FacebookTwitter
Hatrack River Forum   
my profile login | search | faq | forum home

  next oldest topic   next newest topic
» Hatrack River Forum » Active Forums » Books, Films, Food and Culture » New Human Genome Discoveries Argue Against Evolution (Page 5)

  This topic comprises 6 pages: 1  2  3  4  5  6   
Author Topic: New Human Genome Discoveries Argue Against Evolution
Javert
Member
Member # 3076

 - posted      Profile for Javert   Email Javert         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Originally posted by Tresopax:
Do those things make a difference in the question of whether a choice can still be a choice if someone knows how you will choose beforehand?

I should think so. Don't you? If I created you and knew everything you would ever do, but had the ability to make you so you did different things, then I have chosen to make you in this specific way. Thus making it my responsibility that you have behaved that way.
Posts: 3852 | Registered: Feb 2002  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
TomDavidson
Member
Member # 124

 - posted      Profile for TomDavidson   Email TomDavidson         Edit/Delete Post 
Or, heck, even if I didn't make you, if I made everything else while knowing that you would do X because of your reactions to everything else I made, I'm still responsible for your doing X.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Geoffrey Card
Member
Member # 1062

 - posted      Profile for Geoffrey Card   Email Geoffrey Card         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Except the father in this scenario did not create his son in the same way that it is suggested that God created Adam in Genesis. Nor is the father in the hypothetical omnipotent. He learned over time the things his son would or wouldn't do in certain scenarios. He did not know everything his son would do before his son was born, and have the ability to alter any or all of it at a whim.
I agree that this is a limit on free will. I don't personally believe in that model of the creation of mankind, but in that scenario, it is very difficult to take free will seriously. Instead, in this scenario, all your choices are either (1) predetermined by God, or (2) selected at random by God, which isn't a lot better.

Now, if this scenario turns out to be accurate, then whatever [Smile] But for me, it would be difficult to accept this scenario while also accepting the idea that God punishes people for their choices, which He either predetermined or randomized.

Which may be why many sects that believe in this model ALSO stray away from the importance of personal choices, leaning instead towards ideas like "salvation by grace alone" and "salvation of the elect", which rely far less upon individual free will (but which I also find personally uncompelling).

As far as God's power to control the environment of a choice goes, I think when addressing that question, you have to not treat certain acts as having universal moral values. IE, killing someone in one scenario, with one motivation, is different from killing a different person under different circumstances. So as the environment changes, the value of the choice changes at the same time, so God doesn't "make someone good" or "make someone bad" by altering the contexts of their choices — both are graded on a curve.

But as far as the efficacy of free will goes in this scenario, I don't think it's hindered much. Sure, a given chooser will make different choices as the circumstances of the choice change. But HOW a particular chooser's decisions change with circumstances is what defines a free individual. IE, you can define an individual by the change in circumstances REQUIRED to get them to make a particular choice. The circumstances that would induce you to kill are different from the circumstances that would induce me to kill, and that difference is part of what makes us unique individuals with free will.

Posts: 2048 | Registered: Jul 2000  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Aris Katsaris
Member
Member # 4596

 - posted      Profile for Aris Katsaris   Email Aris Katsaris         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Name for me one "clear prophecy" (as you said) of the Bible that has been flatly wrong.
"Matthew 16:27 For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels: and then will he render to every man according to his works. 28 Amen I say to you, there are some of them that stand here, that shall not taste death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."

Here Jesus seems to clearly proclaim his second coming will be during that generation.

Posts: 676 | Registered: Feb 2003  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Tarrsk
Member
Member # 332

 - posted      Profile for Tarrsk           Edit/Delete Post 
No, you see, Jesus meant "tasting death" in a literal fashion, like eating the dead. As long as at least one of the apostles failed to become a cannibal, the prophecy is still accurate! LOGIC.

(The followup implication here is that the apostles will all get to experience the rich flavor of delicious man-flesh once Jesus returns.)

Posts: 1321 | Registered: Sep 1999  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Samprimary
Member
Member # 8561

 - posted      Profile for Samprimary   Email Samprimary         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Originally posted by Aris Katsaris:
quote:
Name for me one "clear prophecy" (as you said) of the Bible that has been flatly wrong.
"Matthew 16:27 For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels: and then will he render to every man according to his works. 28 Amen I say to you, there are some of them that stand here, that shall not taste death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."

Here Jesus seems to clearly proclaim his second coming will be during that generation.

Maybe the response to this is to claim that you can't say for sure that there aren't immortals lurking about, Canticle for Leibowitz style, waiting for christ's return.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Bella Bee
Member
Member # 7027

 - posted      Profile for Bella Bee   Email Bella Bee         Edit/Delete Post 
As Spike once said:

'If every vampire who said he was at the crucifixion was actually there, it would've been like Woodstock.'

Posts: 1528 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Geraine
Member
Member # 9913

 - posted      Profile for Geraine   Email Geraine         Edit/Delete Post 
As far as prophecies and visions of the future, I don't really see it as God being a time traveller that knows exactly what choices we will make. Most visions are general. They usually don't focus on one person in general. There are very few prophecies that do. I don't think he somehow projected the exact future into the retinas of a prophet. He gave them an idea, or maybe a dream.

Then gain, maybe he simply brought a 3D projector and a Blue Ray player and played a copy of The Stand. Who knows.

Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Chris Bridges
Member
Member # 1138

 - posted      Profile for Chris Bridges   Email Chris Bridges         Edit/Delete Post 
Make sure you interpret the prophecy in a manner that is not based merely on subjective imagination, but is based on sound scholarship--including allowing the Bible alone to define all its symbols and terms; ...

The part you're continually missing is that using only one source is not sound scholarship. You cannot use the Bible as your only source for proving the accuracy of the Bible.

Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Ron Lambert
Member
Member # 2872

 - posted      Profile for Ron Lambert   Email Ron Lambert         Edit/Delete Post 
For Bible prophecy you can Chris, because there is no competition. Nothing else claims to be inspired by the Creator, Who alone can know the future.

For Bible history, you can compare to the findings of archaeology, paleontology, etc. But after enough instances where some experts have authoritatively proclaimed that the Bible was wrong--such as about the existence of the Hittites--and then subsequent further exploration and discovery have verified the Bible's account and repudiated all the others (such as proving that the Hittites did exist, and they existed where and when the Bible said they did), eventually you begin to get the idea that the Bible has been proven right and every contrary opinion proven wrong so many times, that it would be prudent to assume the Bible is probably right. Another example: Experts used to claim that the Bible accounts of Nebuchadnezzar's importance, that he "built" Babylon up to its greatest peak of glory, were false. But then further excavation and analysis in the ruins of Babylon turned up myriads of bricks, all with Nebuchadnezzar's name inscribed on them.

It gets to the point where you have to realize that you must view with skepticism anyone who comes along and contradicts anything in the Bible. You need to ask "Why is this person claiming this? Is it really based on valid evidence, or is it really a product of personal bias, what the person wants to believe, or wants NOT to believe?

In the Bible accounts of creation and the global flood, there are many things that many experts today authoritatively denounce. But creationist scientists have answered all those claims point by point, and have presented solid, concrete evidence that is best explained by the Biblical creation and flood accounts, and clearly is contrary or at least very hard to explain from an evolutionary or uniformitarian perspective.

Here the fight goes on. There is a lot of inertia, a lot of long-held bias, that has been built up, enforced by people in positions of power who have shown themselves willing to threaten the tenure of, or the granting of government grants to, even the most qualified scientists who openly ask if Intelligent Design might actually have something to it.

But this battle is not over. Evolution and uniformitarian geology will eventually lose, because they are not true. Eventually this will be proven to the point where no one will deny it anymore. In the meantime, it is prudent to back the already many-times proven winner, the Bible.

Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Mucus
Member
Member # 9735

 - posted      Profile for Mucus           Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
Nothing else claims to be inspired by the Creator ...

Meanwhile
quote:
Qurʾān, (Arabic: “Recitation”) also spelled Quran and Koran , the sacred scripture of Islam and, for all Muslims, the very word of God, revealed through the agency of the archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad.

Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Bella Bee
Member
Member # 7027

 - posted      Profile for Bella Bee   Email Bella Bee         Edit/Delete Post 
You know, just because some historically based stories (in what, in the Old Testament, is also very much the history book of a people as well as a holy book) turn out to be true - and honestly, I really love it when that happens - doesn't mean that everything in the story, and everything related to the story, is also true.

A lot of people assumed that Troy probably never existed until people started excavating sites which suggest that it's likely that it did. Doesn't mean that the events described in The Odyssey can now be assumed to be completely accurate.

And what about Aris' prophecy point?

