@swamidass I hope you can see why I hedged with the “unless provoked”!
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@anon46279830 (and @swamidass) , I can sure see why you hedged your statement.
Something was strange about how you were categorizing natural events… all without being willing to accept “macro-evolution” or “common descent” … so obviously we all needed to find out exactly what you were thinking about.
So which scenario do you prefer for the Cambrian period?
1] God engaging in serial Special Creations?
2] Alien virus installing some or all of its genetic sequence into key life forms?
3] Arrival of octopus eggs from deep space?
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That said, such a situation could still involve natural descent, but that would not be where the key modification would come from. Take the gap between a fish and an amphibian. What if over the course of thirty or forty generations God acted to put just enough changes in each generation that they would still be able to be birthed and bred by natural means but each generation would also be further toward the amphibian end of things? This so that even though no amphibian was created out of thin air, or clay, one still had a very different creature though only forty generations removed from the fish. That result would be due to genetic engineering moving things a bit further along each generation. That is “descent with modification” but the modification that matters is via genetic engineering. So is that evolution, special creation and intelligent design all rolled up into one?
So, are you saying that God can nudge the mutations along (which is, after all, the point of God-Guided Evolution), until God’s evolution creates amphibians from fish?
Or:
Are you saying that the first amphibian must be one of God’s Specially Created templates?
Maybe you can define “God-Guided” evolution? I was thinking on the lines of the top one there and the example was a “might” not a “must”. To me, what I am describing here is both creationism and evolution. Just not evolution through strictly “natural” means. Whether we have the tools to detect the interventions is an open question. Perhaps we can only hope to find “anomalies” cause undetermined.
Well, until you posted your recent explanation, I was pretty sure we either had Godless Evolution, or God-Guided Evolution where crucial mutations (or even a series of mutations) were created in various genomes at just the right time… using Natural Selection and Common Descent principles to process the populations in question towards the desired, Divine, end points.
But then you established a second kind of Divine Engagement, which (while God-Guided) is not really Evolution:
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God Specially Creates templates at various times, from which minor evolution (not macro-evolution) may create varieties with no major or dramatic shifts in form/function.
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From a high-view of the process, this approach creates a fossil record that looks like Nature produce the big jumps in speciation (via Common Descent and Natural Selection) - - but it is not actually how it happened.
So… excluding any Young Earth options, we have three approaches for interpreting the fossils in an
Old Earth context:
1] Godless Evolution
2] God-Guided Evolution
3] Special Creation of templates for key shifts in Phyla, Class, Order, with room for minor changes via
Natural Selection. [< in other words, there is only Common Descent within kinds of animals, not
Common Descent leading from one kind to another kind.]
Thoughts?
#3 best describes my beliefs, with the caveat about the mixed process which I outlined above.
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If creatures came from the ark then the uniqueness of marsupial dominance in australia etc needs to be explained in YEC models.
i insist its easily explained by changing classification.
the marsupials are just the same creatures as elsewhere but adapted, in minor ways, with like triats called marsupial traits.
Thats why you have such glorious likeness in marsupisal lions, wolves, mice, etc with lions, wolves, mice elsewhere.
Its just that simple and obvious. likewise this concept has other examples in the fossil record.
another famous one being the Iipopterns (sp).
And you think this explains why ONLY mammals with such traits made it to Australia after the ark but BEFORE Australia drifted into the ocean?
Hardly.
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The creatures called marsupials are only a post flood adaptation. Its possible there were some befiore the flood but its just a minor change in reproduction mostly. A few other things also.
I think the change to marsupoalism was simply to increase reproduction rates. so those moving into S america also had it happen. there was timelines before the waters rose a little to stop migrations of creatures.
They were to obey gods command to refill the earth and be quick.
its so easy to see marsup[als as just tweeked placentals. no reason to invoke glorious convergent evolution to explain perfect similarity between types of "marsupials/placentals).
Reductionist science better explains this .
I did write a eassy called “Post Flood Marsupial Migration Explained” by Robert Byers. Just google.
No… @Robert_Byers… that is erroneous.
Marsupials in Australia can be traced back to mammals of the Dinosaur age… distinct from the mammals of the rest of the world.
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