Evidence For And Against Evolution

[leroy]

I was just talking about your initial claim about the 200 loci and the article you misrepresented.

Yes that my claim....


Ok, and you are asserting that this initial claim is wrong?

 

[tas8831]

In this case you went to alternative #4 "avoid direct answers"

Ah, so THAT is why you try to flim-flam me when I ask you to explain how many fixed, beneficial mutations the production of a specific trait 'requires' or how many such mutations are required to get a human from an ape ancestor or what traits the human ancestor had - you have no idea, and are just like flat earthers.
Cool admission.

My point is and has always been that two independent organisms can have the same mutation (s) in the same gene in the same loci....... Do you agree with this statement yes or no?......

Sometimes, but as I showed from the very paper you refer to and clam to have read that this is not always the case in convergence.

(This is called "genotipic Convergence")

Are you sure about that?

Honestly I don't understand why are you bringing up your semantic game on "convergent and identical evolution"

Because the words have different meanings?

The fact is that 2 organisms can have the same mutations in the same genes and in the same loci, weather if you want to call it "convergent evolution" or "identical evolution" is irrelevant. Feel free to use any word that you find convinient, but scientists call this" genotipic Convergence" so why not using that term?

Actually, scientists call it "genotypic convergence", and it is necessary for this to happen to produce similar phenotypes, as the paper you claim to have read indicates.


Why no direct answers to my replies to you?
Why the topic changes and such? Flat earther much?

 

[tas8831]

Ok so what exactly is your position

1. That you do not understand the material that you plagiarize very well.
2. That Haldane's Dilemma is moot.
3. That even if it were a real thing, it is still moot until you and your YEC heros can explain how many FBMs are 'required' to get a human from an apelike ancestor and how they figured that out.

1 that 500,000 benefitial mutations are enough to explain the differences between chimps and humans

You do not understand the things you plagiarize from YEC hacks who ALSO no not understand the material.

Let me show you how stupid Don Batten is - or at least how stupid he hopes his target audience is - from the nonsense you plagiarized:

"Imagine a population of 100,000 apes, the putative progenitors of humans. Suppose that a male and a female both received a mutation so beneficial that they out-survived everyone else; all the rest of the population died out—all 99,998 of them. And then the surviving pair had enough offspring to replenish the population in one generation. And this repeated every generation (every 20 years) for 10 million years, more than the supposed time since the last common ancestor of humans and apes. That would mean that 500,000 beneficial mutations could be added to the population (i.e., 10,000,000/20). Even with this completely unrealistic scenario, which maximizes evolutionary progress, only about 0.02% of the human genome could be generated."​

Did you notice the errors? The bait and switch? The stupidity? Of course not - let me point it out:

"Imagine a population of 100,000 apes, the putative progenitors of humans.
​

This population would also have contained the progenitors of chimps.

...That would mean that 500,000 beneficial mutations could be added to the population (i.e., 10,000,000/20). Even with this completely unrealistic scenario, which maximizes evolutionary progress, only about 0.02% of the human genome could be generated."​

Ummm... WHAT? Did he really just indicate that EVERY base pair locus in the human genome is beneficial? Or that the ENTIRE ancestral genome had to be 'replaced'? Or is he just a mendacious moron?
No, Donny Batten - beneficial mutations are NOT about "building genomes" - YEC John Sanford made the same basic claim, and he is (supposedly) a geneticist of some sort - why do even professional YECs lie and/or exhibit such incompetence?
Of course, this will be news to actual scientists who found that any 2 people differ by almost 1.6% at the nucleotide level.

So - other than some kind of mere assertion that that is 'too few', what is Donny's evidence?

Oh wait - it gets better:

"Haldane calculated that no more than 1,667 beneficial substitutions could have occurred in the supposed 10 million years since the last common ancestor of apes and humans. "​

Haldane did not such thing - that was pure electrician ReMine that 'calculated' that.

"This is a mere one substitution per 300 generations, on average. The origin of all that makes us uniquely human has to be explained within this limit."

IF, and only IF, Haldane's model is 100% true and accurate and universally applicable.
Let us recall what population geneticist Warren Ewens said - you know, stuff you totally ignored:

From the very start, my own calculations suggested to me that Haldane’s arguments were misguided and indeed erroneous, and that there is no practical upper limit to the rate at which substitutions can occur under Darwinian natural selection.​

Weird that you totally ignored that.

2 that there was enough time for more mutations?

