How is there reality without God?

[EarthScienceguy]

Neils Bohr
"No Phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." Or another way to say this is that a tree does not fall in a forest unless it is observed.

The only way for there to be an objective reality is if God is the constant observer everywhere.

Physicist John Archibald Wheeler: "It is wrong to think of the past as 'already existing' in all detail. The 'past' is theory. The past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present."

God is everywhere so He can observe everywhere and produce objective reality.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to EarthScienceguy in post #76]

Where did the matter and energy come from and what exists outside of this universe?

Who cares? I spend zero time worrying about either of those questions as they are irrelevant to my past, present or future existence and happiness. Lots of physicists worry about this, but I don't care in the least.

The James Webb space telescope observations do not support the Big Bang model at all.

Where did you get that from?

So you put your faith in humans. So you are saying that you worship the human intellect. Worship is defined as the feeling or expression of reverence (deep respect for someone or something.) and adoration (deep love and respect) for a deity(In this case the human intellect). You seem to have a deep love and respect for the human intellect. That means that you worship the human intellect as the supreme source of knowledge.

I don't "worship" humans or the human intellect, but respect what humans have accomplished intellectually. I see no reason to believe that gods or anything in the supernatural realm exists now or ever has existed, so what's left? I'm a materialist.

Because the problems go beyond just finding the beginning. The solution also has to find the answer to the middle and the end also all at the same time. Because Einstein's theory of relativity states that past, present, and future all exist. So when the universe has been created all points of space and time throughout the life of the universe also had to be created.

What solution? Again, I spend no time trying to figure how how the universe came into existence, or how it will end. These are interesting things to ponder I suppose, but whether humans figure this out or not while I'm alive is irrelevant to me or my life. I don't need to care or make comments on these issues in an effort to support the existence of a god being.

No, I believe they can be deduced but they are dependent on your starting presuppositions. I am not sure how you can say that your starting presuppositions are correct when they at the present time do not produce the one universe with one objective reality that we see. This is relevant because every moment in time had to be created at the moment of creation because past, present, and future all exist according to Einstein's theory of Relativity.

More pondering how the universe came to be or how it may end. Who cares? What does this have to do with anything?

You do not have to believe in the laws of physics that is fine. There are a lot of people out there that prefer their own beliefs to what can be proved by science.

I do believe in the laws of physics ... nothing I've said suggests otherwise.

Paul did say that he saw the risen Jesus. Along with the disciples and 500 others so yes there were those that saw the risen Jesus in the city where he was actually crucified. The disciples preached the message of Jesus' resurrection in Jerusalem where Jesus was killed. The resurrection was the central message of the disciples and of Christianity.

Just stories in an old holy book. No reason to believe the stories are actually true. There is lots of fiction and storytelling in the bible.

[Jose Fly]

The law of Cause and effect says that every single effect had a cause. Accept when it comes to evolution. The first bacteria had to have a genetic code. Or are you one of those that believe that we are some part of an alien video game? Are you a na noo na noo or something like that? Live long and prosper right?

Perhaps it's not that you refuse to get it, it's that you simply can't? Think of it this way....just as chemists didn't need to explain the origin of elements before they could explain how they behave and interact, biologists don't need to explain the origin of the first organisms before they can explain how they behave and evolve.

If you can't grasp that simple concept, I can't help you.

What does it matter to you? According to your comment above you believe genetic information was formed out of thin air, by some alien or something, or maybe something like an elf, or a pixy or maybe it was Tinkerbell. Where did the genetic information come from? Until you answer that question your argument is illogical and there is really nothing to discuss.

So once again you make quantitative claims about "genetic information" and all it takes to stump you is to ask how you define and measure "genetic information". Here's a hint....if you can't define or measure something, you can't make quantitative claims about it.

Really you observed it out in nature? Or did you control the variables so as to produce the outcome you wanted? You know kind of like breeding dogs.

LOL...and now the excuses. Whether it happened in a lab or in the wild, the fact remains your claim is demonstrably wrong.

"Paleontologists now increasingly recognize that “jumps” between species, without intermediates, are not simply the result of an incomplete record. Niles Eldredge, an evolutionary paleontologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History, puts it this way with Ian Tattersal: “The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life’s history — not the artifact of a poor fossil record.”

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould admitted: “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.”

You have never heard of Punctuated equilibrium? the hypothesis that evolutionary development is marked by isolated episodes of rapid speciation between long periods of little or no change.

