Introducing Babacar

Babs
Mon, 04 May 2020 10:33:22 +0000
Conversation

First of all, thank you so much for sharing. I heard you on “Capturing Christianity” and I was challenged and intrigued. I went and bought the book, so I’ll be reading that amongst other things. I can’t help but want to use the opportunity to ask a scientist questions! I’m always wondering things so, may I ask you some questions? Please forgive my ignorance.

Regarding the interview on Capturing Christianity.

-I found your disillusionment with ID to be unclear. ID does push for science to confirm something that science can not currently confirm under naturalism. However, I think you were referring to fallacious proofs for ID. So could you clarify maybe using an commonly used example of ID? For example bacterial flagella.

-You gave a sort of rudimentary understanding for beginners on how to understand changes caused by evolution. “Rate x Time = Distance.” How DNA analysis works I don’t quite understand so I just have to take your word for it. The question I have regarding this is, how does this formula necessarily show parentage? Can you not take two things of separate origin and compare them for rate and distance and compute a time, despite the fact they are unrelated? Is there a danger of this becoming self-fulfilling? Perhaps a bad analogy would be two wax figures. You might compare the two and find them incredibly similar and also different. So you know the “distance” between the two, and perhaps you know the rate at which they can be remolded. Then you could calculate the time it would take for one to turn into the other, however this would not reflect the reality, if the one didn’t turn into the other. The reason I ask is that I figure I am missing something. A friend of mine did the evolution of “CD from a rock” in a class on evolution while in college just to beg this question. There may be a kind of relation that is not lineage. I suppose DNA somehow explains this, but I don’t know how.

Other stuff:

-Along those lines, why don’t we think that several evolutionary trees exist rather than just one leading back to one common ancestor? Don’t similar things evolve separately like fins, and stripes?

-Many times I read in ID arguments or other Christian sources that genetically there are limits for how much something can change. So there is a kind of ceiling an organism hits and can go no further. Is that true? If so, is there a limit for how much an evolutionary tree or branch can grow?

-If we know the difference between chimp and human DNA, can we not conceivably reprogram a chimp into a human?

-I have thought for a long while that somehow our behavior might write to our genes somehow, hence the way we live effects our descendants. I don’t know of any proof of this and I wonder if anybody knows if there is proof one way or another? If it happens, how does that happen?

Thanks so much,

Babs

41 posts - 9 participants