Harsh Truth: If Intelligent Design is Untestable . . .

[jonathan180iq]

If that was too 'mined' I can expand the quote if it helps

In the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years (evolutionists are now dating the beginning of the Cambrian at about 530 million years), are the oldest in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.

So, even when addressing the allegations of quote mining levied against you, you choose to quote mine even further more instead of simply addressing the issue in context, is that right?

CONTEXT
"The biggest gap, and the one the creationists like best of all, is the one that preceded the so-called Cambrian Explosion. A little more than half a billion years ago, in the Cambrian era, most of the great animal phyla "suddenly" appear in the fossil record. Suddenly, that is, in the sense that no fossils of these animal groups are known in rocks older than the Cambrian, not suddenly in the sense of instantaneously; the period we are talking about covers about 20 million years. Anyway, it is still quite sudden, and, as I wrote in a previous book, the Cambrian shows us a substantial number of major animal phyla "already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists."

The last sentence shows that I was savvy enough to realize that creationists would like the Cambrian Explosion. I was not (back in 1986) savvy enough to realize that they'd gleefully quote my lines back at me in their own favor, carefully omitting my careful words of explanation. On a whim, I just searched the World Wide Web for "It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history" and obtained no fewer than 1,250 hits. As a crude control test of the hypothesis that the majority of these hits represent creationist quote—minings, I tried searching, as a comparison, the clause that immediately follows the above quotation: "Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record." I obtained a grand total of 63 hits, compared to the 1,250 hits for the previous sentence.

I have dealt with the Cambrian Explosion at length before. Here I'll add just one new point, illustrated by the flatworms, Platyhelminthes. This great phylum of worms includes the parasitic flukes and tapeworms, which are of great medical importance. My favorites, however, are the free-living turbellarian worms, of which there are more than 4,000 species: that's about as numerous as all the mammal species put together. They are common, both in water and on land, and presumably have been common for a very long time. You'd expect, therefore, to see a rich fossil history. Unfortunately, there is almost nothing. Apart from a handful of ambiguous trace fossils, not a single fossil flatworm has ever been found. The Platyhelminthes, to a worm, are "already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history." But in this case, "the very first time they appear" is not the Cambrian but today. Do you see what this means, or at least ought to mean for creationists? Creationists believe that flatworms were created in the same week as all other creatures. They have therefore had exactly the same time in which to fossilize as all other animals. During all the centuries when all those bony or shelly animals were depositing their fossils by the millions, the flatworms must have been living happily alongside them, but without leaving the slightest trace of their presence in the rocks. What, then, is so special about gaps in the record of those animals that do fossilize, given that the past history of the flatworms isone big gap: even though the flatworms, by the creationists' own account, have been living for the same length of time? If the gap before the Cambrian Explosion is used as evidence that most animals suddenly sprang into existence in the Cambrian, exactly the same "logic" should be used to prove that the flatworms sprang into existence yesterday. Yet this contradicts the creationist's belief that flatworms were created during the same creative week as everything else. You cannot have it both ways. This argument, at a stroke, completely and finally destroys the creationist case that the Precambrian gap in the fossil record can be taken as evidence against evolution." -R. Dawkins

The original quote that you love to cut and paste is found here, as part of a larger point.
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, London:W. W. Norton 1986, p. 229.

The excerpt that I've cited above can be found here:
Dawkins, Richard, The Blind Watchmaker, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1996, pp. 229-230

Also, please note that you quote mining that you engage in is constantly referenced by other creationists who also engage in identical endeavours. This is quote-mined so often that it even has it's own place over on the TalkOrigins Quote Mining list...

Check out #40:
Quote Mine Project: "Large Gaps"


So, do you have any rebuttal against this very clear and obvious quote-mining that you continue to do?

Just stop doing it, and people will stop calling you out on it...

 

[Parsimony]

Would xenocrysts give the right age or would it be the same as the phenocrysts?

Xenocrysts are older than the rocks which contain them. So no, they would not yield the correct age if what you were looking for was the age of the solidifying of the flow. You need a sample without xenocrysts.

The problem is, both minerals have excess argon. Was it because of argon occlusion within the minerals?

“The second possibility is that so-called "excess argon" could have become trapped in the Mount St. Helens magma. This is where we find the bulk of the confusing complexity in Austin's paper and in those of his critics. The papers all go into great detail describing the various ways that argon-containing compounds can be incorporated into magma. These include the occlusion of xenoliths and xenocrysts, which are basically contaminants from existing old rocks that get mixed in with the magma; and phenocrysts, which are crystals of all sorts of different minerals that form inside the rock in different ways depending on how quickly the magma cools.“ -Skeptoid

The problem with these minerals is the excess argon that did not gassed out so some have more argon than the others and therefore should give different ages.

