Evidence for God from Science

I guess the way I think about it would be to compare car engines. Now we understand that they are engineered, but we also know that they are engneered from previous designs, not out of necessity many times.

So if we see ten car engines with the same design in the way the metal is shaped versus ten other car engines that have other shapes of the tail pipes, we don't think that the twenty cars we made in isolation from each other but that their designs were from borrowed from the original design, or from a few original designs.

THis is more than just sayign that the same designer made them, this is looking at the fact that the designed objects have very distinct patterns within each other, similar to an engineer who created severa different essential engine schematics or to an artist who has several periods of design and enjoyed using them for other artworks.

I believe God used a similar blueprint, but that each "species" was an original. For example at the Avalon (570 Mya) and Cambrian (543 Mya) explosions; where did God get the blueprints for all of those new Phyla? Bacteria was about all there was.

What about the Triassic-Jurassic boundary? The Triassic dinos went extinct and then were replaced in less than 30,000 years.

Humans and chimps only share about 86.7% of their DNA. The 98-99% figure is talking about how similar, similar regions are.

Endogenous retroviruses are assumed to be evidence for evolution. It is an unproven assumption that these fragments actually came from retroviruses. Evolutionists once considered them "junk" left over from our ancestors, but now scientists are finding that they have function. Some actually alert the cell and disrupt the life cycle of real retrovirus invaders. Some regulate gene expression and some function as genes.

ERVs in humans should be closely related to chimps. Here are some quotes from a research paper:

by studying the population dynamics of complete copies of primate endogenous retrovirus family K (ERV-K) in the genomes of humans, chimpanzee and rhesus monkey, a surprising pattern was observed....being published this week on PLoS ONE revealed that human ERV-K had a similar demographic signature to that of the rhesus monkey, both differing greatly from that of the chimpanzee.

Reporting on research in 2005 found another problem for ERVs:

What researchers don't understand is why the virus affected the ancestors of chimps, gorillas, and Old World monkeys, but didn't affect the ancestors of humans or of Asian apes like orangutans and gibbons.

Cytochrome C
According to evolution (using mtDNA)the hippo is the closest living relative of the whale. If we look at Cyc, whales are identical to arabian camels and lamas. Hippos are three mutations off. In fact mice, rats guinea pigs and rabbits are only one mutation off. The western tarsier is only two away from the whale.

using different markers we get confused about equines. Cyc shows that the donkey and common zebra are identical while the horse has an extra mutation. if we look at chromosome numbers the horse (32) is closer to the donkey (31), while the zebra has (22).

Just some thoughts.

But no matter what scientific view you choose, you still have to deal with the Biblical text. The words have meanings that must be addressed. Like I said earlier, if evolution was the correct understanding for the Biblical text, I would expect bana to be used instead of bara and asa.

Dayage, thanks for the info. Would youhave the reference for the ERV paper from 2005 you cited?

dayage wrote:As far as humans evolving, I believe that God created them from scratch. The Bible states that God bara (brought into existence) man and asa (built) man. When He built Eve He bana (refabricated). So I would expect to see bana used for the different creative acts if evolution was true, but it is not used.

I just don't see how "brought into existence" could exclude created with previous material, expecially when one considers that there *would* be new arrangents of DNA or chromosomes. WOuldn't that be "brought into existence?".

The problem I have with your interpretation of the bara/asa thing, is that I have a hard time believing God would be so deceiving as to create organisms independently right from scratch as you speak - that share so many attributes that it creates the illusion that evolution occurred (just some of the crap those antievolutions pull out of their asses ).

zoegirl:

I just don't see how "brought into existence" could exclude created with previous material, expecially when one considers that there *would* be new arrangents of DNA or chromosomes. WOuldn't that be "brought into existence?".

I agree. I think this is a matter of interpretation here..

Anonymiss wrote:The problem I have with your interpretation of the bara/asa thing, is that I have a hard time believing God would be so deceiving as to create organisms independently right from scratch as you speak - that share so many attributes that it creates the illusion that evolution occurred (just some of the crap those antievolutions pull out of their asses ).

zoegirl:

I just don't see how "brought into existence" could exclude created with previous material, expecially when one considers that there *would* be new arrangents of DNA or chromosomes. WOuldn't that be "brought into existence?".

I agree. I think this is a matter of interpretation here..

I don't see how deception plays into it. How we interpret evidence is a product of our approach to things, and that has varied by historical age as well as by culture. Assuming that we in this scientific age and western scientific culture are the measure of how God "should" have done something or left the evidence of what He did, smacks more of a perspective bias on our part, I think.

Canuckster1127 wrote: Assuming that we in this scientific age and western scientific culture are the measure of how God "should" have done something or left the evidence of what He did, smacks more of a perspective bias on our part, I think.

Even so the mountains of scientific evidence (to date) suggesting that we evolved (probably in the manner zeogirl suggested), appears to by far exceed that that may imply that we didn't...

Anonymiss wrote:

Canuckster1127 wrote: Assuming that we in this scientific age and western scientific culture are the measure of how God "should" have done something or left the evidence of what He did, smacks more of a perspective bias on our part, I think.

Even so the mountains of scientific evidence (to date) suggesting that we evolved (probably in the manner zeogirl suggested), appears to by far exceed that that may imply that we didn't...

That's exactly what a perspective bias does. It affects how things appear based upon where you look upon them from.

That said, I happen to agree that the evidence points toward an old earth and progressive creation that could include evolution on a macro scale. I'm also aware that those conclusions can change and modify as more evidence is discovered and incorporated into our existing information and also that the methods of interpretation of that data can and will change as well. I don't find that the scriptures themselves are contrary to that either, but rather some hermeneutical approaches rigidly held (such as the more rigid forms of YEC, in my opinion) are.

Well, to clarify, I don't believe that they evolved in the sense that that word is usually used. I simply mean that God used previous designs/schematics to fulfill HIs plan. I don't believe there was anything random about the process, although there certainly may be mysterious means to what happened in the past.

zoegirl,

Here is a link to the 2005 paper:
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlser ... 30110&ct=1

Thanks!! I'll read it today and get back.

I believe we (earlier discourse on this site, not you specifically) went over this before.
PTERV1 is a non-orthologous ERV.

Meaning that the insertions occurred after lineages split apart.

Based on an analysis of 1,467 large-insert clones, we mapped 299 retroviral insertion sites among the four species (Figure 3; Table S2). A total of 275 of the insertion sites mapped unambiguously to non-orthologous locations (Table 2), indicating that the vast majority of elements were lineage-specific (i.e., they emerged after the divergence of gorilla/chimpanzee and macaque/baboon from their common ancestor).

Heres an analogy.
Lets say we had siamese twins attached at the shin.
30 years later we see matching scars along the shin and conclude that at one time that they were once attached.

This is similar although much less conclusive than comparisons of orthologous ERV's in mammals.

However we have another set of twins who were never attached.
We find scars along their shins as well.
However they are not in similar posisions and they show signs of being of different ages.

These can be likened to non-orthologous ERV's.

So in essence you are talking about scars, but the evidence for evolution is for a specific set of scars...not scars in general.

boy, haven't heard fromn you in awhile!! Good to hear from you.

Good to be back.

Glad to see that so many are still here.

BGoodForGoodSake wrote:Good to be back.

Glad to see that so many are still here.

Welcome back old pal. Hope you stick around.

day-age - the biases you speak of, it seems to me a lot of people rejecting human evolution dislike the idea of us sharing a common ancestry with animals (which I being an animal-lover, have no problems with at all).

I wanna get that book "Your Inner Fish".