Paleontologists now increasingly recognize that “jumps” between species, without intermediates, are not simply the result of an incomplete record. Niles Eldredge, an evolutionary paleontologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History, puts it this way with Ian Tattersal: “The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life’s history — not the artifact of a poor fossil record.

One study in Nature reported that “if scaled to the … taxonomic level of the family, the past 540 million years of the fossil record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past.”

We do not see gradualism above the level of the family. Right where creationists put kinds of animals.

So you do admit that the fossil record contains examples of gradual evolution, which refutes your initial talking point. Good job!

And if "kind" = taxonomic family, you must be just fine with human/primate common ancestry.

biochemist W. Ford Doolittle to explain that “Molecular phylogenists will have failed to find the ‘true tree,’ not because their methods are inadequate or because they have chosen the wrong genes, but because the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree.” New Scientist put it this way: “For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life … But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence.”

Carl Woese, a pioneer of evolutionary molecular systematics, explains:
Phylogenetic incongruities can be seen everywhere in the universal tree, from its root to the major branchings within and among the various taxa to the makeup of the primary groupings themselves

Michael Syvanen tried to create a tree showing evolutionary relationships using 2000 genes from a diverse group of animals:
He failed. The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories. … the genes were sending mixed signals. … Roughly 50 per cent of its genes have one evolutionary history and 50 per cent another.

It has been called a bush, not a tree. But that even has problems.

Got to go finish later Dang pixy dust is everywhere.

LOL..you claimed that no tree of life has been produced. I showed that to be wrong. No amount of goalpost-moving will change that.

[Miles]

[Replying to Miles in post #63]

I invite all doubters to click on the link above and read more about the evidence for evolution. For those compelled to dismiss the validity of evolution out of hand, enjoy your ignorance in silence.

I invite all that really want to know the truth about evolution to read what researchers really think about evolution here at this site. https://dissentfromdarwin.org/scientists/


Please note that a

Dr. Douglas Axe, Director of Biologic Institute and Maxwell Visiting Professor of Molecular Biology, Biola University
“Because no scientist can show how Darwin’s mechanism can produce the complexity of life, every scientist should be skeptical. The fact that most won’t admit to this exposes the unhealthy effect of peer pressure on scientific discourse.”

Dr. Marcos Eberlin, member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, founder of the Thomson Mass Spectrometry Laboratory.
As a (bio)chemist I become most skeptical about Darwinism when I was confronted with the extreme intricacy of the genetic code and its many most intelligent strategies to code, decode and protect its information, such as the U x T and ribose x deoxyribose exchanges for the DNA/RNA pair and the translation of its 4-base language to the 20AA language of life that absolutely relies on a diversity of exquisite molecular machines made by the products of such translation forming a chicken-and-egg dilemma that evolution has no chance at all to answer.”

Dr. Stanley Salthe, Professor Emeritus, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York
Darwinian evolutionary theory was my field of specialization in biology. Among other things, I wrote a textbook on the subject thirty years ago. Meanwhile, however I have become an apostate from Darwinian theory and have described it as part of modernism’s origination myth.

Chris Williams, Ph.D., Biochemistry Ohio State University
As a biochemist and software developer who works in genetic and metabolic screening, I am continually amazed by the incredible complexity of life. For example, each of us has a vast ‘computer program’ of six billion DNA bases in every cell that guided our development from a fertilized egg, specifies how to make more than 200 tissue types, and ties all this together in numerous highly functional organ systems. Few people outside of genetics or biochemistry realize that evolutionists still can provide no substantive details at all about the origin of life, and particularly the origin of genetic information in the first self-replicating organism. What genes did it require — or did it even have genes? How much DNA and RNA did it have — or did it even have nucleic acids? How did huge information-rich molecules arise before natural selection? Exactly how did the genetic code linking nucleic acids to amino acid sequence originate? Clearly the origin of life — the foundation of evolution – is still virtually all speculation, and little if no fact.

Over 1000 scientist have signed the following statement

"We are skeptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of hte evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."
https://www.discovery.org/m/securepdfs/ ... 152021.pdf

Ever hear of Project Steve?

Project Steve

NCSE's [National Center for Science Education] "Project Steve" is a tongue-in-cheek parody of a long-standing creationist tradition of amassing lists of "scientists who doubt evolution" or "scientists who dissent from Darwinism."

