“…Extrasensory perception (ESP) involves reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses but sensed with the mind…”
From Wikipedia here:
This post is in reality the continuation of a discussion following my Blogpost
‘Russell’s Teapot Really refutes Atheism not Theism’
I was inspired to write it in response to an atheist friend of mine whom suggested in the comments/ discussion following after the above Blogpost on Russell’s teapot that because A Flew expressed belief in ESP that this was a clear indication he was of dull intellect.
Now I don’t believe Humans have ‘ESP’, yet I don’t discount the possibility that there may be modes… ‘some completely natural’… of sensing things which in the current state of scientific knowledge we are currently completely oblivious to. Others could be ‘spiritual’ powers…like free will.
Of course it is exactly statements like that which cause ‘rationalists’ like my friend to pour scorn against anyone whom suggests things like ESP, or any ‘spiritual powers’ at all may be possible.
Let me place a caveat on my position as enumerated above.
I don’t believe humanity has or ever will develop a ‘Naturalistic’ ESP… why? * because I don’t believe in Evolution!*
To my way of thinking it is the Atheist Evolutionist whom ought not to doubt the possibility of Humans having/ or developing a naturalistic form of ESP as by my reckoning their wild theory seems to give room for every fantastic myth conceivable!
To appreciate this it is only necessary to apprehend just how fantastic are the claims of evolutionists Re the Evolution of Man from a single celled organism.
Let me explain.
Ever seen an X men movie?
All those Fantastic characters… mutants whom are Super-human and have ‘special powers’… but not spiritual powers… they are all advanced Bio tek.
That is what evolution is all about!
Lets talk ‘Naturalistic ESP’.
Now Evolutionists believe that a protozoa type organism slowly developed into the human animal with the five senses, taste, sound, touch, sight, smell… all via the inexorable march of Evolutionary process/progress.
On that basis I cannot see how my friend can insist that an atheist whom claimed decades ago to believe in ESP is some how being ridiculously inconsistent with Naturalistic theory *unless my friend assumes Evolution’ has already exhausted all the possibilities.* …yet it is easy to cast doubt upon this.
I believe I can expose his own inconsistency and in the process expose just how silly belief in evolution really is.
Consider these things…
An ear is a microphone.
An eye is a Camera lens.
A nose and mouth are chemical detectors
An hand is a load scale, temperature probe, and compression tester.
Animals have various other senses too eg lateral lines and sonar/radar etc,
My Atheist friend claims unguided ‘Evolution’ designed and built all these Bio tek instruments.
I ask why then he would doubt that evolution has not/ could not also build a biological ‘wireless cell phone/ ‘walky talky’ like device/system’ directly into our Brains so that we could mentally communicate at a vast distance…without speech?… ie a form of ‘Natural’ ESP?
We do today know that such communication is possible via external devices… a reality which not too many generations ago would have been considered ridiculously impossible!
Obviously a race of X human beings with a Bio wireless telecomunication system would have a superior survival advantage over ordinary human beings.
We must ask why ‘Evolution’ which is… Or so we are told… obsessed with ‘Survival’ has not bothered to supply us which such kit?
All evolution has to do is install such a devise inside our bodies and hey presto we have ESP!… not that difficult to grasp… if as you claim Evolution is capable of ‘upgrading a lifeform from a Germ into a human being!
The crux of my arguement is that if you balk at the idea of Evolution creating ‘Bio-cell phones’ then you must also question the rationale that evolution could create sight, sound, taste, etc… for the very same reason.
Ie because these are incredibly sophisticated ‘gadgets’ too!
Thus the evolutionist position really is that Si-fi movies like X Men are believable!
I ask what freakish creatures… via Evolution…are we destined to become?
An atheist whom balks at the Idea of ESP exposes the simplistic level on which they function. ie They redily will tell you it is rational to believe that evolution is capable of installing Cameras… but irrational to suggest it might install cellphones!