Posts: 1528 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
CT
Member
Member # 8342

 - posted      Profile for CT           Edit/Delete Post 
Down the road, there is the Book of Mormon, purported to be revealed to Joseph Smith by way of golden tablets delivered by an angel.

And at another ranch,

quote:
According to Hindu tradition, the Vedas are apauruṣeya "not of human agency",[3] are supposed to have been directly revealed, and thus are called śruti ("what is heard").[4][5]

[3] Apte, pp. 109f. has "not of the authorship of man, of divine origin"
[4] Apte 1965, p. 887
[5] Müller 1891, pp. 17–18


Posts: 831 | Registered: Jul 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Blayne Bradley
unregistered


 - posted            Edit/Delete Post 
quote:

The Information Challenge

By Richard Dawkins

In September 1997, I allowed an Australian film crew into my house in Oxford without realising that their purpose was creationist propaganda. In the course of a suspiciously amateurish interview, they issued a truculent challenge to me to “give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome.” It is the kind of question only a creationist would ask in that way, and it was at this point I tumbled to the fact that I had been duped into granting an interview to creationists — a thing I normally don’t do, for good reasons. In my anger I refused to discuss the question further, and told them to stop the camera. However, I eventually withdrew my peremptory termination of the interview as a whole. This was solely because they pleaded with me that they had come all the way from Australia specifically in order to interview me. Even if this was a considerable exaggeration, it seemed, on reflection, ungenerous to tear up the legal release form and throw them out. I therefore relented.

My generosity was rewarded in a fashion that anyone familiar with fundamentalist tactics might have predicted. When I eventually saw the film a year later 1, I found that it had been edited to give the false impression that I was incapable of answering the question about information content 2. In fairness, this may not have been quite as intentionally deceitful as it sounds. You have to understand that these people really believe that their question cannot be answered! Pathetic as it sounds, their entire journey from Australia seems to have been a quest to film an evolutionist failing to answer it.

With hindsight — given that I had been suckered into admitting them into my house in the first place — it might have been wiser simply to answer the question. But I like to be understood whenever I open my mouth — I have a horror of blinding people with science — and this was not a question that could be answered in a soundbite. First you first have to explain the technical meaning of “information”. Then the relevance to evolution, too, is complicated — not really difficult but it takes time. Rather than engage now in further recriminations and disputes about exactly what happened at the time of the interview (for, to be fair, I should say that the Australian producer’s memory of events seems to differ from mine), I shall try to redress the matter now in constructive fashion by answering the original question, the “Information Challenge”, at adequate length — the sort of length you can achieve in a proper article.
Information

The technical definition of “information” was introduced by the American engineer Claude Shannon in 1948. An employee of the Bell Telephone Company, Shannon was concerned to measure information as an economic commodity. It is costly to send messages along a telephone line. Much of what passes in a message is not information: it is redundant. You could save money by recoding the message to remove the redundancy. Redundancy was a second technical term introduced by Shannon, as the inverse of information. Both definitions were mathematical, but we can convey Shannon’s intuitive meaning in words.

Redundancy is any part of a message that is not informative, either because the recipient already knows it (is not surprised by it) or because it duplicates other parts of the message. In the sentence “Rover is a poodle dog”, the word “dog” is redundant because “poodle” already tells us that Rover is a dog. An economical telegram would omit it, thereby increasing the informative proportion of the message. “Arr JFK Fri pm pls mt BA Cncrd flt” carries the same information as the much longer, but more redundant, “I’ll be arriving at John F Kennedy airport on Friday evening; please meet the British Airways Concorde flight”. Obviously the brief, telegraphic message is cheaper to send (although the recipient may have to work harder to decipher it — redundancy has its virtues if we forget economics). Shannon wanted to find a mathematical way to capture the idea that any message could be broken into the information (which is worth paying for), the redundancy (which can, with economic advantage, be deleted from the message because, in effect, it can be reconstructed by the recipient) and the noise (which is just random rubbish).

“It rained in Oxford every day this week” carries relatively little information, because the receiver is not surprised by it. On the other hand, “It rained in the Sahara desert every day this week” would be a message with high information content, well worth paying extra to send. Shannon wanted to capture this sense of information content as “surprise value”. It is related to the other sense — “that which is not duplicated in other parts of the message” — because repetitions lose their power to surprise. Note that Shannon’s definition of the quantity of information is independent of whether it is true. The measure he came up with was ingenious and intuitively satisfying. Let’s estimate, he suggested, the receiver’s ignorance or uncertainty before receiving the message, and then compare it with the receiver’s remaining ignorance after receiving the message. The quantity of ignorance-reduction is the information content. Shannon’s unit of information is the bit, short for “binary digit”. One bit is defined as the amount of information needed to halve the receiver’s prior uncertainty, however great that prior uncertainty was (mathematical readers will notice that the bit is, therefore, a logarithmic measure).

In practice, you first have to find a way of measuring the prior uncertainty — that which is reduced by the information when it comes. For particular kinds of simple message, this is easily done in terms of probabilities. An expectant father watches the Caesarian birth of his child through a window into the operating theatre. He can’t see any details, so a nurse has agreed to hold up a pink card if it is a girl, blue for a boy. How much information is conveyed when, say, the nurse flourishes the pink card to the delighted father? The answer is one bit — the prior uncertainty is halved. The father knows that a baby of some kind has been born, so his uncertainty amounts to just two possibilities — boy and girl — and they are (for purposes of this discussion) equal. The pink card halves the father’s prior uncertainty from two possibilities to one (girl). If there’d been no pink card but a doctor had walked out of the operating theatre, shook the father’s hand and said “Congratulations old chap, I’m delighted to be the first to tell you that you have a daughter”, the information conveyed by the 17 word message would still be only one bit.
Computer information

Computer information is held in a sequence of noughts and ones. There are only two possibilities, so each 0 or 1 can hold one bit. The memory capacity of a computer, or the storage capacity of a disc or tape, is often measured in bits, and this is the total number of 0s or 1s that it can hold. For some purposes, more convenient units of measurement are the byte (8 bits), the kilobyte (1000 bytes or 8000 bits), the megabyte (a million bytes or 8 million bits) or the gigabyte (1000 million bytes or 8000 million bits). Notice that these figures refer to the total available capacity. This is the maximum quantity of information that the device is capable of storing. The actual amount of information stored is something else. The capacity of my hard disc happens to be 4.2 gigabytes. Of this, about 1.4 gigabytes are actually being used to store data at present. But even this is not the true information content of the disc in Shannon’s sense. The true information content is smaller, because the information could be more economically stored. You can get some idea of the true information content by using one of those ingenious compression programs like “Stuffit”. Stuffit looks for redundancy in the sequence of 0s and 1s, and removes a hefty proportion of it by recoding — stripping out internal predictability. Maximum information content would be achieved (probably never in practice) only if every 1 or 0 surprised us equally. Before data is transmitted in bulk around the Internet, it is routinely compressed to reduce redundancy.

That’s good economics. But on the other hand it is also a good idea to keep some redundancy in messages, to help correct errors. In a message that is totally free of redundancy, after there’s been an error there is no means of reconstructing what was intended. Computer codes often incorporate deliberately redundant “parity bits” to aid in error detection. DNA, too, has various error-correcting procedures which depend upon redundancy. When I come on to talk of genomes, I’ll return to the three-way distinction between total information capacity, information capacity actually used, and true information content.

It was Shannon’s insight that information of any kind, no matter what it means, no matter whether it is true or false, and no matter by what physical medium it is carried, can be measured in bits, and is translatable into any other medium of information. The great biologist J B S Haldane used Shannon’s theory to compute the number of bits of information conveyed by a worker bee to her hivemates when she “dances” the location of a food source (about 3 bits to tell about the direction of the food and another 3 bits for the distance of the food). In the same units, I recently calculated that I’d need to set aside 120 megabits of laptop computer memory to store the triumphal opening chords of Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (the “2001” theme) which I wanted to play in the middle of a lecture about evolution. Shannon’s economics enable you to calculate how much modem time it’ll cost you to e-mail the complete text of a book to a publisher in another land. Fifty years after Shannon, the idea of information as a commodity, as measurable and interconvertible as money or energy, has come into its own.
DNA information

DNA carries information in a very computer-like way, and we can measure the genome’s capacity in bits too, if we wish. DNA doesn’t use a binary code, but a quaternary one. Whereas the unit of information in the computer is a 1 or a 0, the unit in DNA can be T, A, C or G. If I tell you that a particular location in a DNA sequence is a T, how much information is conveyed from me to you? Begin by measuring the prior uncertainty. How many possibilities are open before the message “T” arrives? Four. How many possibilities remain after it has arrived? One. So you might think the information transferred is four bits, but actually it is two. Here’s why (assuming that the four letters are equally probable, like the four suits in a pack of cards). Remember that Shannon’s metric is concerned with the most economical way of conveying the message. Think of it as the number of yes/no questions that you’d have to ask in order to narrow down to certainty, from an initial uncertainty of four possibilities, assuming that you planned your questions in the most economical way. “Is the mystery letter before D in the alphabet?” No. That narrows it down to T or G, and now we need only one more question to clinch it. So, by this method of measuring, each “letter” of the DNA has an information capacity of 2 bits.