Creationists draw up these lists to try to convince the public that evolution is somehow being rejected by scientists, that it is a "theory in crisis." Not everyone realizes that this claim is unfounded. NCSE has been asked numerous times to compile a list of thousands of scientists affirming the validity of the theory of evolution. Although we easily could have done so, we have resisted. We did not wish to mislead the public into thinking that scientific issues are decided by who has the longer list of scientists!

Project Steve pokes fun at this practice and, because "Steves" are only about 1% of scientists, it also makes the point that tens of thousands of scientists support evolution. And it honors the late Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist, NCSE supporter, and friend.

We'd like to think that after Project Steve, we'll have seen the last of bogus "scientists doubting evolution" lists, but it's probably too much to ask. We hope that when such lists are proposed, reporters and other citizens will ask, "How many Steves are on your list!?"

The statement:

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to "intelligent design," to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation's public schools.

First of all, all the Steves who signed up were confirmed to be actual scientists. Not mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, "former presidents of a Hindustan academy," or undergraduate Lab. Coordinators, as listed in your "A SCIENTIFIC DISSENT FROM DARWINISM" at WWW.DISSENTFROMDARWIN.ORG

Secondly, as of January 28th, 2021, the Steve-o-meter numbered 1,465 scientists on its list, so considering that Steves are estimated to represent only 1% of all scientists this would mean that there are around 146,500 true scientists who back the theory of evolution, compared to the lame 1,117 people who dissent from Darwinism, some of whom are not even scientists, but nutritionists, those with a Ph.D. in Philosophy, and someone who is a "professor of surgery."

See HERE for the list of "scientists" who "DISSENT FROM DARWINISM" which, by the way, is a concept that was superseded years ago by ongoing evolutionary research.

.

[Clownboat]

[Replying to Jose Fly in post #75]

Seriously? Man you creationists really need new arguments! So of course this old and stale creationist talking point will generate the same old and stale replies....Project Steve, pointing out how lists mean nothing in science, and trying to get you to understand how the statement they signed to is quite ignorant (there's more to evolution than mutation and selection).....

The list is 21 years old and what exactly has it accomplished? Nothing. So why you think citing it now will change that is indeed a mystery. But then, I guess that's all you have....regurgitation of decades old talking points that have never accomplished a thing.

For those readers that want to read more on the serious problems that evolution has you can read here. https://www.discovery.org/a/24041/

11 of the problems would be as follows.

Problem 1: No Viable Mechanism to Generate a Primordial Soup
Problem 2: Unguided Chemical Processes Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code
Problem 3: Random Mutations Cannot Generate the Genetic Information Required for Irreducibly Complex Structures
Problem 4: Natural Selection Struggles to Fix Advantageous Traits into Populations
Problem 5: Abrupt Appearance of Species in the Fossil Record Does Not Support Darwinian Evolution
Problem 6: Molecular Biology has Failed to Yield a Grand “Tree of Life”
Problem 7: Convergent Evolution Challenges Darwinism and Destroys the Logic Behind Common Ancestry
Problem 8: Differences between Vertebrate Embryos Contradict the Predictions of Common Ancestry
Problem 9: Neo-Darwinism Struggles to Explain the Biogeographical Distribution of many Species
Problem 10: Neo-Darwinism has a Long History of Inaccurate Darwinian Predictions about Vestigial Organs and “Junk DNA”
Problem 11: Humans Display Many Behavioral and Cognitive Abilities that Offer No Apparent Survival Advantage

Thank you

What mechanism do you propose that better explains not only the animals we see now on earth, but also in the fossil record?

You point out what you perceive to be problems above. What mechanism better explains what we observe over the one you complain about above? Are you simply complaining about the best explanation we have? If so, that would be odd.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #0]

Who cares? I spend zero time worrying about either of those questions as they are irrelevant to my past, present or future existence and happiness. Lots of physicists worry about this, but I don't care in the least.

It is a logical fallacy for the universe not to come from somewhere. So you believe that the universe just pop into existence? Out of nothing, no energy, no matter, no god, nothing. If the above is the case you have no bases for claiming that God does not exist. And to say "those questions as they are irrelevant to my past, present or future existence and happiness" is a faith statement. You have faith that that is the case you do not know that is the case.

Where did you get that from?

Reading it is a wonderful thing.

Another team, meanwhile, found evidence for galaxies the size of our Milky Way at a redshift of 10, less than 500 million years after the big bang.