You've not yet demonstrated what the number needs to be, so this question is mere begging the question and can be rightly ignored as nonsense.

It is a good opportunity to teach me a lesson and justify your claim

Weird that this notion did not occur to you when you make assertions to the contrary - did you ask the person you plagiarized from to teach you a lesson, too? Or did you just take Batten's nonsense at face value?

so please show that 5M years is enough time to account for the differences between chimps and humans trough the process of random mutations and natural selection ..... Perhaps I will end up learning how us someone suppose to justify claims

Why are you like this?

Why do you ask for explanations and such, and then totally ignore them, only to ask the same things again?

Oh - and why do you keep ignoring these:

1. What traits the human-chimp ancestor had in the first place
2. how many mutations would have been needed in order to get a distinctly human trait - say, upper limb proportion - from the LCA of humans and chimps
2a. How you discovered what the ancestral state was, seeing as we do not know what the exact ancestral taxon was
2b. how you determined the number of beneficial mutations needed to produce that change
etc.

Without answering those, Batten, ReMine, etc. literally have no argument.

 

[tas8831]

Ok, no parallel evolution on those particular 551 loci.

But the article describes 200 other loci where parallel substitutions occured

So you didn't read the paper.

Or you didn't understand it.

Or both.

You see, in the paper you pretend to have read, they looked at 200 loci in 20-odd taxa.

And in 551 loci (you know, 20 x 200 = 4000) among those taxa, there were no parallel substitutions. There were in others (totally oversimplified, but that paper is pretty dense!).

So your implicit assertion that such convergence is required and uncanny is wrong; and your overt claim that all 200 genes showed it was also wrong.

 

[tas8831]

I was just talking about your initial claim about the 200 loci and the article you misrepresented.
You then tried to make it about other stuff.

Isn't that annoying?

 

[Jose Fly]

And the thing is, the creationists position is so bankrupt that it's never based on what they believe, the Bible, but on what evolutionists believe, science. Their False Dichotomy argument being that "If I can show evolution is wrong then creationism wins by default." And, of course, it wouldn't.

.

Very good point. I guess that's why when people start threads trying to get creationists to make a positive case for creationism, they inevitably either turn into debates about evolution, or quickly fade away.

 

[Jose Fly]

Oh - and why do you keep ignoring these:

1. What traits the human-chimp ancestor had in the first place
2. how many mutations would have been needed in order to get a distinctly human trait - say, upper limb proportion - from the LCA of humans and chimps
2a. How you discovered what the ancestral state was, seeing as we do not know what the exact ancestral taxon was
2b. how you determined the number of beneficial mutations needed to produce that change
etc.

Without answering those, Batten, ReMine, etc. literally have no argument.

He ignores them for the same reason he ignores the fundamental point that humans did not evolve from chimps, which renders his challenge (describe how to get the human genome from the chimp genome) meaningless.....he has neither answers nor rebuttals. As is abundantly apparent, all he can do is go round the same circles ad nauseum.

 

[leroy]

So you didn't read the paper.

Or you didn't understand it.

Or both.

You see, in the paper you pretend to have read, they looked at 200 loci in 20-odd taxa.

And in 551 loci (you know, 20 x 200 = 4000) among those taxa, there were no parallel substitutions. There were in others (totally oversimplified, but that paper is pretty dense!).

So your implicit assertion that such convergence is required and uncanny is wrong; and your overt claim that all 200 genes showed it was also wrong.

aja

Yes the article is talking about 200 genes that “evolved” in the same way independently in dolphins and mammals , or in other words that dolphins and bats got the same mutations in the same genes multiple independent times

Systematic analyses of convergent sequence evolution in 805,053 amino acids within 2,326 orthologous coding gene sequences compared across 22 mammals (including four newly sequenced bat genomes) revealed signatures consistent with convergence in nearly 200 loci. Strong and significant support for convergence among bats and the bottlenose dolphin was seen in numerous genes linked to hearing or deafness, consistent with an involvement in echolocation. Unexpectedly, we also found convergence in many genes linked to vision: the convergent signal of many sensory genes was robustly correlated with the strength of natural selection. This first attempt to detect genome-wide convergent sequence evolution across divergent taxa reveals the phenomenon to be much more pervasive than previously recognized.

Genome-wide signatures of convergent evolution in echolocating mammals | Nature

The analysis revealed that 200 genes had independently changed in the same ways, Parker, Rossiter and their colleagues report today in Nature. Several of the genes are involved in hearing, but the others have no clear link to echolocation so far; some genes with shared changes are important for vision, but most have functions that are unknown.

