The Problem with Christians

[AJW333]

Christianity is not science.  At the end of the day it is a matter of faith and reason. My reason to believe is multifaceted but I regard the Scripture as being accurate because of its ability to reliably predict the future.

So, if predictions are sufficient to believe in a thing, would you not then have to agree that the predictions that evolution makes- which unlike your scriptural ones are not simple post hoc rationalizations made to retrofit the text to modern events, but actual predictions made before and unambiguously about a given event- that have all been proven true, are sufficient evidence to accept evolution?

The predictions of evolution are somewhat underwhelming. You could predict the evolution of fish to amphibious creatures that have legs, as a step in the evolutionary tree, but we still have creatures just like that today, eg the axolotl. If God actually created the axolotl, then your determination that it was part of an evolutionary step would be incorrect. I wouldn't regard that as much of a prediction.

I mean, if you want a prediction coming true, Tiktaalik is about as perfect an example as you'll ever get.

I would say that this is no better than the axolotl.

So why is it that the vague bible prophecies, that have to be self-servingly "interpreted" by religious figures to match, and which give you no evidence at all for the cause of those predictions,

Bible prophecies may seem vague to those who don't understand Biblical language. Isaiah 53 is hardly vague to me as it speaks quite clearly of the messiah 700 years before his arrival. Furthermore, there are codes embedded in this passage that authenticate its predictions.

 

....but an actual scientist that you can talk to right now making a specific prediction about what sorts of organisms they might find in a specific place in the fossil record if evolution were true, and then that same scientist going out and finding exactly that creature at exactly that place is not sufficient to accept evolution? Are predictions good enough or not?

Weren't you one of those who were critical of my wife's dream predicting a future event with precision, along with her sister having the same dream on virtually the same night? I would deem that to be far more impressive than retrospectively "predicting" a fossil type. I could also point out the fact that there are scant numbers of intermediates in the fossil record. Does their absence mean nothing?

 

before[/i] you ask it, especially if you're phrasing it as a sort of gotcha question that you think doesn't have an answer, because if it turns out that there is an answer, then all your confidence is going to look as though it was borne of ignorance, rather than intellectual rigor. In this case it's particularly embarrassing because your question suggests that you think Neanderthal is the only progenitor species we know of, which hasn't been true for at least fifty years: we actually have a pretty clear ancestral record, for humans. In fact, we can chart the development of the Homo genus from the great apes, all the way back to the basal primate species some 65 million years ago, and we did this through observation, repeatable testing, and examination of the evidence.

I read the article and it posits that we evolved from apes. What did apes evolve from? I would like to see the 5 steps from human,s working back along the evolutionary tree. Can you point me to an article that shows me what came before the apes and what was before that?