You could tell how much of the argon present in the mineral came from outside contamination and how much of it was produced by radioactive decay by looking at the ratios of different isotopes present. Argon-40 is the only isotope of argon produced when potassium-40 decays, whereas argon-36 and argon-38 also exist in air. It's just a matter of doing the math. We know that it's right because it matches up with other radiometric dating techniques which use elements with different decay rates and decay modes. If it was wrong, it wouldn't match. I showed this with the link I posted earlier.

The basic assumption is, natural occurring argon should gassed out, but because of argon occlusion into these minerals, xenocrysts and phenocrysts, it gave different ages on the geochron, but testing the whole rock where it reset to zero is shown 350,000 years in just ten years. That’s the main point of the argument.

See my response above.

When did it set to zero? There shouldn’t be any presence of radiogenic argon when the rock formed or set to zero, but because of excess argon or argon occlusion within the minerals, xenocrysts and phenocrysts, geochron gave different ages on these minerals.

That's why homogeneous samples are necessary for radiometric dating (ones without foreign inclusions).

Have you ever thought that dating this soft tissue with 14C would greatly favor evolutionist if it found not dateable at all? This would be the end of the debate between creationists and evolutionists.

There are many creationists who hold carbon-dating to be unreliable, so no, it would not have done much to settle the debate.

YES!

Good to know.

Palaeontologists will have to revise their theories on the end of the dinosaurs, the KT extinction.

Yes, but not by much. We know that a huge number of species were killed off by that impact. A living dinosaur would simply represent a species that survived when it was otherwise believed that none did.

 

[URAVIP2ME]

The stratification of species is how we know there is evolutionary history. If we find things that are slightly different as we move through the different strata that is how we see evolutionary history.

There are No dinosaur bones found mixed with human bones, thus they both did Not exist at the same time period.

 

[URAVIP2ME]

If you can find an animal with a longer tail than the hippo you could probably win this argument, but insisting that a hippo has a “tail like a cedar”, to whom you are appealing to?

The Hippo's tail does only measure about 18 to 20 inches. That thick tail can be rigidly upright to swing it about like a tree.
Having a tail ' like a cedar ' does Not have to mean cedar in height or length but in thickness.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

There are No dinosaur bones found mixed with human bones, thus they both did Not exist at the same time period.

Yes...are you adding on or do you think that I was stating otherwise?

 

[URAVIP2ME]

Yes...are you adding on or do you think that I was stating otherwise?

In the six ' creative days ' of unknown length ( or even if all of the creative days were of the same or equal length of time or Not )
Even if God used some sort of evolution as part of creation, there was No evolution involved where mankind is concerned.
Adam was inanimate until God breathed the breath of life into lifeless Adam.
When Adam died Adam simply went back to the dust of the ground were Adam started - Genesis 3:19
Although animal kind was around before humans, mankind is Not of animal kind.

 

[Shad]

We can all learn from ignorance. I think the word you’re looking for is congratulations or congrats and not congradulations. I could understand if you mistakenly hit the R or the Y in your keyboard but the D under the E, there is no excuse for that but ignorance.

Red herring and ad hominem, my spelling has nothing to do with my argument. You attack this as if it had anything to do with my point, but it does not. It is a simple spelling mistake I never bothered to correct.

Did I assume sinew is only about dinosaurs? Did you know that the word "Behemoth" is plural? We all have collagen. Gravity pulls us down really quick if don’t have enough collagen.

Yes you did as you right after you made your wiki link you went straight to dinosaurs nothing else. Now you are backtracking.

If I describe an elephant I would probably use a tree to describe the height. I did not say 130 feet but it can grow up to 130 feet.

JOB 40:17 “He bends his tail like a cedar; The sinews of his thighs are knit together.

Cedar can grow up to 130 feet and that is just the tail of this Behemoth.

A tendon (or sinew) is a tough band of fibrous connective tissue that usually connects muscle to bone[1] and is capable of withstanding tension. Tendons are similar to ligaments and fasciae; all three are made of collagen.

“The sinews of his thighs are knit together.” The T-rex’s femur or thigh is where they found the tissue or collagen/sinew. Do you think this is just a coincidence, or it’s God’s work?

 

[Shad]

God did not plant any seedlings of anything, He brought out the trees with “fruit yielding seed” already. So, now you know that chicken came first before the egg just like the trees with fruit in it already.