“The biggest surprise,” says Frédéric Delsuc, a molecular phylogeneticist at Montpellier University in France, “is probably the extent to which convergent molecular evolution seems to be widespread in the genome."

Bats and Dolphins Evolved Echolocation in Same Way

 

[tas8831]

aja

Yes the article is talking about 200 genes that “evolved” in the same way independently in dolphins and mammals , or in other words that dolphins and bats got the same mutations in the same genes multiple independent times

Hilarious!

You are quoting the news blurb/interview referring to the paper, then linking to the paper which you did not read. I mean, you understand that, right? Pennisi is a pretty good writer (I met her once, way back in 2001), but her job is to catch people's attention.

Did you miss the part I quoted, or just not understand it?

1. What traits the human-chimp ancestor had in the first place
2. how many mutations would have been needed in order to get a distinctly human trait - say, upper limb proportion - from the LCA of humans and chimps
2a. How you discovered what the ancestral state was, seeing as we do not know what the exact ancestral taxon was
2b. how you determined the number of beneficial mutations needed to produce that change
etc.
If you do not know what traits the ancestor had, and you have no idea how many mutations would have been "required" to alter those traits into the traits modern humans have, how on earth can you or Donny Batten or electrician ReMine possibly declare that number - or ANY number of mutations - to be 'too few' and be taken seriously?

So - why did you link to the actual paper but quote THIS?

And what about, from where you quoted:

"However, he is critical about the way the analysis was done, suggesting that the approach found only indirect evidence of molecular convergence."

And, by the way - this is a bit ignorant:

"The discovery that molecular convergence can be widespread in a genome is "bittersweet,” Castoe adds. Biologists building family trees are likely being misled into suggesting that some organisms are closely related because genes and proteins are similar due to convergence, and not because the organisms had a recent common ancestor. No family trees are entirely safe from these misleading effects, Castoe says. “And we currently have no way to deal with this.”"​

This is nonsense, seeing as how phylogenies have been produced using mtDNA, which is largely irrelevant to phenotype convergence, and noncoding DNA. I know this because I have used lots of it in analyses.

 

[YoursTrue]

OK:
I forget now who originally posted these on this forum, but I keep it in my archives because it offers a nice 'linear' progression of testing a methodology and then applying it - I have posted this more than a dozen times for creationists who claim that there is no evidence for evolution:

The tested methodology:

Science 25 October 1991:
Vol. 254. no. 5031, pp. 554 - 558

Gene trees and the origins of inbred strains of mice

WR Atchley and WM Fitch

Extensive data on genetic divergence among 24 inbred strains of mice provide an opportunity to examine the concordance of gene trees and species trees, especially whether structured subsamples of loci give congruent estimates of phylogenetic relationships. Phylogenetic analyses of 144 separate loci reproduce almost exactly the known genealogical relationships among these 24 strains. Partitioning these loci into structured subsets representing loci coding for proteins, the immune system and endogenous viruses give incongruent phylogenetic results. The gene tree based on protein loci provides an accurate picture of the genealogical relationships among strains; however, gene trees based upon immune and viral data show significant deviations from known genealogical affinities.

======================

Science, Vol 255, Issue 5044, 589-592

Experimental phylogenetics: generation of a known phylogeny

DM Hillis, JJ Bull, ME White, MR Badgett, and IJ Molineux
Department of Zoology, University of Texas, Austin 78712.

Although methods of phylogenetic estimation are used routinely in comparative biology, direct tests of these methods are hampered by the lack of known phylogenies. Here a system based on serial propagation of bacteriophage T7 in the presence of a mutagen was used to create the first completely known phylogeny. Restriction-site maps of the terminal lineages were used to infer the evolutionary history of the experimental lines for comparison to the known history and actual ancestors. The five methods used to reconstruct branching pattern all predicted the correct topology but varied in their predictions of branch lengths; one method also predicts ancestral restriction maps and was found to be greater than 98 percent accurate.

==================================

Science, Vol 264, Issue 5159, 671-677

Application and accuracy of molecular phylogenies

DM Hillis, JP Huelsenbeck, and CW Cunningham
Department of Zoology, University of Texas, Austin 78712.