Spot the contradiction!???
Does my friend believe Mankind has reached the Zenith of evolution?
Now for some Funny Evolutionary Theory… Our X-Men Post-Religious future! 😀
Obviously I am not suggesting this video is anything other than a ridiculous fraud… what I’m highlighting *is the Atheist evolutionary myth* upon which it is based… is precisely what Atheist believe.
Its funny because Evolutionists actually *Believe this sort of stuff*… yet mock Theists faith in God!
Think about this…. They believe we came from Non-Theistic sub-creatures… evolved into what we are now, whom have been described as ‘The Worshiping Animals’… which they theorise as though being delusional Fables… non-the-less this trait must have had ‘survival advantages’… yet still they insist that Atheism is an ‘Enlightenment’…a progressive step away from ‘Primitive superstition’… so that ‘in the future’ Humanity will abandon ‘all religious superstition’… and be in atheist thinking ‘Fully rational’… fully knowing… without faith… etc etc… so by their reasoning Atheism both Precedes and Follows Theistic faith… all by the blind forces of Nature!
Talk about a Dung pile of Materialist Fables and superstitions!
It is the theistic position which makes the X men movie an absurdity.
Theism says *Evolution is a Joke!*, and that the blind forces of Nature cannot create life… cannot design new Gadgets/ senses/ biological capacities, etc, and thus the only way a human being could have any form of Naturalistic ESP is if our Creator designed and installed such Gadgetry into our bodies via writing it directly into our DNA… just as he has done with our Eyes, Ears, Etc…all of which are irrefutible testaments to the existance of God!
“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:’
St Paul. Romans 1:20
Tim Wikiriwhi
King James Bible believer.
Libertarian. Dispensationalist.
Good argument. 🙂
>>”The crux of my arguement is that if you balk at the idea of Evolution creating ‘Bio-cell phones’ then you must also question the rationale that evolution could create sight, sound, taste, etc… for the very same reason.”
Nice try Tim, but it seems that you are overlooking the obvious, namely, that a camera is NOT an eye (nor is an audio recorder an ear, etc). A camera is a piece of equipment used to record images, whereas an eye is an organ of sight. The former mimics the functions of the latter, but apart from that they are worlds apart. Both focus light from external objects in the field of view onto a light-sensitive medium. In the case of the camera, this medium is film or an electronic sensor; in the case of the eye, it is an array of visual receptors. Both act as transducers. That is where the similarities end. An eye does not and CANNOT record an image as a camera can. The eyes use living cells to detect and interpret the light and convert these into electrical signals that are relayed to the brain and processed into an image. No brain processing, no image. The camera on the other hand uses a diaphragm from where the image is recorded on film or like in modern cameras on tape or digitally. The eye has a blind spot which is also known as scotoma, whereas cameras do not have any such limitation. The eye is highly sensitive to the dust and foreign particles settling on the outer film. Stereoscopic vision of eyes allows 3 dimensional images while camera captures only 2 dimensional images.
Furthermore, and most importantly, simply because human technology is been built so as to mimic certain biological functions does not justify grounds for claiming that the reverse applies and that biology can therefore ‘possibly’ mimic human inventions via the process of evolution. Talking about taking a logical leap! Evolution is not a creative process – it is an entirely responsive process, which means that new functionality only develops and is maintained in response to the need to survive. There is no justification whatever to jump to the conclusion that there is or ever will be a need to survive using telepathy. In fact, as far as we humans are concerned, because our creative powers to invent technologies such as the cellphone have already been realized, such a need is now eliminated!
Unless you can provide objective evidence of the existence of ESP, to claim that it may exist is to make the exact same mistake as Antony Flew did, which is to treat the arbitrary as being real knowledge, an blatant epistemological error.
A few closing remarks to points made in your article:
1. I never wrote or implied that because Antony Flew expressed a belief in the possibility of ESP that this is “a clear indication he was of dull intellect”. No doubt he was a knowledgeable and intelligent gent. What I inferred was that by his taking the idea of something entirely arbitrary like ESP as being ‘possible’ that that was evidence of his having had an irrational epistemology from the get-go.