Whenever prior uncertainty of recipient can be expressed as a number of equiprobable alternatives N, the information content of a message which narrows those alternatives down to one is log2N (the power to which 2 must be raised in order to yield the number of alternatives N). If you pick a card, any card, from a normal pack, a statement of the identity of the card carries log252, or 5.7 bits of information. In other words, given a large number of guessing games, it would take 5.7 yes/no questions on average to guess the card, provided the questions are asked in the most economical way. The first two questions might establish the suit. (Is it red? Is it a diamond?) the remaining three or four questions would successively divide and conquer the suit (is it a 7 or higher? etc.), finally homing in on the chosen card. When the prior uncertainty is some mixture of alternatives that are not equiprobable, Shannon’s formula becomes a slightly more elaborate weighted average, but it is essentially similar. By the way, Shannon’s weighted average is the same formula as physicists have used, since the nineteenth century, for entropy. The point has interesting implications but I shall not pursue them here.
Information and evolution

That’s enough background on information theory. It is a theory which has long held a fascination for me, and I have used it in several of my research papers over the years. Let’s now think how we might use it to ask whether the information content of genomes increases in evolution. First, recall the three way distinction between total information capacity, the capacity that is actually used, and the true information content when stored in the most economical way possible. The total information capacity of the human genome is measured in gigabits. That of the common gut bacterium Escherichia coli is measured in megabits. We, like all other animals, are descended from an ancestor which, were it available for our study today, we’d classify as a bacterium. So perhaps, during the billions of years of evolution since that ancestor lived, the information capacity of our genome has gone up about three orders of magnitude (powers of ten) — about a thousandfold. This is satisfyingly plausible and comforting to human dignity. Should human dignity feel wounded, then, by the fact that the crested newt, Triturus cristatus, has a genome capacity estimated at 40 gigabits, an order of magnitude larger than the human genome? No, because, in any case, most of the capacity of the genome of any animal is not used to store useful information. There are many nonfunctional pseudogenes (see below) and lots of repetitive nonsense, useful for forensic detectives but not translated into protein in the living cells. The crested newt has a bigger “hard disc” than we have, but since the great bulk of both our hard discs is unused, we needn’t feel insulted. Related species of newt have much smaller genomes. Why the Creator should have played fast and loose with the genome sizes of newts in such a capricious way is a problem that creationists might like to ponder. From an evolutionary point of view the explanation is simple (see The Selfish Gene pp 44 – 45 and p 275 in the Second Edition).
Gene duplication

Evidently the total information capacity of genomes is very variable across the living kingdoms, and it must have changed greatly in evolution, presumably in both directions. Losses of genetic material are called deletions. New genes arise through various kinds of duplication. This is well illustrated by haemoglobin, the complex protein molecule that transports oxygen in the blood.

Human adult haemoglobin is actually a composite of four protein chains called globins, knotted around each other. Their detailed sequences show that the four globin chains are closely related to each other, but they are not identical. Two of them are called alpha globins (each a chain of 141 amino acids), and two are beta globins (each a chain of 146 amino acids). The genes coding for the alpha globins are on chromosome 11; those coding for the beta globins are on chromosome 16. On each of these chromosomes, there is a cluster of globin genes in a row, interspersed with some junk DNA. The alpha cluster, on Chromosome 11, contains seven globin genes. Four of these are pseudogenes, versions of alpha disabled by faults in their sequence and not translated into proteins. Two are true alpha globins, used in the adult. The final one is called zeta and is used only in embryos. Similarly the beta cluster, on chromosome 16, has six genes, some of which are disabled, and one of which is used only in the embryo. Adult haemoglobin, as we’ve seen contains two alpha and two beta chains.

Never mind all this complexity. Here’s the fascinating point. Careful letter-by-letter analysis shows that these different kinds of globin genes are literally cousins of each other, literally members of a family. But these distant cousins still coexist inside our own genome, and that of all vertebrates. On a the scale of whole organism, the vertebrates are our cousins too. The tree of vertebrate evolution is the family tree we are all familiar with, its branch-points representing speciation events — the splitting of species into pairs of daughter species. But there is another family tree occupying the same timescale, whose branches represent not speciation events but gene duplication events within genomes.

The dozen or so different globins inside you are descended from an ancient globin gene which, in a remote ancestor who lived about half a billion years ago, duplicated, after which both copies stayed in the genome. There were then two copies of it, in different parts of the genome of all descendant animals. One copy was destined to give rise to the alpha cluster (on what would eventually become Chromosome 11 in our genome), the other to the beta cluster (on Chromosome 16). As the aeons passed, there were further duplications (and doubtless some deletions as well). Around 400 million years ago the ancestral alpha gene duplicated again, but this time the two copies remained near neighbours of each other, in a cluster on the same chromosome. One of them was destined to become the zeta of our embryos, the other became the alpha globin genes of adult humans (other branches gave rise to the nonfunctional pseudogenes I mentioned). It was a similar story along the beta branch of the family, but with duplications at other moments in geological history.

Now here’s an equally fascinating point. Given that the split between the alpha cluster and the beta cluster took place 500 million years ago, it will of course not be just our human genomes that show the split — possess alpha genes in a different part of the genome from beta genes. We should see the same within-genome split if we look at any other mammals, at birds, reptiles, amphibians and bony fish, for our common ancestor with all of them lived less than 500 million years ago. Wherever it has been investigated, this expectation has proved correct. Our greatest hope of finding a vertebrate that does not share with us the ancient alpha/beta split would be a jawless fish like a lamprey, for they are our most remote cousins among surviving vertebrates; they are the only surviving vertebrates whose common ancestor with the rest of the vertebrates is sufficiently ancient that it could have predated the alpha/beta split. Sure enough, these jawless fishes are the only known vertebrates that lack the alpha/beta divide.

Gene duplication, within the genome, has a similar historic impact to species duplication (“speciation”) in phylogeny. It is responsible for gene diversity, in the same way as speciation is responsible for phyletic diversity. Beginning with a single universal ancestor, the magnificent diversity of life has come about through a series of branchings of new species, which eventually gave rise to the major branches of the living kingdoms and the hundreds of millions of separate species that have graced the earth. A similar series of branchings, but this time within genomes — gene duplications — has spawned the large and diverse population of clusters of genes that constitutes the modern genome.

The story of the globins is just one among many. Gene duplications and deletions have occurred from time to time throughout genomes. It is by these, and similar means, that genome sizes can increase in evolution. But remember the distinction between the total capacity of the whole genome, and the capacity of the portion that is actually used. Recall that not all the globin genes are actually used. Some of them, like theta in the alpha cluster of globin genes, are pseudogenes, recognizably kin to functional genes in the same genomes, but never actually translated into the action language of protein. What is true of globins is true of most other genes. Genomes are littered with nonfunctional pseudogenes, faulty duplicates of functional genes that do nothing, while their functional cousins (the word doesn’t even need scare quotes) get on with their business in a different part of the same genome. And there’s lots more DNA that doesn’t even deserve the name pseudogene. It, too, is derived by duplication, but not duplication of functional genes. It consists of multiple copies of junk, “tandem repeats”, and other nonsense which may be useful for forensic detectives but which doesn’t seem to be used in the body itself.

Once again, creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA.
Information in the genome

Can we measure the information capacity of that portion of the genome which is actually used? We can at least estimate it. In the case of the human genome it is about 2% — considerably less than the proportion of my hard disc that I have ever used since I bought it. Presumably the equivalent figure for the crested newt is even smaller, but I don’t know if it has been measured. In any case, we mustn’t run away with a chaunvinistic idea that the human genome somehow ought to have the largest DNA database because we are so wonderful. The great evolutionary biologist George C Williams has pointed out that animals with complicated life cycles need to code for the development of all stages in the life cycle, but they only have one genome with which to do so. A butterfly’s genome has to hold the complete information needed for building a caterpillar as well as a butterfly. A sheep liver fluke has six distinct stages in its life cycle, each specialised for a different way of life. We shouldn’t feel too insulted if liver flukes turned out to have bigger genomes than we have (actually they don’t).

