Mastermind wrote:James, you don't understand. I'm not saying Evolution is impossible. I'm saying it is extremely UNLIKELY without a creator.
But what are you basing this on? Equally unlikely probabilities?
Mastermind wrote:As for calculating odds, we can use statistics. Check today's rate of mutation and use those numbers to calculate how much it would take. We don't need the entire fossil record. In fact, we don't need it at all. The envyronment does not affect the rate of mutation. Statistically, it is always the same. The only thing that could possibly affect it is radiation, and when radiation comes into play, the odds fall greatly out of Naturalistic Evolution's favor, since radiation mutations are rarely beneficial (unless you watch too many mutant movies).
Could I ask what historical physical evidence is used to support these probabilities? Rocks alone? Also, what do you mean by "statistically it [rate of mutation] is always the same"? Just to be clear.
Mastermind wrote:We don't. We estimate. I wouldn't trust the fossil record for this, but rather physical emulation of the events instead. If a meteor hit, we can predict more or less what would happen, and estimate what % of the population would be affected.
Do you mean physical
simulation? I just cannot see how one could simulate an event which happened millions (billions?) of years ago with any confidence without referring to physical evidence. Do you have a reference for any of these simulations?
Jac3510 wrote:These aren't the numbers I am thinking--try less than 10 million, and maybe less than 3 million. In case you don't check the footnotes on that article. PBS agrees
Hi Jac. Sorry about that, my reference was from here:
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/cambrian/camb.html
I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that the explosion lasted for the whole Cambrian period. Although, I do not think that PBS agrees (with reasons.org) as it states 30 million years as the time range.
In any case, let me quote Dr. Rana from the apologetic article that you referenced:
"This event, known as the Cambrian “Explosion”, occurred over an
extremely narrow window of geological time (~5-10 million years based on western scientific literature and less than 3 million years based on Chinese scientific literature)."
Please refer to the emotive language in bold. When Rana says "extremely narrow window", surely he means
relatively narrow window. Then "geological time" - what has geological time got to do with anything!? Is he trying to imply that because millions of years is a
relatively small time in terms of the age of the Earth that this makes it a small absolute time? If you want to look at this objectively then you must deal in terms of
evolutionary or
biological time - but not geological. Could you clear this up for me?
Kurieuo wrote:Yet, it is true that Science can only examine what exists within nature, so perhaps the solution to the origin of life is out of the realm of Science? It has afterall failed miserably to provide a solution, as the Professor of Natural Philosophy Paul Davies (an agnostic) wrote in his book "The Fifth Miracle":
When I set out to write this book, I was convinced that science was close to wrapping up the mystery of life's origins… Having spent a year or two researching the field, I am now of the opinion that there remains a huge gulf in our understanding… This gulf in understanding is not merely ignorance about certain technical details, it is a major conceptual lacuna.
Could the "conceptual lacuna" equate to a jump similar to that of classical to quantum mechanics? Not necessarily science to theism.
James