Red herring and non-sequitur. Your comment has nothing to do with my comment thus is irrelevant.

GE 1:29 Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you;
GE 1:30 and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so.

You may have to Congradulate [pardon my ignorance] me here again because I got this from wiki.

Cedrus libani is an evergreen coniferous tree growing up to 40 m (130 ft) tall, with a trunk up to 2.5 m (8 ft 2 in) in diameter. The crown is conic when young, becoming broadly tabular with age with fairly level branches.

The shoots are dimorphic, with long shoots and short shoots. The leaves are needle-like, spaced out on the long shoots, and in clusters of 15-45 on the short shoots; they are 5–30 mm (1⁄4–1 3⁄16 in) in length, quadrangular in cross-section, and vary from green to glaucous blue-green with stomatal bands on all four sides. The seed cones are produced often every second year, and mature in 12 months from pollination; mature cones in late autumn are 8–12 cm (3–4 3⁄4 in) long and 4–6 cm (1 1⁄2–2 3⁄8 in) wide. -wiki

And if you read the sentence again “I did not say 130 feet but it can grow up to 130 feet” and I think God was not talking about “SEEDLINGS” in Job 40:17.

Red herring and non-sequitur. Your comment has nothing to do with my comment thus is irrelevant. You are still assuming the verse is about length when not a single word is talking about length. Your response is incoherent

 

[Shad]

Empirical evidence you mean? Where? Evidence of nothing produced nothing.

That’s why you guys are still in the theory business because nothing has been proven yet as evidence from your theories. You think frauds are evidence of theory? Molecules-to-Man. Really?

Again showing you have no idea what a scientific theory means thus your comment is irrelevant. Argument from incredulity thus a failure in logic.

 

[Shad]

of course, or by the same token, you are saying you don't conflate creationism with theism?!

Considering one involves a god by default while the other make no mention of god at all neither positive nor negative there is no issue. You seem to be offended by the fact of what creation is and what evolution is not.

 

[David M]

Contradicting Darwin’s theory “On the imperfect geological record” “earth’s surface is constantly in flux”
Have you ever heard of floods. Flood carries sediment or particles from one place into another place as they were move by water in a drainage bed and once they settled on water and dries out it hardens and form around bones and fossilized it.

Not contradicting anything to do with geology.

And that flood is laying down its deposits in relation to the strata present at the time of the flood and later layers will be laid down in relation to that flood layer.

 

[David M]

You are just rephrasing my statement. There is only one thing you guys are agreeing with each other, i.e., going after my statements, but as far as having the same answer or mind, totally contradicting each other.

No, that is accurately describing the situation. It refutes your silly "index fossil" argument.

We are contradicting the falsehoods that you are copying from some creationist website.

 

[David M]

False. We stock the jury with our common idiots (bad idea in my opinion) because in England there was a concept where a panel of the same people determined the fate of everyone who went through the court system. The American system hated his concept of total power and control of our lives.

Trial by a Jury of your peers (i.e. the modern system) formally in the UK dates back to the very start of the 18th Century, so it was in place for at least a couple of generations before the American system was created.

The roots of the change to a trial by jury were enacted in 1641 in Britain with the Abolition of the Star Chamber.

WHEREAS by the great charter many times confirmed in parliament, it is enacted, That no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or disseised of his freehold or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled or otherwise destroyed, and that the King will not pass upon him, or condemn him; but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land

[Wikipedia]

 

[David M]

Oh yes you do! Half-lives are theoretical age used to calculate the age of igneous rocks. If you don’t used half-lives you simply cannot arrive to any conclusion as far as age of any fossils and sedimentary strata. So, theoretically, the ages of fossils are all based on another theory, and that is, dating igneous rocks, and dating igneous rocks based on another theory of half-lives of elements found in it.

Half-lives of isotopes are not a theory. They are a fact. The decay rate of radioactive isotopes is something that you can measure.

For example, when a sample of the lava in the Mt. St. Helens crater (that had been observed to form and cool in 1986) was analyzed in 1996, it contained so much argon-40 that it had a calculated “age” of 350,000 years!

That date was obtained by doing whole rock dating of samples. Because lava contains inclusions of rocks that did not melt during the eruption but were carried with the lava it cannot be used to date an eruption unless such inclusions are removed, a FACT that has been known for a very long time. Reputable scientists do not use whole rock dating do determine that date of en eruption, they exclude any inclusions before using K-Ar dating.

