Is belief or unbelief more reasonable?

Note this Bill claim comes immediately after I posted a model of the ground-up model for the evolution of avian flight. :slightly_smiling_face: Of course to Bill “testable” means having to repeat every last step in the million+ year history of flight evolution down to the molecular level.

Bill, can you think of any extant animals which have a step between non-flight and flight, like gliding?

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Right. Exactly. You didn’t answer my question, except implicitly: you do seem to assume that flight started when suddenly an utterly non-flying organism gave birth to a fully-adapted modern bird. That is, that all those genetic changes happened at the same time.

Rather, an insect perhaps developed some flatter limbs and found that that allowed it to somewhat direct its fall when it fell out of a tree or off a rock, and that that allowed it to hunt prey or avoid predators. Over multiple generations, that adaptation came to dominate the population based on natural selection, and the insects with the broadest limbs were more successful. And so on.

The evolution of flight - which occurred multiple independent times with different organisms of different scales at different times - occurred across multiple generations of very small adaptations being selected for, not by one single leap.

The point stands: when you don’t understand evolution, the thing you debunk is not evolution, and your debunking is irrelevant to evolution.

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Here it comes right on cue folks. The old hoary “what good is half a wing!” Creationist gem. :laughing:

Here is a 15 year old paper testing the WAIR (wing assisted inclined running) model for the evolution of avian flight. Note the authors specifically state how their work tests the hypothesis, something Bill swears doesn’t exist. :slightly_smiling_face:

What Use Is Half a Wing in the Ecology and Evolution of Birds?

Abstract: The use of incipient wings during ontogeny in living birds reveals not only the function of these developing forelimbs in growing birds’ survival but also the possible employment of protowings during transitional stages in the evolution of flight. When startled, juvenile galliform birds attempt aerial flight even though their wings are not fully developed. They also flap their incipient wings when they run up precipitous inclines, a behavior we have described as wing-assisted incline running (WAIR), and when they launch from elevated structures. The functional benefit of beating these protowings has only recently been evaluated. We report the first ontogenetic aerial flight performance for any bird using a ground bird, the chukar partridge ( Alectoris chukar ), as a model species. We provide additional ontogenetic data on WAIR, a recently described locomotor mode in which fully or even partially developed flapping forelimbs are recruited to increase hindlimb traction and escape performance. We argue that avian ancestors may have used WAIR as an evolutionary transition from bipedal locomotion to flapping flight.

From the paper:

As a rebuttal to [Darwin’s (1859)] explanation of the origin and diversification of life, St. George Jackson [Mivart (1871)] posed a challenge: “What use is half a wing?” With this simple question, Mivart challenged Darwin to explain the adaptive role of intermediate forms within an evolutionary continuum, prompting Darwin to expand on the concept of functional shifts within structural continuity ([Gould 1985]). This concept of transitional functional and structural stages is the basis for exaptation, an integral component of modern evolutionary theory ([Gould and Vrba 1982]). A response to Mivart’s question is that if the wing of a flying bird is a product of small, gradual structural changes, these transitional forms must have had some function during the evolution of powered flight. But how do we assign and test a hypothetical function or propose an adaptive value for a transitional form that we find preserved only in the fossil record? This dilemma has spurred volumes of publications on the origin of flight, which have characteristically centered around two well-entrenched schools of thought. The first, known as the arboreal theory, proposes that flight evolved from tree-dwelling ancestors and predicts a gliding intermediate phase ([Marsh 1880], [Bock 1965], [1985], [Feduccia 1996], [2005], [Xu et al. 2003]). The other, known as the cursorial theory, considers ancestral birds to be terrestrial dinosaurs that developed powered flight “from the ground up” ([Williston 1879], [Nopsca 1907], [Ostrom 1979], [Caple et al. 1983], [Chatterjee 1997]. However, none of the historical theories regarding the evolution of avian flight adequately explains the functional value of a transitional wing to a protobird.

Perhaps new insight into this arena can be gained from studies on the behavior and ontogeny of extant species, both juveniles and adults, that exhibit locomotor patterns similar to those of avian ancestors (i.e., cursorial bipeds). Extant animals represent models relevant to explaining the functional strategies of intermediate ancestral forms because of the similarities between ontogenetic wing structures and the wings of potential transitional forms. More simply, where else can one find an incipient avian wing but on a baby bird? Thus, extant ontogenetic transitional forms provide observable, logical functional explanations of putative adaptive intermediate stages, as required for hypotheses structured in a historical-narrative arena ([Bock 1985]), and only by looking at these extant models can we take origin hypotheses into the experimentally testable realm. In this article, we explore the ontogeny of locomotor performance and its relationship to wing development in an extant model in order to gain insight into the origin of avian flight.