Such behemoths emerging so rapidly defies expectations set by cosmologists’ standard model of the universe’s evolution. Called Lambda CDM (LCDM), this model incorporates scientists’ best estimates for the properties of dark energy and dark matter, which collectively act to dominate the emergence of large-scale cosmic structures. (“Lambda” refers to dark energy, and “CDM” refers to dark matter that is relatively sluggish, or “cold.”) “Even if you took everything that was available to form stars and snapped your fingers instantaneously, you still wouldn’t be able to get that big that early,” says Michael Boylan-Kolchin, a cosmologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “It would be a real revolution.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... cosmology/

“With the resolution of James Webb, we are able to see that galaxies have disks way earlier than we thought they did,” says Allison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. That’s a problem, she says, because it contradicts earlier theories of galaxy evolution. “We’re going to have to figure that out.” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02056-5

More pondering how the universe came to be or how it may end. Who cares? What does this have to do with anything?

Your belief system is a fairy tale. I mean you are welcome to believe whatever it is you want to believe but it really has no more credence than the belief that Tinkerbell made the universe. You have no logical footing to say whether there is a god or not. But this is what I mean when I say that there is really no such thing as an atheist. They are simply agnostics that do not want to face the facts of science.

The past present and future all existing is real science and it really gives little hope to a materialistic solution to the origin of the universe. Not that you care but now you know why you don't care because there is no hope for materialism.

I do believe in the laws of physics ... nothing I've said suggests otherwise.

No, you don't because the laws of physics say that everything in this universe must have a beginning. All of the cosmology points to the fact that the universe had to have a beginning. You have no solution and no hope of a solution to the problem of origins. Science has turned a corner and your position in no longer tenable.

Just stories in an old holy book. No reason to believe the stories are actually true. There is lots of fiction and storytelling in the bible.

Even critical scholars believe that Jesus, Paul, and the disciples were actually real people that lived during the time of Jesus. There is more written about Jesus in antiquity than anyone else in antiquity and closer to when He lived.

You seem to be living in a land of make-believe. History and science are opposed to what you believe to be true.

[JoeyKnothead]

It is a logical fallacy for the universe not to come from somewhere...

But perfectly logical to propose a magical entity of unlimited nosiness is?

Late edit to fix that last word.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to EarthScienceguy in post #85]

It is a logical fallacy for the universe not to come from somewhere.

You're missing the point. I'm making NO claims about how the universe came into existence ... none, nada. Humans don't know the answer to that problem but have some hypotheses that are still being tested. You're somehow taking that position and creating scenarios that I supposedly believe when I've made no comments on how I think the universe came about other than that we don't know yet.

And to say "those questions as they are irrelevant to my past, present or future existence and happiness" is a faith statement. You have faith that that is the case you do not know that is the case.

It is not a "faith statement" ... if I never learn how the universe came into existence it will have no impact on my future. If someone figures this out it will also have no impact on me or my future. How is the mechanism for some event that happened billions of years ago going to impact me or anyone else. It isn't.

Reading it is a wonderful thing.

It is ... you should try it. The quotes you provided say nothing about the Big Bang and certainly do not disprove it. They only say that galaxies formed earlier than models predicted based on LCDM. This is the kind of thing science does. We have a new and more capable telescope and it (no surprise) is making observations of new and unexpected things. Now what happens is a bunch of scientists will use this new data to refine their models. This is how it always works. How you jumped to the conclusion that these observations cast doubt on the Big Bang model is beyond me.

Your belief system is a fairy tale.

I don't have a belief system ... I accept scientific results until they are shown to be wrong. Inserting gods into explanations is the fairy tale, because no such beings have ever been shown to exist.

... it really has no more credence than the belief that Tinkerbell made the universe.

Why are you so obsessed with how the universe came about and who/what caused it? I have no belief system about this and don't care, but you continuously come back to that point as if it were the entire focus of the discussion.

No, you don't because the laws of physics say that everything in this universe must have a beginning. All of the cosmology points to the fact that the universe had to have a beginning.

I've never claimed the universe did not have a beginning. My point is that we don't know exactly what the mechanism was, and I personally don't care what it was. I don't need to know how the universe came into existence as part of my daily life, my future plans, or anything else. I can happily continue living, and eventually die, knowing nothing more than I do now. I don't lay awake at night worrying about how the universe came to be.

You seem to be living in a land of make-believe. History and science are opposed to what you believe to be true.