Molecular investigations of evolutionary history are being used to study subjects as diverse as the epidemiology of acquired immune deficiency syndrome and the origin of life. These studies depend on accurate estimates of phylogeny. The performance of methods of phylogenetic analysis can be assessed by numerical simulation studies and by the experimental evolution of organisms in controlled laboratory situations. Both kinds of assessment indicate that existing methods are effective at estimating phylogenies over a wide range of evolutionary conditions, especially if information about substitution bias is used to provide differential weightings for character transformations.​

We can hereby CONCLUDE that the results of an application of those methods have merit.


Application of the tested methodology:

Implications of natural selection in shaping 99.4% nonsynonymous DNA identity between humans and chimpanzees: Enlarging genus Homo

"Here we compare ≈90 kb of coding DNA nucleotide sequence from 97 human genes to their sequenced chimpanzee counterparts and to available sequenced gorilla, orangutan, and Old World monkey counterparts, and, on a more limited basis, to mouse. The nonsynonymous changes (functionally important), like synonymous changes (functionally much less important), show chimpanzees and humans to be most closely related, sharing 99.4% identity at nonsynonymous sites and 98.4% at synonymous sites. "



Mitochondrial Insertions into Primate Nuclear Genomes Suggest the Use of numts as a Tool for Phylogeny

"Moreover, numts identified in gorilla Supercontigs were used to test the human–chimp–gorilla trichotomy, yielding a high level of support for the sister relationship of human and chimpanzee."



A Molecular Phylogeny of Living Primates

"Once contentiously debated, the closest human relative of chimpanzee (Pan) within subfamily Homininae (Gorilla, Pan, Homo) is now generally undisputed. The branch forming the Homo andPanlineage apart from Gorilla is relatively short (node 73, 27 steps MP, 0 indels) compared with that of thePan genus (node 72, 91 steps MP, 2 indels) and suggests rapid speciation into the 3 genera occurred early in Homininae evolution. Based on 54 gene regions, Homo-Pan genetic distance range from 6.92 to 7.90×10−3 substitutions/site (P. paniscus and P. troglodytes, respectively), which is less than previous estimates based on large scale sequencing of specific regions such as chromosome 7[50]. "​

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONCLUSION:

This evidence lays out the results of employing a tested methodology on the question of Primate evolution. No molecular phylogenetic analyses have produced results that counter the results of these.

Feel free to provide evidence for magic creation of a man from dust 6-10,000 years ago.

Imagine a creationist that can make a single argument without PLAGIARIZING creationist hacks.
It has to be imagined, because I have yet to encounter a creationist that can actually make their own arguments without at least paraphrasing other creationists.

Tell us all - did you plagiarize that crap from THIS CLOWN, or THIS ONE, who quoted the other? Reported.

I am pretty sure that you do not understand any of that, so I will debunk it for the sake of those that can in a subsequent post.


Sure. Until there is a good reason to think otherwise - and no, ReMine and Batten's dopey slogans do not count.


Unless you are Donny Batten, YEC, those are NOT "your" numbers.
I guess you folks like to ignore that many held that Haldane's dilemma was never really a dilemma:

Warren Ewens interview:

AP: The mention of Crow brings up a further question I had. Were many biologists concerned about the problems of genetic load and mutation load at the time you began your graduate career?


WE: [...]
A second form of the load concept was introduced by the British biologist-mathematician Haldane who claimed, in 1957, that substitutions in a Darwinian evolutionary process could not proceed at more than a certain comparatively slow rate, because if they were to proceed at a faster rate, there would be an excessive “substitutional load.” Since Haldane was so famous, that concept attracted a lot of attention. In particular, Crow and Kimura made various substitutional load calculations around 1960, that is at about that time that I was becoming interested in genetics.
Perhaps the only disagreement I ever had with Crow concerned the substitutional load, because I never thought that the calculations concerning this load, which he and others carried out, were appropriate. From the very start, my own calculations suggested to me that Haldane’s arguments were misguided and indeed erroneous, and that there is no practical upper limit to the rate at which substitutions can occur under Darwinian natural selection.​

I already explained the problem with that dopey argument you plagiarized - you are just ignoring, like most dishonest creationists do.