Remember, too, that even the total capacity of genome that is actually used is still not the same thing as the true information content in Shannon’s sense. The true information content is what’s left when the redundancy has been compressed out of the message, by the theoretical equivalent of Stuffit. There are even some viruses which seem to use a kind of Stuffit-like compression. They make use of the fact that the RNA (not DNA in these viruses, as it happens, but the principle is the same) code is read in triplets. There is a “frame” which moves along the RNA sequence, reading off three letters at a time. Obviously, under normal conditions, if the frame starts reading in the wrong place (as in a so-called frame-shift mutation), it makes total nonsense: the “triplets” that it reads are out of step with the meaningful ones. But these splendid viruses actually exploit frame-shifted reading. They get two messages for the price of one, by having a completely different message embedded in the very same series of letters when read frame-shifted. In principle you could even get three messages for the price of one, but I don’t know whether there are any examples.
Information in the body

It is one thing to estimate the total information capacity of a genome, and the amount of the genome that is actually used, but it’s harder to estimate its true information content in the Shannon sense. The best we can do is probably to forget about the genome itself and look at its product, the “phenotype”, the working body of the animal or plant itself. In 1951, J W S Pringle, who later became my Professor at Oxford, suggested using a Shannon-type information measure to estimate “complexity”. Pringle wanted to express complexity mathematically in bits, but I have long found the following verbal form helpful in explaining his idea to students.

We have an intuitive sense that a lobster, say, is more complex (more “advanced”, some might even say more “highly evolved”) than another animal, perhaps a millipede. Can we measure something in order to confirm or deny our intuition? Without literally turning it into bits, we can make an approximate estimation of the information contents of the two bodies as follows. Imagine writing a book describing the lobster. Now write another book describing the millipede down to the same level of detail. Divide the word-count in one book by the word-count in the other, and you have an approximate estimate of the relative information content of lobster and millipede. It is important to specify that both books describe their respective animals “down to the same level of detail”. Obviously if we describe the millipede down to cellular detail, but stick to gross anatomical features in the case of the lobster, the millipede would come out ahead.

But if we do the test fairly, I’ll bet the lobster book would come out longer than the millipede book. It’s a simple plausibility argument, as follows. Both animals are made up of segments — modules of bodily architecture that are fundamentally similar to each other, arranged fore-and-aft like the trucks of a train. The millipede’s segments are mostly identical to each other. The lobster’s segments, though following the same basic plan (each with a nervous ganglion, a pair of appendages, and so on) are mostly different from each other. The millipede book would consist of one chapter describing a typical segment, followed by the phrase “Repeat N times” where N is the number of segments. The lobster book would need a different chapter for each segment. This isn’t quite fair on the millipede, whose front and rear end segments are a bit different from the rest. But I’d still bet that, if anyone bothered to do the experiment, the estimate of lobster information content would come out substantially greater than the estimate of millipede information content.

It’s not of direct evolutionary interest to compare a lobster with a millipede in this way, because nobody thinks lobsters evolved from millipedes. Obviously no modern animal evolved from any other modern animal. Instead, any pair of modern animals had a last common ancestor which lived at some (in principle) discoverable moment in geological history. Almost all of evolution happened way back in the past, which makes it hard to study details. But we can use the “length of book” thought-experiment to agree upon what it would mean to ask the question whether information content increases over evolution, if only we had ancestral animals to look at.

The answer in practice is complicated and controversial, all bound up with a vigorous debate over whether evolution is, in general, progressive. I am one of those associated with a limited form of yes answer. My colleague Stephen Jay Gould tends towards a no answer. I don’t think anybody would deny that, by any method of measuring — whether bodily information content, total information capacity of genome, capacity of genome actually used, or true (“Stuffit compressed”) information content of genome — there has been a broad overall trend towards increased information content during the course of human evolution from our remote bacterial ancestors. People might disagree, however, over two important questions: first, whether such a trend is to be found in all, or a majority of evolutionary lineages (for example parasite evolution often shows a trend towards decreasing bodily complexity, because parasites are better off being simple); second, whether, even in lineages where there is a clear overall trend over the very long term, it is bucked by so many reversals and re-reversals in the shorter term as to undermine the very idea of progress. This is not the place to resolve this interesting controversy. There are distinguished biologists with good arguments on both sides.

Supporters of “intelligent design” guiding evolution, by the way, should be deeply committed to the view that information content increases during evolution. Even if the information comes from God, perhaps especially if it does, it should surely increase, and the increase should presumably show itself in the genome. Unless, of course — for anything goes in such addle-brained theorising — God works his evolutionary miracles by nongenetic means.

Perhaps the main lesson we should learn from Pringle is that the information content of a biological system is another name for its complexity. Therefore the creationist challenge with which we began is tantamount to the standard challenge to explain how biological complexity can evolve from simpler antecedents, one that I have devoted three books to answering (The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable) and I do not propose to repeat their contents here. The “information challenge” turns out to be none other than our old friend: “How could something as complex as an eye evolve?” It is just dressed up in fancy mathematical language — perhaps in an attempt to bamboozle. Or perhaps those who ask it have already bamboozled themselves, and don’t realise that it is the same old — and thoroughly answered — question.
The Genetic Book of the Dead

Let me turn, finally, to another way of looking at whether the information content of genomes increases in evolution. We now switch from the broad sweep of evolutionary history to the minutiae of natural selection. Natural selection itself, when you think about it, is a narrowing down from a wide initial field of possible alternatives, to the narrower field of the alternatives actually chosen. Random genetic error (mutation), sexual recombination and migratory mixing, all provide a wide field of genetic variation: the available alternatives. Mutation is not an increase in true information content, rather the reverse, for mutation, in the Shannon analogy, contributes to increasing the prior uncertainty. But now we come to natural selection, which reduces the “prior uncertainty” and therefore, in Shannon’s sense, contributes information to the gene pool. In every generation, natural selection removes the less successful genes from the gene pool, so the remaining gene pool is a narrower subset. The narrowing is nonrandom, in the direction of improvement, where improvement is defined, in the Darwinian way, as improvement in fitness to survive and reproduce. Of course the total range of variation is topped up again in every generation by new mutation and other kinds of variation. But it still remains true that natural selection is a narrowing down from an initially wider field of possibilities, including mostly unsuccessful ones, to a narrower field of successful ones. This is analogous to the definition of information with which we began: information is what enables the narrowing down from prior uncertainty (the initial range of possibilities) to later certainty (the “successful” choice among the prior probabilities). According to this analogy, natural selection is by definition a process whereby information is fed into the gene pool of the next generation.

If natural selection feeds information into gene pools, what is the information about? It is about how to survive. Strictly it is about how to survive and reproduce, in the conditions that prevailed when previous generations were alive. To the extent that present day conditions are different from ancestral conditions, the ancestral genetic advice will be wrong. In extreme cases, the species may then go extinct. To the extent that conditions for the present generation are not too different from conditions for past generations, the information fed into present-day genomes from past generations is helpful information. Information from the ancestral past can be seen as a manual for surviving in the present: a family bible of ancestral “advice” on how to survive today. We need only a little poetic licence to say that the information fed into modern genomes by natural selection is actually information about ancient environments in which ancestors survived.

This idea of information fed from ancestral generations into descendant gene pools is one of the themes of my new book, Unweaving the Rainbow. It takes a whole chapter, “The Genetic Book of the Dead”, to develop the notion, so I won’t repeat it here except to say two things. First, it is the whole gene pool of the species as a whole, not the genome of any particular individual, which is best seen as the recipient of the ancestral information about how to survive. The genomes of particular individuals are random samples of the current gene pool, randomised by sexual recombination. Second, we are privileged to “intercept” the information if we wish, and “read” an animal’s body, or even its genes, as a coded description of ancestral worlds. To quote from Unweaving the Rainbow: “And isn’t it an arresting thought? We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.”

1 The producers never deigned to send me a copy: I completely forgot about it until an American colleague called it to my attention.

2 See Barry Williams (1998): “Creationist Deception Exposed”, The Skeptic 18, 3, pp 7 – 10, for an account of how my long pause (trying to decide whether to throw them out) was made to look like hesitant inability to answer the question, followed by an apparently evasive answer to a completely different question.


IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Tresopax
Member
Member # 1063

 - posted      Profile for Tresopax           Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
I should think so. Don't you? If I created you and knew everything you would ever do, but had the ability to make you so you did different things, then I have chosen to make you in this specific way. Thus making it my responsibility that you have behaved that way.
I agree that you'd be responsible. But just because you are responsible, that doesn't mean I'm not also responsible or that I didn't choose to do it. I think we'd both be responsible for my choice.

I see the cookie situation as different only in degree. Sure, God is truly certain of how I will behave, whereas the father is only pretty certain of how his child will behave. And sure, God completely created me, whereas a father just helped shape his child. But in both cases its still one party effectively manipulating the other to make them choose a certain thing.