Me? You believe that a god being created the universe when we don't know that gods even exist. Nothing about my "belief system" is opposed to science ... it is entirely driven by science. You're a creationist, so lost this battle over a century ago. Resistance is futile.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to Jose Fly in post #0]

EarthScienceguy wrote: ↑Mon Dec 12, 2022 4:12 pm
The law of Cause and effect says that every single effect had a cause. Accept when it comes to evolution. The first bacteria had to have a genetic code. Or are you one of those that believe that we are some part of an alien video game? Are you a na noo na noo or something like that? Live long and prosper right?

Perhaps it's not that you refuse to get it, it's that you simply can't? Think of it this way....just as chemists didn't need to explain the origin of elements before they could explain how they behave and interact, biologists don't need to explain the origin of the first organisms before they can explain how they behave and evolve.

The question for the OP is "How is there reality without God?" So here you are admitting that researchers have no clue as to how the first genetic code was produced. And yet we see life here on Earth. How did life appear on Earth? And according to the fossil record, life really did just appear on the Earth along with the different phyla. So how can there be the reality of life without God? According to the answer above you have no answer.

Chemists do not believe that compounds just popped into existence like evolutionist says they do.

• "Paleontologists now increasingly recognize that “jumps” between species, without intermediates, are not simply the result of an incomplete record. Niles Eldredge, an evolutionary paleontologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History, puts it this way with Ian Tattersal: “The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life’s history — not the artifact of a poor fossil record.”

• Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould admitted: “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.”

Life popped into existence, different phyla popped into existence, how does that happen? Tinker bell, gremlins, what is your belief?

What does it matter to you? According to your comment above you believe genetic information was formed out of thin air, by some alien or something, or maybe something like an elf, or a pixy or maybe it was Tinkerbell. Where did the genetic information come from? Until you answer that question your argument is illogical and there is really nothing to discuss.

So once again you make quantitative claims about "genetic information" and all it takes to stump you is to ask how you define and measure "genetic information". Here's a hint....if you can't define or measure something, you can't make quantitative claims about it.

I am not trying to quantify anything. I am simply saying that for you life just appeared without any cause. I was just trying to help you out. You have no answer as to the cause of life on earth.

So you do admit that the fossil record contains examples of gradual evolution, which refutes your initial talking point. Good job!

This would be called adaption. Adaptations put a limit on the change that can take place. It is dependent on the genetic code that already exists in the organism. This has always been the creationist position. And this is exactly what we observe.

And if "kind" = taxonomic family, you must be just fine with human/primate common ancestry.

If man was an animal maybe. But man is not an animal man.

Besides, there would not be enough time for this "evolution" to take place. If that is what you are calling it.

The difference between humans and chimps is around 1E7 gametes 1% difference. The only long-term evolutionary experiment is the one that is still being conducted at Michigan State using ecoli bacteria. That experiment has documented 12 mutations novel mutations in 70,000 generations. Most of these could be considered deleterious especially if they were not in their protected environment but I will go with the 12. Using this actually observed mutation rate the time required for a man to go to an ape would be about 1 trillion years.

Here is the problem

• "In 2000 and 2004, protein scientist Douglas Axe published experimental research in the Journal of Molecular Biology on mutational sensitivity tests he performed on enzymes in bacteria. Enzymes are long chains of amino acids which fold into a specific, stable, three-dimensional shape in order to function. Mutational sensitivity experiments begin by mutating the amino acid sequences of those proteins, and then testing the mutant proteins to determine whether they can still fold into a stable shape, and function properly. Axe’s research found that amino acid sequences which yield stable, functional protein folds may be as rare as 1 in 1074 sequences, suggesting that the vast majority of amino acid sequences will not produce stable proteins, and thus could not function in living organisms.
  
  Because of this extreme rarity of functional protein sequences, it would be very difficult for random mutations to take a protein with one type of fold, and evolve it into another, without going through some non-functional stage. Rather than evolving by “numerous, successive, slight modifications,” many changes would need to occur simultaneously to “find” the rare and unlikely amino acid sequences that yield functional proteins. To put the matter in perspective, Axe’s results suggest that the odds of blind and unguided Darwinian processes producing a functional protein fold are less than the odds of someone closing his eyes and firing an arrow into the Milky Way galaxy, and hitting one pre-selected atom. Douglas A. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds,” Journal of Molecular Biology, 341: 1295-1315 (2004); Douglas A. Axe, “Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors,” Journal of Molecular Biology, 301: 585-595 (2000)."