2. I do not “pour scorn against anyone whom suggests things like ESP, or any ‘spiritual powers’ at all may be possible” as you have asserted. I am scornful only of those who suggest that such phenomena are possible when there is no objectively verifiable evidence to back such a claim, and who upon being shown that there is no evidence (including that their own evidence does not qualify as evidence), proceed to maintain a belief in “possibility” despite a lack of evidence. For someone to make an error in knowledge is not deserving of scorn. To maintain an error in knowledge knowingly is.
3. There is an abundance of evidence for the existence of evolution. There is no acceptable (i.e. objective) evidence for the existence of ESP. To equate the two as being equally “possible” is ludicrous.
Since Ayn Rand is anathema here, perhaps some wise words from Epicurus will strike a more resonant chord:
“If we consider those opinions which are only tentative, and must await further information before they can be verified, to be of equal authority with those opinions which bear about them an immediate certainty, we will not escape error. For if we do this we overlook the reason for doubt between that which is right and that which is wrong.”
I need to contemplate your reply further Terry,
Yet several things immediately spring to mind.
Firstly when you say…
“… simply because human technology is been built so as to mimic certain biological functions does not justify grounds for claiming that the reverse applies and that biology can therefore ‘possibly’ mimic human inventions via the process of evolution. ”
You here are making my argument for me!
That is exactly/ precisely the theistic argument against evolution… unguided Biology cannot do that!
And that leads onto a second point, that *via observation* single cell organisms remain single cell organisms.
They never ‘evolve’ into multi cellular creatures…fish, people, etc. ( you need to have a sophist excuse as to why you can ignore the fact that direct observation does not support the theory of evolution)
And we know why.
There exists no ‘unguided’ mechanism to add the required genetic codes. (the sophist idea of ‘Natural selection’ fails to provide any mechanism by which ‘better’ creatures…. with new DNA can ‘appear’.
I would imagine ‘Mutation’ via fortuitous accident/ exposure to cosmic rays etc will be the myth that you cling to.
Their are some very strange genetic anomalies such as ‘double ups’, yet they do not write new DNA, nor to they create new species. Eg Polyploidy plants.
Hairless cats not a ‘new species’ but reamian Cats with a genetic disorder.
That mutant mistakes are detrimental to the ablity of species to survive so greatly favors the notion of De-evolution… not evolution as to completely render any claim that this is a possible means to explain how the millions of creatures ‘evolved from single cell protozoa… to explain the millions of times their DNA must have been rewritten in a more advanced genetic code is to be irrational in the extreme… and absolutely Non-scientific.
And to harmonize my points I ask you this question.
Which is the most complex/ sophisticated piece of equipment… a cell phone, or a Human being?
I think the answer is so obvious that you can have no come back.
Thus my arguement holds absolutely.
And contrary to your assertion that ‘the eye is not a camera’ I insist that it is! In conjunction with the Brain it captures images and stores them in our Biological Hard drives.
(Please don’t get excited Richard that I am likening our brain to a computer!)
Perhaps you should read Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. It will answer some of your objections, if my memory is correct.
A few points.
“…unguided Biology…” Evolution is guided principally by natural selection, i.e. any genetic variations which increase an animal’s reproductive chances in a given environment are more likely to spread through a population than genetic variations which decrease an animal’s reproductive chances.
Consequently, species are most unlikely to de-evolve because adverse mutations which detract from an individual’s chances of surviving and successfully reproducing tend to be eliminated from the gene pool by failure to reproduce. A species might disappear because of environmental changes or successful competition from another species, but that’s not de-evolving, or do you mean that species which lose functioning body parts (e.g. underground animals which have non-seeing eyes, humans who have a tail bone but no tail, or whales which retain some of their ancestors’ leg bones, but entirely within their bodies) have de-evolved?
