Really? Which part of that passage says the Sun was created after the earth was already formed?
“14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so. 16 Then God made two great [d]lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also."
I suck at probability theory, so I might spill occasional mumbo jumbo here. However, let’s clarify what the terms in that probability expression represent because it seems to you are conflating them.
P(H|E) means the probability of a hypothesis (H) given (|) some piece of evidence (E). GAE is the hypothesis here, not the evidence, so that makes the above probability expression look like this:
P(GAE | E)
Now thats out of the way, please present the lines of evidence, “E”, for GAE.
I agree, but AFAIK there is no evidence for any of the claims of GAE, which include a de novo creation of AE, genetic admixture between their descendants and POGs etcetera.
Biological evolution (BE) in itself is neutral to the idea of a literal AE or Christianity as a whole. BE can be defined as a process that causes heritable changes within a population over a given amount of time. Nothing in that definition unsettles a literal AE. What clashes with a number of literal AE versions is our evolutionary history: our common descent with chimps/bonobos from primitive ape ancestors.
Our evolutionary history does nothing to a figurative AE or AE according to GAE, but it clashes with AE models like the YEC type.
The body of work for GAE is not evidence, but the collection of its claims. GAE is a composite hypothesis whose truth status depends on its components.
P(GAE|E) = P(de novo AE|E) + P(descendant admixture with POGs|E) + … P(H|E)
How you got this twisted baffles.
That common human ancestor had ancestor as well, but a literal de novo AE according to GAE doesn’t. If Grandma got to know of this, she might just smack you on the back of your head.
This is horrendously irrelevant to whether GAE is true or not.
No it doesn’t, for the simple fact that these recent common ancestor had ancestors as well, which is not the case for a literal AE according to GAE. Even mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam had ancestors. Its descent from ancestors all the way.
I think you are overlooking the major goal of GAE which is to show the possibility of a literal de novo created AE serving as ancestors to all modern humans, by having their lineages mix with the lineages of POGs. Both are claims, not evidence.
You are swimming in an ocean of confusion. There isn’t a shred of evidence to even suggest a literal AE existed or are ancestral to all present humans. The hypothesis is still extremely unlikely.
Your answer lies in the boldened parts. “Greater light” is generally interpreted as a reference to the sun, and the “lesser” light as a reference to the moon.
The sun is older than the earth, and was already hitting the earth’s atmosphere and surface with its radiation (including visible light) millions of years before the earth morphed into its final, present form. However, according to the above Bible verse, the sun began to shine it’s light on the earth on the fourth day of creation, since God “made” it in that day (whatever day means). That’s a massive contradiction between this literal reading and the data on the evolution of our sun.
In addition, the fact that the author of Genesis distinguished the sun (a star) from other stars indicates that author or God himself didn’t really know what he was talking about. All stars create energy from fusion reactions in their core and the sun is no exception.
When you are told the Bible is not a science textbook or is not meant to serve as a historical record of origins, you have take that caveat seriously.
I think you have a seriously muddled understanding of Bayesian probability and started to write out why, but it doesn’t seem likely to be worth the bother. A brief statement: Bayesian reasoning is a very imperfect model for human reasoning about probabilities, and trying to impose Bayesian reasoning as a prescriptive standard doesn’t work.
This conclusion appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the statements you just quoted. You quote people who are disagreeing with you about what they think and blandly assert that they’re actually supporting your position.
I’d say it’s trivially false rather than important. Hypotheses are judged by their truth or falsity.
At this point your assertions have become completely detached from reality. No oceanographer would do anything differently if she learned that there might be other oceans in some parallel world. Oceanographers study the ocean they have access to.
Look, it’s fine if the modeling behind GAE provides evidence for you for Christianity, given your own prior beliefs, but what’s getting you into trouble is trying to make that into an objective reality that should apply broadly. It’s not.
By “consequences” I hope that you are referring to empirical predictions in a muddled way. If you are referring to the consequences of accepting or rejecting them…just wow.
If you truly believe that it’s so important to take these particular passages literally (except, of course, when the chapters literally contradict each other), why aren’t you reading it in the original Hebrew?