First, Donny gets the argument wrong.
Second, he sets up a strawman scenario.
Third, he doesn't seem to understand population genetics.
Fourth, he did not address the questions I asked you, such that his strawman even had hypothetical merit:[/COLOR]

1. What traits the human-chimp ancestor had in the first place
2. how many mutations would have been needed in order to get a distinctly human trait - say, upper limb proportion - from the LCA of humans and chimps
2a. How you discovered what the ancestral state was, seeing as we do not know what the exact ancestral taxon was
2b. how you determined the number of beneficial mutations needed to produce that change
etc.
​

If you do not know what traits the ancestor had, and you have no idea how many mutations would have been "required" top alter those traits into the traits modern humans have, how on earth can you or Donny Batten or electrician ReMine possibly declare that number - or ANY number of mutations - to be 'too few' and be taken seriously?

It is clear to me that some things happen. By that I mean that bacteria can change without divine intervention. They just do. That type of change is allowed by God. But he did not cause things like the Zika virus. Those things happen by themselves. And such deformities will be eliminated by God some day.

 

[YoursTrue]

No, I said it is the only scientific explanation for NH. I never said anything about it being "better than God did it", which again is impossible since common ancestry falls within the category of "things God can do".


I'll repeat this one more time, and if you don't get it this time around we can just finish. Gods, by definition, can do absolutely everything. Therefore, there cannot be an alternative explanation to "God did it". Therefore, it is impossible to provide an alternative to "God did it", which renders the question of it being better or worse moot.

First of all, your definition of God or gods is definitely not true. Various religions and people don't always have the same belief in God or gods, and what their gods c an or cannot do, so to say 'Gods' can do anything is not necessarily true. First you have to know which god you're speaking of.

 

[YoursTrue]

Hilarious!

You are quoting the news blurb/interview referring to the paper, then linking to the paper which you did not read.

Did you miss the part I quoted, or just not understand it?

1. What traits the human-chimp ancestor had in the first place
2. how many mutations would have been needed in order to get a distinctly human trait - say, upper limb proportion - from the LCA of humans and chimps
2a. How you discovered what the ancestral state was, seeing as we do not know what the exact ancestral taxon was
2b. how you determined the number of beneficial mutations needed to produce that change
etc.
If you do not know what traits the ancestor had, and you have no idea how many mutations would have been "required" to alter those traits into the traits modern humans have, how on earth can you or Donny Batten or electrician ReMine possibly declare that number - or ANY number of mutations - to be 'too few' and be taken seriously?

So - why did you link to the actual paper but quote THIS?

And what about, from where you quoted:

"However, he is critical about the way the analysis was done, suggesting that the approach found only indirect evidence of molecular convergence."

And, by the way - this is a bit ignorant:

"The discovery that molecular convergence can be widespread in a genome is "bittersweet,” Castoe adds. Biologists building family trees are likely being misled into suggesting that some organisms are closely related because genes and proteins are similar due to convergence, and not because the organisms had a recent common ancestor. No family trees are entirely safe from these misleading effects, Castoe says. “And we currently have no way to deal with this.”"​

This is nonsense, seeing as how phylogenies have been produced using mtDNA, which is largely irrelevant to phenotype convergence, and noncoding DNA. I know this because I have used lots of it in analyses.

Ok here's what I was wondering about. How do scientists know that 98-99% DNA is the same between chimpanzees and homo sapiens? And please don't tell me it's because they analyzed it. Who analyzed the genes and how did they compare and what 2% or so are different from chimp to human?

 

[tas8831]

It is clear to me that some things happen. By that I mean that bacteria can change without divine intervention. They just do. That type of change is allowed by God. But he did not cause things like the Zika virus. Those things happen by themselves. And such deformities will be eliminated by God some day.

So cool.I eagerly await reading your evidence for any of that.

 

[tas8831]

Ok here's what I was wondering about. How do scientists know that 98-99% DNA is the same between chimpanzees and homo sapiens? And please don't tell me it's because they analyzed it. Who analyzed the genes and how did they compare and what 2% or so are different from chimp to human?

Umm...

Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome

The main findings include:

Single-nucleotide substitutions occur at a mean rate of 1.23% between copies of the human and chimpanzee genome, with 1.06% or less corresponding to fixed divergence between the species.
​

Plus lots and lots of analyses using lesser amounts of data.
It also depends on exactly what one is comparing - genes tend to show a higher similarity than noncoding regions.
However, there is a clear trend in terms of decreasing similarity the 'farther away' you go - so, gorilla is a few percent less similar, orangutan a few percent less, etc., just as hypotheses of descent imply they should.
More important than mere similarity, though, is the extend of shared, unique mutations.
That is the sort of analysis that was discussed in those papers I cited.