I doubt if biologists use ‘progress’ or ‘advance’ to describe changes in genetic codes.
Since I’m not a biologist, just a layman with a very casual interest in science, I’m sure you can come up with questions which will stump me, and even stump biologists in their current state of knowledge, but ignorance is not an argument, and such arguments have fallen to scientific advances in the past.
Evolution doesn’t install devices in living things. Rather, incremental changes which increase reproductive success in particular environmental niches occur over time by adapting and extending existing features, and the result is sometimes quite ramshackle. Our recurrent laryngeal nerve inefficiently loops round our hearts instead of directly connecting to the brain stem; this, like cleft palates are a consequence of our fish ancestry. Unlike fish, we have vulnerable external testes, a consequence of evolving from cold-blooded ancestors to warm-blooded humans. Our eyes have blind spots and are obscured by blood vessels as a consequence of their evolution from light sensitive cells on the skin into eyes. Some of us require expensive dentistry because we have the same number of teeth as our ancestors but our jaws have shrunk in the last 5 million years.
>>”That is exactly/ precisely the theistic argument against evolution… unguided Biology cannot do that!”
It is not my understanding that anyone is arguing that evolution (whether true or not) is copying *human* inventions. That is ludicrous. Evolution states that genes mutate so that life can continue to survive in various forms prompted by environmental influences.
>>”*via observation* single cell organisms remain single cell organisms.
They never ‘evolve’ into multi cellular creatures”
What are you talking about? Observation confirms that almost all life on Earth starts as single cell organisms and evolves into multi-cellular creatures. We are one such creature.
Furthermore, there is incontrovertible evidence of singular celled organisms forming bridges with each other to form colonies and then working in coordination with each other to act as one cohesive unit, and the same species existing in multicellular form:
“Green algae … are eucaryotes that exist as unicellular, colonial, or multicellular forms. Different species of green algae can be arranged in order of complexity, illustrating the kind of progression that probably occurred in the evolution of higher plants and animals.”
and
“In Volvox the individual cells forming a colony are connected by fine cytoplasmic bridges so that the beating of their flagella is coordinated to propel the entire colony along like a rolling ball. Within the Volvox colony there is some division of labor among cells, with a small number of cells being specialized for reproduction and serving as precursors of new colonies. The other cells are so dependent on one another that they cannot live in isolation, and the organism dies if the colony is disrupted.
Organized patterns of cell differentiation occur even in some procaryotes. For example, many kinds of cyanobacteria remain together after cell division, forming filamentous chains that can be as much as a meter in length. At regular intervals along the filament, individual cells take on a distinctive character and become able to incorporate atmospheric nitrogen into organic molecules. These few specialized cells perform nitrogen fixation for their neighbors and share the products with them. But eucaryotic cells appear to be very much better at this sort of organized division of labor; they, and not procaryotes, are the living units from which all the more complex multicellular organisms are constructed.
To form a multicellular organism, the cells must be somehow bound together, and eucaryotes have evolved a number of different ways to satisfy this need. In Volvox, as noted above, the cells do not separate entirely at cell division but remain connected by cytoplasmic bridges. In higher plants the cells not only remain connected by cytoplasmic bridges (called plasmodesmata), they also are imprisoned in a rigid honeycomb of chambers walled with cellulose that the cells themselves have secreted (cell walls).
The cells of most animals do not have rigid walls, and cytoplasmic bridges are unusual. Instead, the cells are bound together by a relatively loose meshwork of large extracellular organic molecules (called the extracellular matrix) and by adhesions between their plasma membranes. Very often, side-to-side attachments between the cells hold them together to form a multicellular sheet, or epithelium.”
(See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK28332/)
>>”And to harmonize my points I ask you this question.
Which is the most complex/ sophisticated piece of equipment… a cell phone, or a Human being?”