But the number of wrong things will be greatly numbered by the number of right things, because science, unlike pseudoscience, is self-correcting.
When was the last time you publicly admitted being wrong, Edgar?
We already say this. You don’t have to wait 100 years to see that this is already how we see our current knowledge.
That isn’t true at all. Mice and rats are more common in function, physiology, and physical characteristics than humans and chimps. But mice/rats are about 10x more different than humans/chimps in their genomes. That clarifies that the patterns we are seeing don’t match the what we expect from common function.
Every hypothesis is an (untested or poorly tested) claim and is proposed to explain how an event or set of events could have happened or happen. When GAE says a literal AE poofed into existence in some garden, were kicked out of that garden later on and had kids who went on to mate with POGs, making AE the common ancestor of all modern humans, its making claims. Of course, the goal of GAE is not to provide testable hypotheses or claims for scientists to check, but to show that that the idea of a literal AE as our ancestors can comfortably be held despite our shared ancestry with other extant organisms.
David keeps saying GAE is evidence for a biblical AE, but that is nonsense because GAE is no such thing. We know its a hypothesis, composed of several claims none of which are supported by positive evidence and that’s what I tried to point out in the comment you replied to.
PostScript: I made some errors here, which are acknowledged here. Note that the error continues until you get these linked comment. Thanks.
When pressing someone on this point, it is helpful to acknowledge places where you also have admitted error. As for me, I have a long erratum on my book.
That’s strange. Where is the positive evidence for a de novo creation of AE or the mixing of their lineages with those of POGs?
I don’t see how.
A biochemist screens a set of peptides to see if they can modulate some physiological process called X. Luckily, one peptide is a hit, but he is at loss as to how the peptide worked its magic. The next thing he does is what every scientist does when faced with an observation they understand little about: he formulates several hypotheses to explain how the peptide worked. Each hypothesis he comes up with it is essentially a claim that needs to be tested to see if it holds up.
I could be getting it all wrong though, so clarify on how I missed it.
There are several claims. Some are not supported with positive evidence, others are. Just because one claim is not supported with positive evidence, does not mean all the claims are not supported with positive evidence.
That would be a good place to slow down and learn how science is practiced by actual scientists.
For starters, most hypotheses embed multiple claims at once, and auxiliary hypothesis are often tacitly included. Also, hypothesis are not always about how events took place, but also if particular events took place, or if particular theories apply (without reference to events).
As I said before, the pronouncements from you with an air of authority are difficult to manage, because they often end up just as confused as the confusion you are attempting to correct. Please consider a more cautious and inquisitive approach.
I see one claim of GAE as supported: that it’s possible for a single couple living 6000 years ago to be ancestral to all humans living 4000 years ago. Are there others? And surely the claim of possibility is a weak claim that one shouldn’t call “positive evidence”. Positive evidence would be something that makes the claim that GAE existed likely, not just possible. Anything that’s just as good evidence for any randomly chosen couple of that age, or any pair of original humans, being ancestral to everyone is not positive evidence for GAE. Or so it seems to me.
GAE begins with a claim that has not a single line of evidence in support of it and that’s the de novo creation of AE. That alone makes the rest of GAE nothing more than a collection of assertions. It continues with other claims not equally supported by positive evidence like their creation in a garden, expulsion from that garden or wherever they were and the genetic mixing of their lineages with POG lineages etcetera. These are the underlying claims of GAE and all are pure assertions.
Since you say there are some other GAE claims that are positively supported, kindly list them. Let’s see if I was really applying strawman logic.
First, it seems we both agree a hypothesis is a claim which can be composed of sub-claims/sub-hypotheses. Good.
Second, I agree my definition of a hypothesis is false because I made it too restrictive with the qualifier “every”. I knew better, but failed to accurately portray that. Thanks for setting that straight.
I am usually cautious about the things I post here and certainly don’t push things with an air of authority. When I encounter topics completely out of my depth, I mostly sit by the sidelines and evaluate the arguments and evidence presented by both sides. However, if I know something about a topic or spot what I feel is incorrect, I voice it out if possible. I am also willing to acknowledge my mistakes as I have done here on several occasions.