done in the name of Christianity were unjustified.
But, in defense of Christianity, I point out that these murders were done in direct contradiction to the teachings of Christ. Whereas with Atheists, (and with Muslims), the murders laid at their feet are consistent with each their worldviews. For instance, exactly where does one derive ‘thou shall not murder’ from Darwin’s morality of ‘survival of the fittest’? It can’t be done. As Jordan Peterson stated, “Why the hell not every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost? It’s a perfectly coherent philosophy and it’s actually one that you can institute in the world with a fair bit of material success if you want to do it.”
Thus, when the atheist murders he is acting in complete accord with his Darwinian worldview, whereas when the Christian murders he is acting in direct contradiction to the teachings of Christ.
For instance, Christ himself, rather than call down 12 legions of angels to slay his enemies submitted himself instead to death on a Cross by the hands of his enemies:
Moreover, Christ himself commanded his followers to not return evil for evil but to return good for evil:
In fact, Jesus instead of commanding his followers to kill those who did not believe, (as Mohammad told his followers to do), instead told his followers to endure persecution.
In fact, all the disciples, save for John, suffered a martyrs death.
In fact, the real risk of becoming a martyr has basically been a staple of someone daring to become a Christian throughout much of Christian history:
Modern Atheists, starting with the French revolution, to Communist Russia to present day China have been particularly brutal and murderous of professing Christians. The murderous brutality of present day Muslims against Christians in the middle east hardly needs to be mentioned since they often behead their Christian victims on TV for the whole world to see.
In fact, Christians easily qualify as the most persecuted people in the world today:
And even if you add up all the murderous atrocities that were listed by Seversky, (that were committed by those who falsely claimed that they were following the teachings of Christ), the number of murders is still only a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions of murders committed by those who followed the morality enshrined in Darwin’s maxim ‘survival of the fittest’, (as well as all those hundreds of millions murdered by those following the murderous teachings of Mohammad):
Thus in conclusion, for Seversky to cherry pick atrocities throughout Christian history that were done by people in direct contradiction to the teachings of Christ, is to be severely biased against Christianity and is to blatantly ignore the true ‘persecuted’ history of Christianity. In fact, Christianity, and Christianity alone, far from being a extremely murderous religion as Atheism and Islam are, has instead been the foundation from which the world has been blessed time and time again,,,
Verse and Video:
Querius @8
“Oops, I forgot. This is evolutionary biology, which is a branch of philosophy. :-/”
You did forget – the field is really a branch of creative writing (fiction) in the humanities. The specialty is ingenious “just so” stories. Science? Forget about it.
Kushanto,
Actually, I was trying to be generous with regard to my attributing groundless Darwinistic speculation to “philosophy.”
But you’re probably right.
It all reflects our profound disappointment with the lack of “following the data,” clearly separating speculation from rigorous investigation, and clinging to an obsolete 19th century theory rather than honestly pursuing a modern understanding biological adaptation.
Instead, we’re told that “the science is settled” while providing “just so stories” about what “musta” happened while denying all serious challenges, research, and papers in non-approved directions.
-Q
Seversky
You did a lot of hard work making that big ass list of yours, now you can add all of it together and I’ll simply name off one super atheist Joseph Stalin and all of what you mentioned doesn’t matter
I’m sorry but atheists just seem more talented at killing massive amounts of people then them stupid Christians or God combined
I guess atheists are just smarter about it
I mean you can blame God for the black plague and then you actually have a real fight for how cruel God might be in comparison to atheists, oh wait nope you can’t use that, god doesn’t exist so you just gotta stick with the Bible and them Christians
But then I’ll add Mao to the mix
And a dash of Hitler, only a Dash though because nobody can truly confirm if he was fully atheistic or actually believed anything, but I can definitely say he completely backed Darwinian evolution, super race, eugenics and all
And we will top it all off with a little Lennon And the Bolshevik Revolution
I’ll even allow you to put the 100 year war in with your complaints and it still won’t come close to the amount of damage that is come from your corner of the philosophical circle
Hell you can add China’s three Kingdom wars to that and you still won’t beat the number of people dead from the small group of super atheists that I mentioned above
You know maybe we could actually discuss these things civilly but Richard Dawkins has made sure that can’t happen with that awesome divide he helped make
One where we can blindly hate one another and not actually look at the real issue which is the hate itself
No I has everybody seen Wikipedia’s treatment of the objections to evolution, everybody go take a venture and look at that and we can all critique it together they go into great detail about how stupid it is to raise questions about the fossil record
Ah, Seversky, you never let me down; your correspondence is a parade of logical fallacies,
Once again, you raise the giggly Tu Quoque response.
Get this through your head – a Tu Quoque response in no way whatever affects the truth value of the statement being responded to.
Seversky:
– What is an ‘atrocity’ according to what ‘natural selection’ has programmed into your brain?
– And why is that ‘definition of atrocity’ the ‘good one’?
Onlookers: please note that, according to Seversky’s philosophy, he does NOT exist. What exists is just a group of neurons that create an illusory ‘self’.
But, UNANSWERED QUESTION: how can ‘real neurons’ ‘fool themselves’?
And more important: why is it that only when you hear the darwinian gospel is when your neurons understand that they have been ‘fooling themselves’ all time long? And then, what mechanism do those same neurons use to ‘de-fool’ themselves?
What a conundrum for the materialist.
H’mm:
Some “shut up!” rhetoric intended to embarrass and silence a Christian voice that dares to speak up that something is drastically wrong with our civilisation. Something that points to needed reformation. Where of course the Marxist genocides are only the second worst holocaust over the past 100 years. The worst is the 800+ million [reports give 1.4 billion], rising at about 800k/week, of our living posterity in the womb.
And guess who have peacefully . . . as in, no riots; though, one backfired media lynching smear job (sounds familiar? as in standard tactics in a tabloid age . . . ) now on # 2 of 8 defamation settlements and counting . . . massively protested this every year since 1973? Oh, the very same Christians Sev would shut up. Ding, ding, ding.
Time to connect some dots.
In case we need a reminder on the true core issue, Provine:
That’s what Sev is desperate to distract attention from, the inherent nihilistic tendencies of evolutionary materialism, which is anti-civilisational. Of course, before that, it reduces responsible, rational freedom to delusion, so it undercuts itself. A big clue that it is utterly indefensible as a worldview.
KF
PS: Those troubled by the sins of Christendom (as a manifestation of the moral hazards and dilemmas of being human) and genuinely seeking answers may find here on helpful.
@24 Kairosfocus,
Truth is an inconvenient bitch.
“No gods worth having exist”? Well. Not true for certain H. sapiens that have elevated themselves to god-like status. They believe that, through science, they will achieve immortality and that they will erradicate human suffering.
It won’t happen though.
The father of lies is at work. 🙂
Remember, folks, if you can’t identify and quantify the variables in a thesis, the thesis is bullshit.
Back to the OP, I wonder how Professor Duckworth handles discoveries like this:
According to the paper, cartilage cells were extracted from the skull of a supposedly 75 million year old baby duck-billed dinosaur (Hypacrosaurus stebingeri). “The results shown mean that double-stranded DNA with a minimum length of six base pairs (BP) is present in these cells.”
Of course, background radiation should have destroyed the DNA after 75 million years due to background radiation, heat, and water. Also note that DNA half-life is highly variable depending on environmental conditions and so it cannot be used as a dating method.
For easy access, you can read about it in Creation magazine:
https://creation.com/dna-duckbilled-dinosaur-fossil
-Q