• Evolutionary biologist in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Science. acknowledges that “simultaneous emergence of all components of a system is implausible.”

• Likewise, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne — a staunch defender of Darwinism — admits that “natural selection cannot build any feature in which intermediate steps do not confer a net benefit on the organism.”

• Even Darwin intuitively recognized this problem, as he wrote in Origin of Species:
  
  If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

I have yet to talk about the problems with fixing a new trait in a population that also has major problems.

LOL..you claimed that no tree of life has been produced. I showed that to be wrong. No amount of goalpost-moving will change that.

I did not claim anything. The researchers I quoted are the ones who made the claim that there is a tree of life.

Like these

• ‘For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life,’ says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. ‘We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality,’ says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change. ~ Graham Lawton, “Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life,” New Scientist (January 21, 2009)

• Molecular phylogenists will have failed to find the ‘true tree,’ not because their methods are inadequate or because they have chosen the wrong genes, but because the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree. ~ W. Ford Doolittle, “Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree,” Science, Vol. 284:2124-2128 (June 25, 1999).

• Syvanen recently compared 2000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies and nematodes. In theory, he should have been able to use the gene sequences to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships between the six animals. He failed. The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories. This was especially true of sea-squirt genes. Conventionally, sea squirts – also known as tunicates – are lumped together with frogs, humans and other vertebrates in the phylum Chordata, but the genes were sending mixed signals. Some genes did indeed cluster within the chordates, but others indicated that tunicates should be placed with sea urchins, which aren’t chordates. ‘Roughly 50 per cent of its genes have one evolutionary history and 50 per cent another,’ Syvanen says. ~ Graham Lawton, “Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life,” New Scientist (January 21, 2009).

• Many biologists claim they know for sure that random mutation (purposeless chance) is the source of inherited variation that generates new species of life and that life evolved in a single-common-trunk, dichotomously branching-phylogenetic-tree pattern! But she dissents from that view and attacks the dogmatism of evolutionary systematists, noting that ‘[e]specially dogmatic are those molecular modelers of the ‘tree of life’ who, ignorant of alternative topologies (such as webs), don’t study ancestors.’ ~ Lynn Margulis, ‘The Phylogenetic Tree Topples,’ American Scientist, Vol 94 (3) (May-June, 2006).

I hope this helps in showing you how wrong you are about the tree of life.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to Clownboat in post #84]

What mechanism do you propose that better explains not only the animals we see now on earth, but also in the fossil record?

You point out what you perceive to be problems above. What mechanism better explains what we observe over the one you complain about above? Are you simply complaining about the best explanation we have? If so, that would be odd.

Does nobody read the OP? How is there reality without God? Life can only be explained by a creator God. There cannot be a reality without a creator God.

[Jose Fly]

The question for the OP is "How is there reality without God?" So here you are admitting that researchers have no clue as to how the first genetic code was produced. And yet we see life here on Earth. How did life appear on Earth? And according to the fossil record, life really did just appear on the Earth along with the different phyla. So how can there be the reality of life without God? According to the answer above you have no answer.

That's right, my view is that we currently don't know how the first life on earth arose. That's why there are multiple research programs seeking to figure it out.

I am not trying to quantify anything.

Good, then we can dispense with any claims about amounts of "genetic information".

This would be called adaption.

We've been over this already. You're dishonestly making up your own definitions of words and expecting everyone else to go along.

If man was an animal maybe. But man is not an animal man.

Taxonomically we are within the Kingdom Animalia.

Besides, there would not be enough time for this "evolution" to take place. If that is what you are calling it.

The difference between humans and chimps is around 1E7 gametes 1% difference.

First error....humans didn't evolve from chimps, humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor that was neither human nor chimp.

The only long-term evolutionary experiment is the one that is still being conducted at Michigan State using ecoli bacteria. That experiment has documented 12 mutations novel mutations in 70,000 generations.

You've been corrected on this error multiple times now (you're confusing novel mutations with strains), yet you keep repeating it. If you can't fix such a simple mistake, I can't help you.

Here is the problem

The problem is you have a fundamental ignorance of the subject you're attempting to debate and you refuse to correct even the most basic of errors.

I did not claim anything. The researchers I quoted are the ones who made the claim that there is a tree of life.

Dude, I just showed you a tree of life. For you to now deny that any exist is the height of delusion.