http://www.earth-history.com/Various/Compendium/index.htm

and have you looked at “Compedium of Human Hisotry”?

actually Mr Meaner and I moved it to a different thread and he stated with some fascinating points including a reference to the “Compendium of Human History” which appears to have an interesting premise that we can not look at history without looking at religion.

Then Mr Meaner appears to have been detained elsewhere.

He brought up the Khazars in Russia and then left me to struggle on on my own!

That would be refreshing - but not for QWERTY. I think at one point we were discussing authorship of the Pentateuch and Exodus issues and I think Mr Meaner was involved. It somehow got swallowed up by the evolution discussion.

your comment:

“No, this is like wanting to play in a sandbox where the other kids say they don’t want to play with you because you don’t follow their rule”

is the point. You do not want to play by the rules of science.

There are many “games” to play. You appear to be playing a biblically focused Christian game. But that is not science. If you want to make scientific statements, you need to work in the framework of science.

It does seem, however, that you are beginnning to understand the situation.

Now I am delighted to “play” Bible analysis with you if you like. You seem to have a deep understanidng here, but I have seen no recent comments on Biblical issues to jump off from. I do sense thatr we better establish our asumption frameworks early so we don’t trip over assumption misunderstanding.

You have yet to prove Hitchens wrong. He says he is a theist in so many words. Who are you do disagree with him? He says “God is not great.” Assuming Hitches believes he is telling the truth, the predicate assumes the existence of the subject.

So dead guys and guys who don’t agree with you should be discarded. Now I see why it’s so hard for scientists who argue against the paradigm to get published. They have to be “confirmed”.

MUSING,
“I have the image of kids in the sandbox playing with trucks and you are on the side saying that you want them to play with airplanes.”

No, this is like wanting to play in a sandbox where the other kids say they don’t want to play with you because you don’t follow their rules and they just don’t like playing with you anyway.

And none of you want to “play” with my giraffe example or emperor penguin example. The best QWERTY can do is “baby steps”. How does the emperor penguin mother know she needs to pass the egg to the father otherwise she will starve to death? How does the father know he needs to save some food in his mouth while he is starving so the baby will have something to eat when it hatches? Are these genetic mutations?

I’m going to go play in another sandbox where I get to launch rockets! Have fun with your trucks.

when you state:

“The issue isn’t that one worldview has science and one doesn’t. The issue is that one starts with the Bible as God’s Word”

you demonstrate that you do not seem to understand what science is. I believe that you understand very depply the strict-interpretatonalist Biblical religious view.

You do not seem to understand the definition of science. I present one mopdel of this in Whirled Views 10.22. I would look forward to your critique on the defintion.

And based on how you have clearly stated your assumption set, I must state that we can not assume that your stated scientific interpretations are intellecutally honest: you admit mthat you will only interpret the data in the context of a strict-interpretationalist model of the Bible.

It is worth noting that one can accept evolution and not believe in atheistic naturalism. I recomend you read Collins’ “The Language of God”. Collins is a first rate scientific researcher. He is also an evangelical Christian. I have some very small quibbles with the details of his development, mostly over some mathematical subtleties, but his argument and development seems very sound.

P.S. you have never been able to provide a testable hyptohesis to show that your creation model explains the available data AND resolves a key failure in the evolutionary model.

And of course if your model is what the the Bible says is true, then you never will provide a testable hypothesis to discriminate between the two models which shows that your model more accurately explains the data: by your assumption set, data is not needed.

so consider the following picture of an evolutionary model:

http://www.tolweb.org/tree/

Now based only on the material presented in this discussion so far, I suggest that for a key aspect of this drawing you can:

1) identify a key meta-question in the diagram for which there is an alternative model

2) identify only in this discussion adequate information to falsify the meta-question in the model presented

3) demonstrate that your new model matches the available data more closely

And when you do that, I suggest you will also present a mmodest concept (after all this is a relatively short exercise) whch should be included in all biology texts including evolutionary material and which, because it is not addrssed, results in a certain class of confusion for those who do not think deeply about this diagram.

So if you choose to do this exercise you can show a seldom published error in the classical describption of evolution as taught in many science classes.