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I am not debunking evolution. There is a solid theoretical basis for population genetics.

I am claiming that the origin of flight and other innovations are not part of modern evolutionary theory. Common descent explains similarities as reproduction produces similar features. Common descent does not explain the innovative differences is animals.

I have not made this assumption. Time, generations and populations cannot explain the origin of large novel functional DNA sequences. An intelligent Creator of the diversity of life can.

Like always the scientific evidence presented shows you’re dead wrong. Would it hurt you to once, just once, do a little research before making these frankly silly Creationist claims?

Of course they can when you consider well known evolutionary processes. Your lack of knowledge about the basics of evolutionary biology doesn’t make all our scientific understanding magically vanish.

So can invisible magic pixies. But since there is no positive evidence for the magic pixies or an Intelligent Creator we have no reason to consider them.

It’s your argument and it assumes only two supernatural options. Ha.

Not begging the question to answer which one I’d choose based on logic. Stop arguing with yourself so much. :rofl:

OK, I can only get so far with someone so unskilled and uninterested in basic logic.

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I have already shown that if a god - any god - enters the picture, all gods must enter. When all gods enter, only ONE GOD remains. The God of the Hebrews, the Christian God. I have also included the logic.

Why should @thoughful not assume the Christian God in her argument which is built on logic? Her argument is logically legitimate. Yours is not.

Your logic analysis fails.

Is this thread still open?

If so it seems to have covered a lot of ground that cropped up in the “Introducing Boris” Badenoff thread.

Unbelief is the natural position to take on any claim until something has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The existence of God has not only not been proved, no evidence has ever been given for the existence of God. Therefore unbelief or atheism is the natural position to take on the God question.

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While I don’t disagree with where you end up, I would say that as an ex-lawyer I find that these notions of such things as “beyond a reasonable doubt” and “burden of proof” and whatnot are strange intrusions of legalism into other forms of reasoning. I think most of us believe, or think we believe, things on more of a “preponderance of the evidence” standard, if we’ve got to borrow the terminology from the law: we believe something when we think it is more likely true than false. Of course, we believe some things more strongly than others, and if we are good at this, we scale that to how good the evidentiary support is.

I think the question whether there are any gods or not is an empirical question, on which we should expect evidence which is both competent and relevant. The question of the existence of any particular god seems to me to be something on which the proponent of a proposition does bear what we lawyers call the “burden of persuasion,” which is not quite the same thing as “burden of proof.” But in any event, terms like “proof” are only of use to those who imagine that they can construct wholly philosophical, logical arguments which demonstrate the existence or non-existence of the gods. In the law, we do use “proof” to mean something like “persuasion,” but in philosophy it ordinarily means something more like a logical demonstration as opposed to an empirical one.

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I was just answering the question. It appears this site is rather boring without Boris. An atheist is not a person who says they can prove there is no God. An atheist is just a person who has noticed that the evidence for the existence of God is on the same level as the evidence for the existence of leprechauns, werewolves and invisible pink unicorns. There fixed it.

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While others would disagree with your characterization of that evidence, I don’t disagree with it. But I would just point out that the notion of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” is hardly on point when the question is whether there is, indeed, any competent evidence at all. And if I were 90% convinced there was a god, instead of 0%, I would “believe” but I would also have to concede that such belief is not “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

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There is plenty of evidence for unicorns. The Indian rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis) can even be observed at many zoos.

It is not surprising that the translators of the KJV Bible in 1611 applied the term unicorn to what they thought might be such an animal in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament.

And then there are werewolves:

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Nope, that’s wrong. The translators also believed in fire breathing dragons, cockatrices, satyrs, fiery serpents, demons and witches. Many people suffered needlessly because of the Christians’ belief in the last two. You’re a retired minister? Are you going to claim you don’t believe in those things?

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FYI Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. and Henry Hull were not real werewolves.

But what about David Naughton and Russell Tovey?

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Yeah! I SAW David Naughton change. No phoney-baloney slow fade between multiple frames with different amounts of facial hair. Plus, I think I’ve been to that pub he visited.