Disproving the Bible

[FatAndFaithless]

Wow. Some of your numebred points make me wonder if you've done any research into any of the responses to your claims at all. The quesiton about 'intermediate forms' is horseshit, been disproven I can't count how many times. I've already addressed your "tree of life" statement and how evolution is not linear and is very inefficient in many cases, and that a bush would be a much more accurate metaphor, with many branches that end, each with innumberable branches that also end, sudden truncations and useless deviations, beacuse evolution is not a goal oriented process. Whenever you bring up 'odds' or 'probability', I have to ask how you exactly calculated that probability, especially considering your misunderstanding of evolution in the first place.

As for vestigal organs, are you serious? Just to list a few that occur in humans: The appendix, the coccyx, wisdom teeth, the vomeronasal organ, certain ear muscles that do not function, the plica semilunaris tissue of the eyes, certain parts of genitalia and embryo development, and not to mention the list of junk DNA in our genome that doesn't appear to do much of anything. Seriously dude.

And just to your last point, again I ask to see your calculations of this improbability.

Are you kidding me about the fossil record. Do you really think it shows what you think it does. If evolution were true, there would have been ancestors and transitional creatures between each genus, family, order, class, and phylum in the layers below the Cambrian Explosion. Where are they.

Your tree of life explanation? You simply stated that it was confusing and inefficient and that it was a bush. Well, it's not. A bush does not branch low and then reconnect further up so some genes can get from that branch to the other branch to match the observation. Genes are telling different evolutionary stories and drawing them does not explain them.

It seems the vestigial parts list is getting smaller--starting with the appendix. It now seems to "serve an important role" http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...tion-of-t/ Also, plenty of mammals have appendixes. The coccyx is an anchor point to muscles--hardly useless. Other examples--perhaps remnants of the past, but perhaps, like the appendix, we just don't know the purpose yet.

Junk DNA? Read http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6099/1159.summary

Taking your points in reverse order.

The junk DNA point: If you would actually read the articles you linked, it says it debunks the thought that our DNA is mostly useless DNA, I never claimed that our DNA was mostly useless. The studies finds that around 80% of our DNA has function. That last 20% is what I'm talking about. It's DNA that has no major function that we can determine. Try reading your sources.

Vestigal organs: The appendix is one that I'll concede, if they find that it is doing something vital, then I wouldn't call it vestigal. However, stating that 'other animals have appendices' is vapid, as I was referring to vestigal organs in humans. The coccyx itself may not be utterly useless as a bone for muscle grounding, but the fact that it is ltierally defined as a remnant of our vestigal tail should give you some insight as to what I meant. And ignoring all my other examples, just saying 'we might find out someday they have a use' is not an argument for your claim of 'we don't have any vestigal organs'.

Genes and the bush: Good lord, the bush is a metaphor, it's used to say that the system of evolution can be convoluded, complex, inefficient and unclear at times, I wasn't saying anything about a literal bush. I was more referring to the emergence of biodiversity more than gene transmission in specific, so I can't comment too much on exactly what you're getting at.

Fossil record: No really. I'm honestly asking if you're serious about there not being any transitional fossils. Fossils are rare in their own right, and the conditions for fossil formation aren't something we'd expect to see everywhere all the time, as the climate and earth conditions have been changing since the Earth formed. That being said, we have vast quantities of them, more than is enough to justify common descent. This literally takes about 30 seconds on google to see. I'll link two pages that are pretty basic in getting the point across, but there are tons of articles and studies that have thoroughly trashed that old creationist canard you threw out abut 'transitional forms'.

http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC200.html
http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC200_1.html

And to answer your smaller question: Yes, the fossil record appears to say what we think it says, at this point in time. The only people that are so opposed to actually looking at the facts and studies from an objective view are the folks from crackpot organizations like the Institute for Creation Research and carm.org. The people that have a vested interest in convincing people their pre-supposed conclusions are true. They appropriate scientific terminology and the labcoats, and then utterly disregard the methods and processes of self-correction by which science is defined.

EDIT: responding to what you posted at the top of this page, it's not juvenile to question your methods of ascertaining probability. It's juvenile to stick your fingers in your ears and refuse to acknowledge that you have no mechanism of determining that possibility, while simultaneously refusing to provide probability for the existence of your god, which you claim is the force behind events in reality.