If I tempted a child to eat a cookie, knowing that if I did so then he'd eat the cookie, I think I'm responsible for him eating it. But again, that doesn't absolve him of his responsibility and it doesn't mean he didn't choose to do it. Multiple people can be responsible for the same outcome.

I see the whole free will debate as being motivated by a misguided attempt to rationalize the problem of evil. Yes, I am responsible for bad choices I make. But if someone created me knowing exactly what choices I will make, then they are also responsible. Thus, you can't simply use "free will" to make the problem of evil go away.

[ January 22, 2011, 01:25 AM: Message edited by: Tresopax ]

Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Chris Bridges
Member
Member # 1138

 - posted      Profile for Chris Bridges   Email Chris Bridges         Edit/Delete Post 
For Bible prophecy you can Chris, because there is no competition. Nothing else claims to be inspired by the Creator, Who alone can know the future.

A. Every religious text claims to be inspired by the Creator, doesn't it? Such as the ones mentioned above?
B. Since I am also not starting from the premise that a Creator exists at all, this is still not much of a compelling argument to use on me.

All you've done is add another layer of circular logic onto the previous one: The accuracy of the Bible can be proven by the events detailed in the Bible, which is true because it was inspired by God, and we know this because the Bible tells us so.

Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
TomDavidson
Member
Member # 124

 - posted      Profile for TomDavidson   Email TomDavidson         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
But again, that doesn't absolve him of his responsibility and it doesn't mean he didn't choose to do it. Multiple people can be responsible for the same outcome.
Is it morally sound for God to punish people when He shares direct responsibility for their actions? Who punishes God?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Tresopax
Member
Member # 1063

 - posted      Profile for Tresopax           Edit/Delete Post 
Well, I'll put it this way - if a father sets up his son to eat a cookie he's not supposed to, the father certainly can punish his son for making the wrong decision, even if he knew his son would do it. Perhaps the father deserves punishment too for causing his son to do the wrong thing, but that depends on what purpose you think the punishment has. If punishment is morally required to right wrongdoings, then the father probably deserves punishment. But if punishment is just an educational tool to teach right from wrong, then the father may not need punishment - in fact, if the father provoked the wrong in order to teach his son something, then its possible the wrong is actually part of a greater good.

I generally believe that if God is omniscient then he must also be perfectly good (because someone who knows everything must know what is good and that it is good to be good), which means that if He has set us up to do wrong things then those wrongs must be necessary for some greater good. I tend to believe a world with evil and wrong choices is more meaningful than one with no evil where everyone always makes the right choice. And that's not because making all the right choices would take away our free will - I don't think it would.

Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Rakeesh
Member
Member # 2001

 - posted      Profile for Rakeesh   Email Rakeesh         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Make sure you interpret the prophecy in a manner that is not based merely on subjective imagination, but is based on sound scholarship--including allowing the Bible alone to define all its symbols and terms; allowing the context to indicate what time in history the prophecy is to be applied to; and being careful to avoid taking literally what is figurative, and avoid taking as figurative what is literal--using reasonable methods of literary analysis, including checking to see how the term or symbol is used elsewhere in Scripture.
As Chris says, this is simply bad scholarship, bad reasoning, bad logic, and it's certainly not 'objective' as you have claimed elsewhere.

quote:
For Bible prophecy you can Chris, because there is no competition. Nothing else claims to be inspired by the Creator, Who alone can know the future.
OK, this is another lie. There are plenty of texts, claimed by plenty of people, that purport to be inspired by God. There are even plenty of versions of the Bible, Ron. It's impossible that you don't know that, so it's a knowing lie you just told.

ETA: And, y'know, this is yet another area you've been proven factually wrong on, Ron. I look forward with pleasure to your slight backpedaling and pretending this conversation never happened.

I also think your remarks on this subject - no other religion's texts claim to be inspired by the Creator - are an attack on other religions, which would be true if anyone said it, I believe, since it's a pretty obvious falsehood. But it's especially true coming from you, given the enormous amount of weight you place on such things.

It'd be one thing to say, "I don't believe they're inspired by God." But you go further than that. They don't even claim to be inspired by God. Who on Earth do you think you are, anyway, Ron? Something for you to consider: for all the holiness and credence and moral weight you ascribe to the Bible, how much of that is supposed to shine from you, exactly?

[ January 22, 2011, 08:06 AM: Message edited by: Rakeesh ]

Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Samprimary
Member
Member # 8561

 - posted      Profile for Samprimary   Email Samprimary         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
For Bible prophecy you can Chris, because there is no competition. Nothing else claims to be inspired by the Creator, Who alone can know the future.

So, considering that this statement is in no way true, would you be willing to admit that you can't actually tautologically claim the bible as a solid authority? I mean, "nothing else claims to be inspired by the Creator" is pretty much one of the most untrue things you've said, and that's really saying something.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Ron Lambert
Member
Member # 2872

 - posted      Profile for Ron Lambert   Email Ron Lambert         Edit/Delete Post 
There is a lot here to comment on, and I need to leave for church in 20 minutes. I will try to give more complete answers later.

The Bible goes a lot further in claiming to be the Word of God. Does the Koran anywhere claim to be the Word of God? What angel "gave" the Koran to Mohammed--Gabriel, or Lucifer? As I understand it, much of the Koran is cribbed from the Old Testament. From what I have heard from scholars who have studied the Koran, Moslems accept much of Old Testament history--their main point of divergence is in rejecting the New Testament claims that Jesus Christ was more than just a prophet, He is the Eternal, Self-Existent God, who said "Before Abraham was, I AM." (John 8:58) The Koran also does not contain anything equivalent to the Ten Commandments. I asked this question directly of some Moslem scholars I met, and they said emphatically that the Koran does not have this concept of Divine Law. It does have something called "Sharia" law, but those Moslem scholars did not view that as being the same. Apparently they are more on the level of the regulations that were to govern the kingdom of Israel

The Bible many times claims to be directly inspired by God, and He is quoted many times. The Bible also gives the text of the Ten Commandments, which God Himself wrote with His own finger on tablets of stone.

Not to be overly repetitive, but the Bible is validated by prophecies that are accurate, prophecies we can compare to history and see they were given to prophets by Someone who can see the future as clearly as the past. I have never heard of any comparable prophecies in any other purported "holy book."

As far as the different versions of the Bible--if you would read even a few of them, you would see that they do not contradict each other on any significant point (except for a few that are paraphrases, not literal translations, thus are bound to be influenced by the views of the paraphraser). In a few cases the meaning of the original text is obscure, so it is good to consult a number of different versions. I have 12 versions on my Bible, including the Textus Receptus Greek version, and the Nestle-Alland Greek version.

There are the books of the Apocrypha--that Protestant scholars choose not to include in the Bible, and Catholic scholars almost decided the same. The problem with the Apocrypha is that there is serious question about their authorship, they contain statements that directly contradict the overall teaching of the rest of the Bible (such as hinting at reincarnation), and no other Bible writers refer to them or quote from them. Jesus and the Apostles quoted the Old Testament frequently (it has been estimated that one third of the New Testament is quotation from the Old Testament), and they did not quote from the Apocryphal books. That is not to say the Apocrypha is not useful--they probably contain some things that are true. I think they are probably correct where they say that it was Jeremiah who led a group of faithful Levites in carrying away the Ark of the Covenant and hiding it in a cave, before the Babylonians conquered Judah and looted and destroyed the Temple.

More later. It's about time for me to leave.

[ January 22, 2011, 09:09 AM: Message edited by: Ron Lambert ]

Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Samprimary
Member
Member # 8561

 - posted      Profile for Samprimary   Email Samprimary         Edit/Delete Post 
So you're moving the goalposts: first, it's 'nothing else claims to be inspired by the Creator,' now you're talking about how it's the Word of God. For your information, though, the bible does not have the monopoly on being considered the Word of God. Yes, the Koran claims to be the word of god (see sura 85:21-22 as well as the clarifying statements of muslim clerics all over the world).

This doesn't change the whole thing you're going to predictably try to weasel away from, where you said something which was clearly wrong and used it to reinforce and/or justify your tautological reasoning.

That, and you seem stuck on this whole idea of that "hey, MY book makes the more outlandish claims; that's how you know it's true!" If book A claims that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is all-seeing all-knowing god of the entire universe and book B claims that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is merely a prophet tied into larger universal forces, this is not evidence that book A is obviously more credible and true by default for virtue of its claims, any more so than we can say that judaism is obviously more provably true because of how it makes the claim of mass revelation.

