The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #158223   Message #3747295
Posted By: Bill D
29-Oct-15 - 09:29 AM
Thread Name: BS: The Pope in America
Subject: RE: BS: The Pope in America
Pete... among the ideas on which I have debated you is this one:

" As far as I know however, there has never been any system demonstrated for the information for any organism to become a creature of a different sort. "

I don't know how to put it so that you will actually see the point, but you are twisting the entire concept of what 'change' means in evolutionary theory. NO ONE is claiming anything like "ostriches turn into tigers" or any other silly combination. That IS a "straw man" fallacy. You are taking the way small changes DO happen, sometimes over a fairly short time sequence...(those finches in the Galapagos, for example)... and asserting that this DISproves general evolution. You are either ignoring what is actually being claimed, or misunderstanding it because your religious beliefs demand an entirely different set of premises.
*IF* you believe that a god created all species in 6 days, and decreed that 'change' would occur only as minor adaptive variation within a species, then you logically cannot comprehend what science has worked out from huge amounts of research!

Evolution is a bush, not a set of straight steps. Once a species has its own branch of that bush, it does NOT jump over to another branch. You are correct that bandicoots do not become giraffes.... but 'something' similar to bandicoots did change over the eons to become the bandicoots of today. Unfortunately, they did not die conveniently in some place so as to provide us with examples of the many intermediate steps.

We DO have some very clear intermediate steps that we CAN show to be links... even in the most important case.... us! DNA proves that that this happens, and because our species was endowed with lucky attributes like bipedal motion and larger brains, some of our ancestors did get buried in places like caves where we can study a few of the intermediate steps of the last 2-3 million years. We are still working out the exact ways our part of the bush branched, and probably never will find all the pieces... but we do have enough to inductively draw a decent picture of the basic bush.

Denying that picture because of a story that 'sounds' more uplifting is denying what our eyes and our evidence shows!

And when you describe the logical inferences in science as 'faith', you are committing the fallacy of equivocation on the word 'faith'... you are simply defining concepts to fit several unsubstantiated premises.