 

[ecco]

There are many deep springs under the top soil. I can only figure, but I wasn't there to make sure.

You really missed the gist of my post. Was that an intentional duck and dodge?

Let's simplify and try again...
Did a couple of continental plates shift naturally
-or-
Did a couple of continental plates shift intentionally

to cause a depression that filled with 1180 cubic miles of water and came to be called Lake Michigan?

 

[ecco]

I do maintain, however, that there are deep springs that are still around, and they were unleashed during the Deluge. I also believe some mountains were pushed higher than they were before the Flood.

When did your worldwide flood occur? 4000 years ago? Are you saying that you believe that Mt. Everest and other miles high mountain ranges grew from a few hundreds of feet to 29,000 feet in 4000 years? If so you need to show a mechanism that explains the sudden cause of the growth, the mechanism for the growth and the mechanism that caused the growth to stop.

You should be aware that science has accounted for these things taking place over millions (not 4000) years.

Just as Jesus and the Christian writers spoke of prophecies also. Yet the transmitted document called the Bible, has essentially (yes, I mean essentially) remained the same throughout the centuries and millenia.

Unchanging? Really?

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that it took hundreds of years to even decide which books to include and which books to discard? Don't you know these things?

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of versions of the Bible despite the fact that each book was carefully copied from a previous version? Don't you know these things?

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that Martin Luther made very many substantial changes to scripture? Don't you know these things? Do you even know who Martin Luther is?

And the important thing is that it was directed to the descendants of Abraham as well as others, but within a specific confine. History (in the Bible) shows that these people (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) has specific interaction with the land and promises they were given. Whether a person believes it or not, it still means something.

It certainly does mean something. It means that some relatively ignorant men cobbled together a bunch of stories to give their people a god to worship who was not the same god of other people who lived at the time.

 

[YoursTrue]

You really missed the gist of my post. Was that an intentional duck and dodge?

Let's simplify and try again...
Did a couple of continental plates shift naturally
-or-
Did a couple of continental plates shift intentionally

to cause a depression that filled with 1180 cubic miles of water and came to be called Lake Michigan?

I don't know what are talking about in reference to lake Michigan.

 

[YoursTrue]

When did your worldwide flood occur? 4000 years ago? Are you saying that you believe that Mt. Everest and other miles high mountain ranges grew from a few hundreds of feet to 29,000 feet in 4000 years?

I don't know how tall they were prior to the flood.

 

[YoursTrue]

When did your worldwide flood occur? 4000 years ago? Are you saying that you believe that Mt. Everest and other miles high mountain ranges grew from a few hundreds of feet to 29,000 feet in 4000 years? If so you need to show a mechanism that explains the sudden cause of the growth, the mechanism for the growth and the mechanism that caused the growth to stop.

You should be aware that science has accounted for these things taking place over millions (not 4000) years.




Unchanging? Really?

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that it took hundreds of years to even decide which books to include and which books to discard? Don't you know these things?

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of versions of the Bible despite the fact that each book was carefully copied from a previous version? Don't you know these things?

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that Martin Luther made very many substantial changes to scripture? Don't you know these things? Do you even know who Martin Luther is?





It certainly does mean something. It means that some relatively ignorant men cobbled together a bunch of stories to give their people a god to worship who was not the same god of other people who lived at the time.

Do you happen to have the written records of genealogy and history, whether or not you believe it, for any groups other than the Israelites? Perhaps you can let me know. I am asking even if you don't believe any of it.

 

[YoursTrue]

When did your worldwide flood occur? 4000 years ago? Are you saying that you believe that Mt. Everest and other miles high mountain ranges grew from a few hundreds of feet to 29,000 feet in 4000 years? If so you need to show a mechanism that explains the sudden cause of the growth, the mechanism for the growth and the mechanism that caused the growth to stop.

You should be aware that science has accounted for these things taking place over millions (not 4000) years.




Unchanging? Really?

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that it took hundreds of years to even decide which books to include and which books to discard? Don't you know these things?

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of versions of the Bible despite the fact that each book was carefully copied from a previous version? Don't you know these things?

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that Martin Luther made very many substantial changes to scripture? Don't you know these things? Do you even know who Martin Luther is?





It certainly does mean something. It means that some relatively ignorant men cobbled together a bunch of stories to give their people a god to worship who was not the same god of other people who lived at the time.

It took time for men and scholars to conclude which writings were to be included in the Bible canon. And remember it was considered a crime for centuries to read the Bible.