That said though:

quote:
I have never heard of any comparable prophecies in any other purported "holy book."
Of course you haven't! You're a notoriously selective reader and interpreter!
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Bella Bee
Member
Member # 7027

 - posted      Profile for Bella Bee   Email Bella Bee         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Jesus and the Apostles quoted the Old Testament frequently (it has been estimated that one third of the New Testament is quotation from the Old Testament)
So your argument that the New Testament is genuine is that much of it comes from the Old Testament, and your argument that the Qurʾān is not genuine is, in part, this:

quote:
As I understand it, much of the Koran is cribbed from the Old Testament.
That's... interesting. Also interesting is that in your 'holy books dictated by angels' issue, you didn't mention the Book of Mormon. What angel, in your humble opinion, delivered that one?
Now prove it. Oh, wait. You can't.

As for this:

quote:
The Bible also gives the text of the Ten Commandments, which God Himself wrote with His own finger on tablets of stone.
You can also find these in the Torah, among about 600 other holy laws given by God. If they're so important to you, Ron, why aren't you Jewish?
Posts: 1528 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Samprimary
Member
Member # 8561

 - posted      Profile for Samprimary   Email Samprimary         Edit/Delete Post 
I really don't think Ron understands why people call him a liar and I don't think he understands why. He'll say something that is untrue or even contradictory and can even be shown this plainly multiple times, but if he persists in claiming it it's really not because he's lying in the sense of intentionally deceiving. He really believes he is clarifying things with evidently true statements and that disagreement is absolutely because of a 'refusal to consider points with an open mind' or an 'unwillingness to face the truth,' even when he's wrong on basic and fundamental levels or is committing multiple and egregious fallacies.

Yeah, I know, it might not be nicer to confront the fact that he is actively and pervasively deluded and irrational, but I want to retire the whole 'ron is a liar' meme.

Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Rakeesh
Member
Member # 2001

 - posted      Profile for Rakeesh   Email Rakeesh         Edit/Delete Post 
I don't grant that premise, Samprimary. I simply don't believe it's possible for someone with even a passing knowledge of multiple religions to be unaware that they claim to be inspired by God.

The way he so frequently refuses to address direct questions, backpedals without acknowledging the misstep, etc., bottom line is he knows some of the thongs he refuses to admit, making him a liar. Why he is lying and changing goalposts is another question.

Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Samprimary
Member
Member # 8561

 - posted      Profile for Samprimary   Email Samprimary         Edit/Delete Post 
Apply that to pretty much anything else ron does in terms of his all-consuming tendencies!

"I simply don't believe it's possible for someone with even a passing knowledge of biology to <X>"

He really thinks he's coming at this from an intellectually honest standpoint.

The only thing which is left to wonder is whether or not he admits to himself when he's being evasive, given the regularity of when he will drop a previous tact in response to questions that he has no real answer for.

Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Chris Bridges
Member
Member # 1138

 - posted      Profile for Chris Bridges   Email Chris Bridges         Edit/Delete Post 
The Bible goes a lot further in claiming to be the Word of God. Does the Koran anywhere claim to be the Word of God? What angel "gave" the Koran to Mohammed--Gabriel, or Lucifer?

Muslims believe the Qur'an was revealed to Muhammed by the angel Gabriel and that it is the word-for-word copy of God's final revelation. Sura 85:21-22: "Nay this is a glorious Qur'an, (inscribed) in a tablet preserved." Every letter and every word is believed to be free from any human influence. And I'm sure you knew this, since you invoked Gabriel as a potential source. Nice way to get that "is it from Satan?" dig in there, though.

As I understand it, much of the Koran is cribbed from the Old Testament.

Much of the Old Testament is history, and Muslims share that history, so yes. The Qur'an purports to build on the Old Testament in much the same way the New Testament purports to build on the Old Testament.

The Koran also does not contain anything equivalent to the Ten Commandments.

Not in a handy, bullet-point list, no. Each of the rules in the Ten Commandments is included in the Qur'an, however.

I asked this question directly of some Moslem scholars I met, and they said emphatically that the Koran does not have this concept of Divine Law. It does have something called "Sharia" law, but those Moslem scholars did not view that as being the same. Apparently they are more on the level of the regulations that were to govern the kingdom of Israel.

To be fair, I don't believe Judaism considers the Decalogue to be of more significance than the rest of Jewish law as it was handed down, either. And many Christian faiths have differing opinions as to the order, wording, number, and meaning. Even Jesus, when asked which ones to keep, mentioned only six of them. (Matthew 19:13-19)

The Bible many times claims to be directly inspired by God, and He is quoted many times.

Yes, it does. So? The Bible cannot be the only source to prove the accuracy of the Bible.

The Bible also gives the text of the Ten Commandments, which God Himself wrote with His own finger on tablets of stone.

The Bible also gives the text of the Ten Commandments, twice, in two slightly different versions, which the Bible says that God Himself wrote, but, as mentioned above, the Bible cannot be the only source to prove the accuracy of the Bible.

Not to be overly repetitive, but the Bible is validated by prophecies that are accurate, prophecies we can compare to history and see they were given to prophets by Someone who can see the future as clearly as the past. I have never heard of any comparable prophecies in any other purported "holy book."

Not to be overly repetitive, but the Bible contains many prophecies that have been dismissed as metaphor, possibly for their crime of not coming true. More religious texts with prophecy: see Bahá'í, The Book of the Hopi, Chen prophecy books, etc. None of them are as huge, self-consistent, or widespread as the Bible, granted, but none of them have had the time, the PR, or the many, many translators and interpreters endlessly working on them to make them so. Thousands of years of arguing over what those different prophecies mean don't help your case, either.

There are the books of the Apocrypha--that Protestant scholars choose not to include in the Bible, and Catholic scholars almost decided the same. The problem with the Apocrypha is that there is serious question about their authorship, they contain statements that directly contradict the overall teaching of the rest of the Bible (such as hinting at reincarnation), and no other Bible writers refer to them or quote from them.

Amazing how accurate the Bible is when you choose to leave out the stuff that doesn't work.

Jesus and the Apostles quoted the Old Testament frequently (it has been estimated that one third of the New Testament is quotation from the Old Testament), and they did not quote from the Apocryphal books.

Tell me, is every book in the Old Testament quoted from in the New somewhere? If not, why aren't those unquoted books considered apocryphal?

So now we have the Bible, which is utterly true in every particular because it tells us it is, and because it is the Word of God, which we know to be true because the Bible tells us that, and because it contains prophecy which is amazingly accurate except for the ones which those of us who believe in the accuracy of the Bible have decided are metaphorical or taken out of context, and because we decided to leave out those books with errors since they can't be part of the Bible if they have errors because the Bible is perfect, which we know because it has no errors in it.

Oddly, I'm still not convinced.

[ January 22, 2011, 01:42 PM: Message edited by: Chris Bridges ]

Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Ron Lambert
Member
Member # 2872

 - posted      Profile for Ron Lambert   Email Ron Lambert         Edit/Delete Post 
The New Testament writers quote from the Old Testament to prove their doctrines. They use it as Authority.

Let me address the prophecy of Jesus in Matthew 24:34: "Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place." (NKJV)

Many people have questioned this, including devout Christians. So I do not wish to convey the idea that anyone is stupid for wondering about this. But the answer is very simple, when you take things in context.

The problem is many people jump to conclusions about who is meant by the expression "this generation." They assume it means the generation of the people He is talking to. But this ignores the subject of His discourse. Jesus did not say, "You will not pass away," or "your generation will not pass away." He said "this generation will not pass away." Who was He referring to by "this generation"?

Throughout Matthew chapter 24, Jesus is answering the disciples' question about when would be the destruction of the temple and the end of the world (asked in v. 3). After saying things that relate mainly to the destruction of the temple (which took place in 70 A.D. when the Roman army overthrew Jerusalem), Jesus talked about the final end of the world, the time of His Second Coming.

First He warned them that there would be false prophets and false Christs, seeking to deceive the faithful. Then He gives the signs that Satan will not be permited to counterfeit. "For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so also will the coming of the Son of Man be." (Mat. 24:27; NKJV)

He tells them about a great tribulation that will come to all the world, the greatest tribulation of all time (v. 21). Then in vs. 29-31 He says: "Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other." (NKJV)

He gives a metaphorical comparison to the signs by which we know that Autumn is near (v. 33). He is saying that the signs He has given will indicate to us that His Second Coming is near. It is here that He says "this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place." (v. 34)

Jesus is talking about the generation that will see the signs of the end of the world. This is the generation that will not pass away until all the signs have been fulfilled and Jesus returns to earth to gather His saints. In other words, all the end-time final events will take place very rapidly--within the span of one generation.

A generation is typically taken as being about 20-22 years. So Jesus is saying that when the first of the signs of the end begin to appear, all the others will follow and His Second Coming will arrive sooner than 20-22 years. Maybe ten years. Maybe less. But one generation will witness all the signs and see His Second Coming.

I hope this is a satisfactory explanation. I feel that questions about Mat. 24:34 and their answer demonstrate the importance of the methods of sound Bible scholarship, which includes taking things in context--paying attention to the topic of a given discourse.