The form of one exists by necessity (the human being), the form of the other does not (the cellphone). To compare or equate the two according to their sophistication is meaningless. To start with the universe has had an eternity to develop the complexity what exists. Mankind has had but a few hundred years since his mind was unshackled thanks to the Enlightenment. How fair is it for you to compare the two? Man can form a perfect diamond in a laboratory in a matter of days, whereas it takes nature millions of years to do the same. Does that prove that man is more powerful than nature? No, of course not. To compare the two is to compare apples with oranges. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond)
>>”And contrary to your assertion that ‘the eye is not a camera’ I insist that it is! In conjunction with the Brain it captures images and stores them in our Biological Hard drives.”
Your equating the two is to use a transumption or trope, which is not objective when one is discussing anything scientific and leads only to epistemological confusion.
Terry,
Quote Rand whenever you like. If she makes a good point, I will accept it at face value.
Please spare me the dreadful line about “all multi-cellular animals coming from a single cell… as somehow adding veracity to the belief in evolution from a single cell!
That is a form of equivocation!
To suggest a single celled protozoa resembles a mammalian fertilised egg is like saying a Book by Dr Seuss resembles a Library!
The single cells/ fertilized eggs of things like birds or people all have the requisite DNA that stipulates that they will become complex multi-cellular organisms.
*This is not an evolutionary process!*
.. and it is that Master plan… the Genetic code which is missing from the single celled organisms which multiply by division… not sex!
So you need to explain how the DNA got written which started off as an asexual microbe to become things like horny elephants!
The leap from a-sexual reproduction to sexual reproduction is just one of countless conundrums belief in Evolution faces.
You cant even explain how the single cellular protozoa got it’s DNA in the first place!
Evolution is one fantasy built upon another and another!
Nothing scientific about it at all.
It is a complete fabrication based upon the superstition of materialism.
You have got appreciate that Darwin had absolutely no understanding of genetics or the mechanisms of heredity when he formulated the theory of evolution. Ie it was formulated in complete ignorance! And it was seized upon by atheists, not because of any scientific reality but because it was seen as a way to deny God created mankind… they hope proof would be found.
The opposite has happened.
With the advances in Biology the complexity of life has thwarted any belief in ‘Simple lifeforms’, or and mechanism that can explain transmutation of species.
And in principle *you do hold that evolution can copy human invention* in the sense that you say Evolution is a means by which complex mechanism can be created… mimicking design.
Eyes, ears, hands, brains, etc.
Remember Dawkins Quote: “Biology is the study of complicated things which give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose”.
The Obvious reality is that Biological organisms are designed art works!
…Blar blar Blar Colonies of single cells! Absolutely nothing to do with evolution either! Just weird little organisms doing their thing as designed… as written into their genes!
They are not evolving.
Tim –
>>”all multi-cellular animals coming from a single cell… as somehow adding veracity to the belief in evolution from a single cell! That is a form of equivocation!”
Well, actually, no it’s not. The point I was making is that the main (but not only) difference between clusters or colonies of singular celled organisms which coordinate their actions with one another and multi-celled organisms is in how the cells are connected together. Think about it. It is not so much a matter of how a one celled organism mutates it’s DNA umpteen times to become a multi-billion celled organism as much as it is about how vast quantities of single-celled organisms adapted so that they could act more efficiently as a cohesive and symbiotic unit, whereafter DNA mutation and gene expression has done the rest.
All cells divide into two daughter cells – there are no exceptions to this rule. There are no triplet divisions. One cell always becomes two, regardless of whether it is a cell of a single celled organism or a multi-celled organism. So it is not so much about how gradual mutations have created organisms with more and more cells and complexity, as it is about how colonies of single celled organisms joined together to become multi-cellular, and then DNA mutations and gene expression took over from there to produce ever larger organisms.
>>”To suggest a single celled protozoa resembles a mammalian fertilised egg is like saying a Book by Dr Seuss resembles a Library!”