Now, how did they get 350,000 years in just 10 years? Half-life is the answer. Therefore, half-lives are nothing but a theory and in this case it was proven to be wrong, wasn’t it?

They got that date by deliberate dishonesty. Creationist dishonesty is the answer (as it so often is).

If you measure this same rock found in Mt. St. Helens using the rubidium and strontium isotopes you would get over a billion years.

Would you? Do you have any evidence of this? In fact what you would get is a result of "undateable", because the sensitivity of today's instruments would not be able to accurately detect the minute changes that happen over a few decades for Rubidium-Strontium dating.

IOW, each elements are calibrated into each own millions of years. If you get 350,000 years in potassium/argon isotopes then you would probably get over a billion years in rubidium/strontium isotopes sampling the same rock.

No you wouldn't. In fact where we can use different methods we find that those methods agree,

 

[David M]

JOB 40:17 “He bends his tail like a cedar; The sinews of his thighs are knit together.

Cedar can grow up to 130 feet and that is just the tail of this Behemoth.

Oh dear. Not this stupidity again.

"bends his tail like a cedar" means it bends in the same manner as a cedar bends, it does not mean that it was the size of a full grown cedar. And considering that Behemoth can be shaded by a few trees and surrounded by some willows there is no way that it could be as big as you suggest.

In any case Behemoth had external genitalia because the proper translation is "The sinews of his stones are knit together", stones was used to refer testes in the bible which makes Behemoth a mammal.

Behemoth was an Elephant or Hippo. My preference is for an elephant due to the "nose pierceth through snares" reference.

 

[JM2C]

This same sort of stupidity and superstition exist among some Christians, who think that Jesus was/is "God". So the whole human and God have come full circle, except we have Christians like you believing in such nonsense God, Holy Spirit and Jesus being one and the same.

Not according this guy

There is plenty of evidence in the NT for Jesus divinity. Just because the trinity slowly evolved hundreds of years later, does not mean there is no evidence in support.

You guys are not in sync, out of tune.

 

[JM2C]

You don't nothing about evolution, if you believe that evolution came from "nothing".

and this was your explanation based on your own understanding/ignorance about evolution.

Evolution was never about abiogenesis or the origin of 1st life.

Was never, but it is

Even about abiogenesis, it is about something coming out of nothing. It is hypotheize that living matter was made out of non-living matters (inorganic matter), under the right conditions.

You are just like outhouse, one minute he agrees that

There is plenty of evidence in the NT for Jesus divinity.

and the next minute this evidence is a myth

Explain the evidence behind mythology to man.

And then YOU mixed them together, the “abiogenesis” and the “was never about abiogenesis” here

Evolution is about evolving, changing and adapting, it required the parents to pass their genes to their children, generation after generation, so it required ancestors and descendants. Genes are passed on hereditarily, hence it required parents, so evolution is every similar to genetics. So there is no "nothing".

Are you confused?

 

[JM2C]

But with Genesis, God created light out of nothing, he created animals and plants, sun, moon and stars, ALL OUT OF NOTHING, except god's words, eg "Let there be light", so light came out of nothing, but from a few spoken words. That same stupid ignorance, come from the John's Logos.

IOW, only God can create anything out of nothing [ex nihilo] and not from a molecule to man, right?

 

[JM2C]

Oh dear. Not this stupidity again.

Really? Is that why you put your 2cents here?

"bends his tail like a cedar" means it bends in the same manner as a cedar bends, it does not mean that it was the size of a full grown cedar. And considering that Behemoth can be shaded by a few trees and surrounded by some willows there is no way that it could be as big as you suggest.

In any case Behemoth had external genitalia because the proper translation is "The sinews of his stones are knit together", stones was used to refer testes in the bible which makes Behemoth a mammal.

Behemoth was an Elephant or Hippo. My preference is for an elephant due to the "nose pierceth through snares" reference.

”SINEW –Strong’s SH1517” OR “GIDEY” in Hebrew. “STONE –Strong’s SH68” or “’EBEN” in Hebrew. Do you understand now the difference between a “STONE” and a “SINEW” in Hebrew, they are not the same?

About your preference, do you think it is better than the ONE who was describing the BEHEMOTH? Or actually the ONE who created this BEHEMOTH is the ONE who was describing it, but your preference, an elephant, while the other guy said it was a hippo, do you think they should matter?

May I suggest something similar to BEHEMOTH? Dinosaurs?

 

[JM2C]

Mysteriously Intact T. Rex Tissue Finally Explained : Discovery News

What the iron lady?