[ January 22, 2011, 03:01 PM: Message edited by: Ron Lambert ]

Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Ron Lambert
Member
Member # 2872

 - posted      Profile for Ron Lambert   Email Ron Lambert         Edit/Delete Post 
I will not reply to anyone who calls me a liar, or suggests that there is anyting factual that I do not admit to. I do not accept their opinions and assertions as factual, especially because they seem to be insincere, and exhibit hateful hostility and unfairness. Anyone who continues insisting on building a strawman and calling it me, can talk to his strawman. The conversation does not involve me.

If anyone wishes to nitpick and misconstrue my statement about the uniqueness of the Bible's claim to be the Word of God, then let me rephrase it to be clearer: The Bible is the only writing on earth that is verified as being the Word of God. It not only claims it, it proves it by providing proof that cannot be counterfeited--fulfilled prophecy relating to the outline of history over thousands of years, up to the end of time.

I did admit that I have never read the Koran. Nor have I read the Book of Mormon. But I have not heard from anyone who has, that these writings have 100% accurate prophecies of the future history of the world.

Chris, you said in part: "...and because we decided to leave out those books with errors since they can't be part of the Bible if they have errors...." I was referring to doctrinal errors, that contradict the overall teaching of the Bible. I don't recall any prophecies in the Apocrypha, so the way you stated this seems to be a red herring.

Again, if anyone thinks the prophecies of the Bible are not 100% accurate, then please give me a specific example. I will see if I can explain it in the same manner as I did the question about the meaning of Mat. 24:34.

Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Parkour
Member
Member # 12078

 - posted      Profile for Parkour           Edit/Delete Post 
Is there even a single person left on this forums who doesn't know by now that you won't own up to making untrue statements? Are you saying you want to not respond to anyone who corrects you?
Posts: 805 | Registered: Jun 2009  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Sean Monahan
Member
Member # 9334

 - posted      Profile for Sean Monahan   Email Sean Monahan         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
I will not reply to anyone who calls me a liar, or suggests that there is anyting factual that I do not admit to.

I have done neither of these things, and you will not respond to me.
Posts: 1080 | Registered: Apr 2006  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
TomDavidson
Member
Member # 124

 - posted      Profile for TomDavidson   Email TomDavidson         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Again, if anyone thinks the prophecies of the Bible are not 100% accurate, then please give me a specific example.
As I've said before, I will have this conversation with you once you can demonstrate to me that you know what an "objective fact" is, and how to recognize one.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
just_me
Member
Member # 3302

 - posted      Profile for just_me           Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
Again, if anyone thinks the prophecies of the Bible are not 100% accurate, then please give me a specific example. I will see if I can explain it in the same manner as I did the question about the meaning of Mat. 24:34.

But Ron, you DIDN'T explain it. You hand-waved it in EXACTLY the way everyone said you would.

They are not 100% accurate to an objective observer. No more than today's horoscope are, at least, in that they can be interpreted by someone looking at them in hindsight as meaning pretty much what they want them to mean.

Posts: 409 | Registered: Apr 2002  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Samprimary
Member
Member # 8561

 - posted      Profile for Samprimary   Email Samprimary         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
If anyone wishes to nitpick and misconstrue my statement about the uniqueness of the Bible's claim to be the Word of God, then let me rephrase it to be clearer: The Bible is the only writing on earth that is verified as being the Word of God. It not only claims it, it proves it by providing proof that cannot be counterfeited--fulfilled prophecy relating to the outline of history over thousands of years, up to the end of time.

There's no misconstruing going on. You said something completely different which was wrong, and now you're trying to avoid admitting that what you said was wrong.

Remember, what you said was that besides the Bible, nothing else claims to be inspired by the Creator. That was obviously untrue. Now you are making different claims 'to be clearer' and not even talking about your previous claims.

Care to address that?

Right now, you're just running from it.

Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Blayne Bradley
unregistered


 - posted            Edit/Delete Post 
Isn't there a scholar among us who can point out that under Jewish scripture Jesus is for sure not the Messiah? That he doesn't actually fufill all of the requirements and the Christians just copted out of it by saying there would be a second coming?
IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Ron Lambert
Member
Member # 2872

 - posted      Profile for Ron Lambert   Email Ron Lambert         Edit/Delete Post 
just_me, are you being honest and fair-minded when you deny my explanation of Mat. 24:34 was reasonable and completely in keeping with the context? If you call that mere "hand waving," then there is not much point in expecting you to have any willingness to think critically.

Blayne, it was the Jews who were confused. They confused the first coming of Christ with the second coming. There is even a third coming after the millennium when He comes to earth with the New Jerusalem to set up the throne of God on earth forever. (This is spoken of in Zechariah 14:4. At His second coming, Jesus' feet never touch the ground.) The Jews rejected their Messiah because He did not come in triumphal power, the way they wanted. Instead they got the suffering servant, and rejected Him.

The Apostle Peter states this about the focus of Old Testament Messianic prophecies: "Of this salvation the prophets have inquired and searched carefully, who prophesied of the grace that would come to you, searching what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ who was in them was indicating when He testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow."

Note what Peter says here: The prophets of the Old Testament wrote prophecies that pertained to the coming of the Messiah that would involve His suffering, and to the coming of the Messiah in glory. Two different comings to this world.

Also notice that Peter was saying the prophets did not themselves necessarily understand what they were prophesying, and they studied diligently the messages they had been given to try to understand.

Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Samprimary
Member
Member # 8561

 - posted      Profile for Samprimary   Email Samprimary         Edit/Delete Post 
Yo, I know you can read my posts. You're reading this right now, Ron. You can at least understand that we're pointing out that you said 'nothing else claims to be inspired by the Creator' and that you're not backing this up by switching to a completely different argument, a la 'only the bible is backed up by 100% accurate prophecy'
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Ron Lambert
Member
Member # 2872

 - posted      Profile for Ron Lambert   Email Ron Lambert         Edit/Delete Post 
OK Sam, just to confound you, I was wrong to say only the Bible claims to be the Word of God. What I meant to say--what I should have said, is the way I clarified it later, that the Bible is the only writing on earth in all history that backs up its claim to be the Word of God.
Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Blayne Bradley
unregistered


 - posted            Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Blayne, it was the Jews who were confused

That's going to go well.

*gets out popcorn* Where's Lisa?

IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Ron Lambert
Member
Member # 2872

 - posted      Profile for Ron Lambert   Email Ron Lambert         Edit/Delete Post 
Blayne, why should Lisa and I argue? I know she's Jewish, she knows I'm a Christian. The essential Christian position is the one I stated, that the Jews wanted the Messiah's coming in glory, and they rejected the Messiah who came as the Suffering Servant. So Jews are still looking for the first coming of the Messiah, and we are looking for His second coming. Lisa and I have discussed Bible scholarship issues before. I have learned a lot from her about how Jews see certain things, such as some prooftexts we Christians like to use. I appreciate Lisa's willingness to discuss such matters. I have encountered some Jews who literally run away when Jesus is mentioned. The fact that we both believe in the seventh-day Sabbath gives us a certain common ground, even though she has insisted that the Sabbath is only for the Jews.

But I think you are really just trying to get this thread even further off the track.

Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
just_me
Member
Member # 3302

 - posted      Profile for just_me           Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Originally posted by Ron Lambert:
just_me, are you being honest and fair-minded when you deny my explanation of Mat. 24:34 was reasonable and completely in keeping with the context? If you call that mere "hand waving," then there is not much point in expecting you to have any willingness to think critically.

Of course I'm being honest and fair-minded. I don't have my mind made up already - I don't know whether the bible is the word of god or not, I don't know whether its prophecies are true, I don't even know whether or not I believe in god anymore, and if I do whether I even like him.

On the other hand your explanation uses circular logic, post hoc reasoning and an assumption of infallibility as a basis. I guess you could say it's "keeping with the context" if the context is "how to cherry-pick what is literal and what is metaphorical to try and prove a point".

You must have a very odd definition of thinking critically... or at least a very non-standard one. I think it's pretty clear... here we have 2 people:

1) I don't know what's true, show me all the info and let me decide.

2) This document is infallible and anyone who doesn't agree with that is <insert negative classification here>

One of these two clearly meets the standard definition of fair-minded. (HINT - it's not the one you are!)