Perhaps not in form, but in substance they are extremely similar. They are both carbon-based, cellular, and have DNA. They even share most of their DNA. Humans share more DNA with the protozoa that even corn does (!), so looking at form alone is sometimes illusionary.
>>”So you need to explain how the DNA got written which started off as an asexual microbe to become things like horny elephants!”
There are plenty of clues:
“Abundant evidence indicates that facultative sexual protists tend to undergo sexual reproduction under stressful conditions. For instance, the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae reproduces mitotically (asexually) as diploid cells when nutrients are abundant, but switches to meiosis (sexual reproduction) under starvation conditions. The unicellular green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardi grows as vegetative cells in nutrient rich growth medium, but depletion of a source of nitrogen in the medium leads to gamete fusion, zygote formation and meiosis. The fissioning yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, treated with H2O2 to cause oxidative stress, substantially increases the proportion of cells which undergo meiosis. The simple multicellular eukaryote Volvox carteri undergoes sex in response to oxidative stress or stress from heat shock. These examples, and others, indicate that, in protists and simple multicellular eukaryotes, meiosis is an adaptation to deal with stress.” (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_and_function_of_meiosis)
>>”You cant even explain how the single cellular protozoa got it’s DNA in the first place!”
Unlike Creationists, who insist on ‘God’ being the answer for everything not yet answered by science founded on rational philosophy (God of the Gaps), men of reason consider the more honest answer of “I don’t know” to be a perfectly valid form of knowledge.
I would like to add the point that obviously a race of X human beings with a Bio wireless telecomunication system would have a superior survival advantage over ordinary human beings.
Hello! QuiteRather useful post you will have right now there. This specific actually assisted us a massive sum!
The argument is fundamentally correct, i.e. it is absolutely true that IN THEORY, an organism could develop methods to emit invisible electromagnetic waves.
– there are organisms that can capture such waves, including us (visible light); some animals can see infrared and ultra-violet waves
– a new fungus, recently discovered, lives inside the damaged reactor of Chernobyl, feeding on gamma ray!
– bats and other creatures can emit ultrasound
– there are animals that can emit electromagnetic waves, i.e. visible light
So there’s no fundamental reason to assume that a biological organism could not emit in the radio signal frequency.
If it didn’t happen so far, that doesn’t mean that it won’t happen in the future. It’s all a matter of whether there’s an incentive, i.e. would the development of such an ability – which would be costly, in resources, provide a significant benefit for survival and procreation?
It might very well!
The objection to ESP is not that it is impossible for a living being to have electromagnetic communication skills, but that believers in ESP think that such faculties would be impossible to measure, i.e. NOT be of physical nature.
Basically, supporters of ESP postulate that there is something “extrasensorial”, quasi-religious, that allows human brains to communicate via channels that are not measurable by scientific methods. That is, of course ballyhoop.
From a site that has no religious bent…. *Fossil record = Zero Evolution*
It also exposes the absurd evolutionary idea that the Dinosaurs were proto-birds, as clearly *Birds already existed as distinct creatures in their own right* … at the same time as dinosaurs….
http://www.livescience.com/55211-dinosaur-age-feathers-caught-in-amber.html
And most of all, she never would happen to be cast as the Black Widow in the Marvel
Cinematic Universe.
Evolution is an untested hypothesis.
At best it is like cosmology, another hypothesis which tries to make sense of the unknown through a rationale explanation.
This is akin to a primitive tribe trying to make sense of a flying machine which they have not seen before.
However sophisticated Neo Darwinist evolution has become, it is a religion, or belief system. It is the ignorant trying to explain away the unknown.
Lee Spetner writes in his book ” The Evolution Revolution: Why Thinking People are Rethinking the Theory of Evolution”:
“Neo-Darwinian Theory (NDT) is counterintuitive, and is acknowledged as such even by its supporters. All present-day life is assumed to have evolved from some primitive cell, and that cell was supposed to have formed itself from simple chemicals. Nobody seems to know how that cell came to be, but almost all biologists think they understand fairly well how evolution proceeded from that cell to all the life we see today. There appears to be a vast amount of information contained in trees, fish, elephants, and people. Where did this information come from? It is said to have come from random mutations and natural selection. How can that work? Natural selection is supposed to be the magic that makes evolution happen, but all natural selection does is eliminate the less adaptive organisms and allow the more adaptive ones to survive and proliferate. Where do those more adaptive ones come from? Apparently, that’s what random mutations are supposed to accomplish. So the information buildup required by Common Descent can come only from random mutations. That means that the buildup of information is a matter of chance. At each step of the evolutionary process, a mutation has to have occurred that grants the organism an advantage. The big question is: Is that reasonable? To see if it is, some people (including me) have made calculations of the probability of mutations building information. We really don’t have all the data we need to make this calculation. But even if we make some conservative assumptions and give the benefit of all doubts to the Darwinian side, such calculations demonstrate that Common Descent is not reasonable (Spetner 1997). The Darwinists, however, do not accept these calculations as conclusive — they suggest alternative scenarios that might make the probabilities larger. In his book Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe addressed the unreasonableness of Darwinian evolution. He described some biological systems as what he called “irreducibly complex.” By that he meant that these systems are composed of several critical components in such a way that the system cannot work unless all those components are in place. He then argued that the system could not evolve one small part at a time, because natural selection could not work on less than the whole system. Here, too, the Darwinians countered by suggesting scenarios in which natural selection might work, but again, the Darwinian scenarios are purely hypothetical. Because the Darwinians can invent scenarios to address any challenge to their theory, they are not convinced by attempts to show that neo-Darwinian evolution cannot work. Therefore, I have concluded that it would be more productive to challenge them to show that it could work — challenge them to do more than just offer vague scenarios of how their theory might work, but to show by calculation that the probability of it working is reasonably high. This is a challenge they must meet to establish their theory on a scientific basis. They have never met this challenge and they cannot. They cannot show that the events they claim to have produced Common Descent have a high enough probability to justify their claim. Their inability to establish the theory of Common Descent means that Common Descent is not an established theory. This is one of the main points of this book. I cannot overemphasize the importance of probability calculations. NDT is not like Newton’s theory of mechanics, whose equations describe the motion of a physical body under a force. Nor is it like Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, whose equations describe the effects of electric and magnetic fields on electric charges. These theories are checked against experiment by solving those equations. NDT describes evolution as the result of random mutations that may or may not yield an adaptive phenotype. These are chance events. The theory can be checked only by calculating the probabilities of the required events to see if they are reasonably large. The theory has not been shown to have passed this test and is therefore not a valid theory. Whatever evidence is given for Common Descent is circumstantial. Circumstantial evidence cannot stand alone. It needs to have a theory tying the evidence to the conclusion. But instead of a theory, imaginary scenarios are offered to suggest how evolution might work. No calculations of probabilities are made. The fossil evidence for evolution consists of examples of extinct organisms that are assembled into an order showing a transition from one form to another. That evidence, however, is a long way from a convincing case for evolution. Because these organisms are extinct, there is no way to show what is actually claimed — namely, that the transitions were effected by a long sequence of small changes. The theory claims, for example, that some ape-like creature, because of a mutation in a sex cell, gave birth to a slightly more human form. Then one of that creature’s descendants did the same, and so on. This chain continued for a few million years until finally a full human was born. This sequence has not been observed, yet that is the claim of Common Descent. Real evidence of Common Descent is nonexistent.”
Lee Spetner. The Evolution Revolution: Why Thinking People are Rethinking the Theory of Evolution (Kindle Locations 36-73). The Judaica Press, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Darwinists only know how to pull sophisticated explanation rabbits out of a hat. That is the only skill they possess!
Thanks for your comment.
It’s long… I’ll have to take some time to consider it