Posts: 409 | Registered: Apr 2002  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Rakeesh
Member
Member # 2001

 - posted      Profile for Rakeesh   Email Rakeesh         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
...what I should have said, is the way I clarified it later, that the Bible is the only writing on earth in all history that backs up its claim to be the Word of God.
Yeah, you didn't clarify it later, Ron. It wasn't a, "Whoops, I misspoke, lemme fix that," moment. But by all means, let's just file this alongside strong gun ownership n'stuff.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Ron Lambert
Member
Member # 2872

 - posted      Profile for Ron Lambert   Email Ron Lambert         Edit/Delete Post 
Rakeesh, I don't remember saying anything about strong gun ownership. That is not an issue that is of much importance to me. I don't own any guns. You probably have me confused with someone else. I think you have done that before. When you are in the habit of building strawmen, all strawmen look alike.

just_me, what is difficult for you about following the logic I presented? Instead of taking Jesus' statement out of context and jumping to the conclusion that when He said "this generation shall not pass" he was talking about the people He was addressing, what is really sound scholarship is to take His statement in context. As I showed in some detail, He was talking about the signs of the end of the world and His Second Coming. How could it be circular reasoning to point out what He was talking about, and that it was the generation that would see these signs who would see all of them fulfilled--in one generation? How is that not reasonable? How is that not objective and accurate scholarship? Just because it is different from the interpretation you may have heard before, does not mean there is anything wrong with it. In any exercise in critical thinking, you have to consider what alternatives would be reasonable. The most fundamental practice in analyzing anything, in any written work--Bible or secular--is to take things in context. Can you see that?

Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
just_me
Member
Member # 3302

 - posted      Profile for just_me           Edit/Delete Post 
I don't know.. "I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom." seems pretty clear to me that he was talking to THOSE WHO WERE STANDING THERE, not some hypothetical "future generation".

And you're right "Just because it is different from the interpretation you may have heard before, does not mean there is anything wrong with it. In any exercise in critical thinking, you have to consider what alternatives would be reasonable.", so you should admit it's reasonable that the alternative - this was a statement that didn't pan our - is also reasonable.

But you want us to admit the possibility of error despite the fact you are incapable of doing so??? Seems you aren't such a good thinker after all, huh?

Posts: 409 | Registered: Apr 2002  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Samprimary
Member
Member # 8561

 - posted      Profile for Samprimary   Email Samprimary         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
How is that not objective and accurate scholarship?
Tom has said you need to demonstrate you understand what an 'objective fact' is. I don't think you do!
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Rakeesh
Member
Member # 2001

 - posted      Profile for Rakeesh   Email Rakeesh         Edit/Delete Post 
quote:
Rakeesh, I don't remember saying anything about strong gun ownership. That is not an issue that is of much importance to me. I don't own any guns. You probably have me confused with someone else. I think you have done that before. When you are in the habit of building strawmen, all strawmen look alike.
Of course you don't, Ron. When comparing liberals and conservatives, you said that conservatives appreciated and responded to imagery that included strength, such as things that included that gun ownership.

I asked you about it at the time and, as you so often do, you didn't address the issue.

Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Ron Lambert
Member
Member # 2872

 - posted      Profile for Ron Lambert   Email Ron Lambert         Edit/Delete Post 
That is what you call a "strong gun ownership statement"?

If that is what you are referring to, then I did not reply because what you said made no sense. I thought you must be referring to some strong statement about gun ownership, which I have never made, other than simply to note the second amendment.

There is nothing wrong with what I did say. Conservatives do tend to identify more with imagery that suggests strength and confidence and individualism (including images such as those related to gun ownership), because that is what conservatism is about--empowering the individual.

How could you possibly take issue with that?

Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Rakeesh
Member
Member # 2001

 - posted      Profile for Rakeesh   Email Rakeesh         Edit/Delete Post 
What, now you want to talk about it? Just to be clear.

ETA: Here's the relevant quote:
quote:
One of the identifying characteristics of conservatives is their confidence in themselves, which means they favor individualism, freedom of choice, religious liberty, freedom from excessive taxation that punishes the productive and rewards the non-productive. Naturally they will gravitate to images involving personal strength, such as gun ownership, and use of gun-related metaphors. Liberals, by contrast, seem to be seduced by the siren song of socialism and the delusive appeal of the "nanny state." They would be glad to let someone else take care of them, let government take sole responsibility for the use of force, while the populace is all disarmed and padded with styrofoam and bubblewrap--provided at government expense (meaning at the expense of the productive).
Gun ownership takes exactly zero personal strength. In fact the point of firearms is that they allow people with very little personal strength to have lethal force in their hands, as opposed to requiring them to be big, muscular, and well-trained in things like archery or swordplay or horsemanship.

I objected to it because it was a profoundly silly statement for the reasons I described. Gun ownership doesn't require personal strength, it only suggests personal strength in much the same way that driving a red sports car makes one look cool. And that's aside from the absurd straw-manning of liberals.

quote:
Because it requires personal strength to own a firearm? I don't 'oppose' the Second Amendment, as I imagine you to mean that statement, Ron, but this is simply a ridiculous statement, equating strength with gun ownership. It takes zero strength at all to own a gun. All it takes is a few bucks and a very little government-deemed competence and a waiting period.
And that's my reply from the time, so you can't say I didn't 'make sense' back when it was a topic. You simply ignored it because you didn't have an answer, a very common response for you.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Ron Lambert
Member
Member # 2872

 - posted      Profile for Ron Lambert   Email Ron Lambert         Edit/Delete Post 
Rakeesh, I would appreciate it if you would cease making false accusations, such as that I did not answer you because I did not have any answers, and (you imply) somehow I must have lacked the courage to face up to your logic. Don't be ridiculous. I have never been afraid to answer anyone in this or any other forum.

I do not generally reply to statements that do not make sense. I don't waste my time that way. As I have pointed out to you, what you said was not clear.

Thanks for the clarification. You are merely indicating a philosophical difference. In a way, I can agree with you that gun ownership is not essential for the strong individualism that is the heart and foundation of the conservative view of the world. As I said, I do not own any guns. And I am sure there are a few liberals who own guns. But for many conservatives, gun ownership is associated with conservatism. Surely everyone can appreciate that it is more forceful to say something like "We're going to target that office-holder and blow him away," than it is to say "We are going to try to defeat that office-holder, and we feel very resolved and confident that we can." Metaphors enrich our language, and no one is going to give up their freedom of expression without a fight.

[ January 23, 2011, 10:15 PM: Message edited by: Ron Lambert ]

Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
Rakeesh
Member
Member # 2001

 - posted      Profile for Rakeesh   Email Rakeesh         Edit/Delete Post 
'Thanks for the clarification'? Ron, as I've stated, this clarification is something I said at the time of the initial conversation which you ignored.

If you didn't answer once, or twice, or even three times people's questions I wouldn't say you did it because you didn't have an answer. But you make such a habit of it, and it comes up so reliably on topics such as this, and breathing tubes, and 'no other religion's texts claim to be inspired by God'.

Those are just recent examples from the past week or two in which you either refused to acknowledge you'd made a mistake or absolutely had to be nailed down, in one case by an actual accredited professional in the field, and you still wouldn't just say, "Yeah, that was silly."

As for the courage thing, well, if you hadn't made a point more than once of bragging about your 'courage' in standing up to people in an online setting, perhaps I wouldn't call it into question when you so pointedly don't do so, Ron. If you're going to trumpet your courage in standing up to people, you have to actually stand up to them. I've been asking for a response from you on this for quite some time now, to no avail. You don't get to claim guts for it now.

quote:
In a way, I can agree with you that gun ownership is not essential for the strong individualism that is the heart and foundation of the conservative view of the world.
Again you're shifting the conversation. I took issue with your suggestion that gun ownership was a thing which indicated strength, and conservatives as the group more likely to participate in that were stronger than the lily-livered weak-kneed nanny-state bubble-wrap loving liberals. Gun ownership doesn't require strength, which is what you suggested. Liberals are not weaker than conservatives for not being appealed to by such imagery.

quote:
Surely everyone can appreciate that it is more forceful to say something like "We're going to target that office-holder and blow him away," than it is to say "We are going to try to defeat that office-holder, and we feel very resolved and confident that we can." Metaphors enrich our language, and no one is going to give up their freedom of expression without a fight.
It's more forceful, yes. Is it stronger? That depends on how you define strength. I look forward to a Christian perspective on defining strength as viewed through violence-laced language, by all means. Furthermore, no one is looking to take away anyone's freedom of expression. Challenging whether it is responsible to use violence-laced expression isn't the same thing as demanding they give up their freedom of expression. That's another false equivalency, and an attempt to change the discussion.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001  |  IP: Logged | Report this post to a Moderator
  This topic comprises 6 pages: 1  2  3  4  5  6   

   Close Topic   Feature Topic   Move Topic   Delete Topic next oldest topic   next newest topic
 - Printer-friendly view of this topic
Hop To:


Contact Us | Hatrack River Home Page

Copyright © 2008 Hatrack River Enterprises Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.


Powered by Infopop Corporation
UBB.classic™ 6.7.2