Quoted from Unbeliever, posted October 3rd, 2005, 1:47am at here
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If the world, and the life it contains, have been so well designed by a perfect creator, then why is it that 99.9 % of all the species that have ever existed have gone extinct? That would seem to me to be evidence quite contrary to the hypothesis of "Intelligent Design", wouldn't it?
Here's how they figured that: A mass extinction summary lecture from the University of North Carolina estimates that living creations are drawn from only fifty million species, but that fifty billion species may have lived on the planet. It estimates a background extinction rate (aside from the mass extinctions) at 2-4 families per million years*. The American Museum of Natural History says that scientists estimate that "at least" 99.9% of all spcecies of plants and animals that have ever lived are now extinct. The Permian-Triassic extinction **alone killed off about 90 percent of marine species and 70 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate species then alive.
*this is based on the assumption that animals have been living on this planet for millions of years, which I believe to be false. **this was likely the flood, since they say it was a world-wide catastrophic event. Likely many of the animals that were taken on the ark didn't survive afterward because of different climatic conditions. Whatever the cause of these deaths, it was because of a global catastrophy and had nothing to do with poor design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian-Triassic_extinction The Permian-Triassic (P-T or PT) extinction event, sometimes informally called the Great Dying, was an extinction event that occurred approximately 252 million years ago (mya), forming the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods. It was the Earth's most severe extinction event, with about 90 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species going extinct. For some time after the event, fungal species were the dominant form of terrestrial life.
At one time, this die-off was assumed to have been a gradual reduction over several million years. Now, however, it is commonly accepted that the event lasted less than a million years, from 252.3 to 251.4 MYA (both numbers ±300,000 years), a very brief period of time in geological terms. Organisms throughout the world, regardless of habitat, suffered similar rates of extinction, suggesting that the cause of the event was a global, not local, occurrence, and that it was a sudden event, not a gradual change.
Quoted from Christian, posted October 5th, 2005, 12:20am at here
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Then could you give me an example, of a transitional species between the animals without hair and the animals with hair. Since hair is a complex structure, there should be something transitional between no hair and hair.
Hair isn't that complex since it's non-living material. It's basically the same idea as scales, plumage, or any other kind of protective covering that can be shed. I'll see if I can look that up though.
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Well apparently you believe in abiogenesis as do most evolutionists, so let's discuss it. What you've said here doesn't apply to my quote since my quote referred to the length of time it would take an intelegent human being to build a model of a cell, using atoms built at a rate of one per minute. This has nothing to do with random chance and it would still take 50 million years. Surely any kind of chance mechanism would take much longer.
You are making a couple of assumptions here. The first is that a deliberate or intelligent process must be used, and the second is that such a process has a higher chance of success than trial and error. But even if an intelligent human is used in the example, humans learn by trial and error anyway. Whenever we design or invent something there are always going to be numerous failed attempts and designs that didn't work. Practically all human inventions came about this way. Nothing is going to come out perfect on the first try, and we are always improving on our existing inventions as time goes by.
A chance mechanism might actually have a higher rate of success than a deliberate design process due to variation. More variation means a higher probability that something will work, and sometimes you even end up with several end products that work just as well. This is something we see in nature all the time; there is more than one way something can be accomplished.
Besides in order for your analogy to hold up, it wouldn't just be ONE person working on it but MANY people at the same time. They also wouldn't be going straight to a modern cell with modern proteins, but would be working with what is already there from a previous design process, and so on. That is how real engineering works and how nature works as well. You wouldn't go up to someone who doesn't even know what electricity is and ask them to build you a computer, would you?
Also as far as what Unbeliever said, I think the point was that if there really was some kind of intelligent designer then why didn't he/she/it get it right the first time? Why would this designer have to allow so many species to go extinct if it knew what it was doing in the first place? If life were deliberately engineered we would not have to see any kind of extinction at all, rather the lifeforms would be perfectly designed to survive in all sorts of conditions. It's like I said above, if the designer had to engineer life by trial and error then it's really no different from everything having a naturalistic cause.
Besides in your two objections you are assuming the very conclusion you are trying to prove, which is circular reasoning. If the mesopotamian flood was really from Yahweh then it still indicates a serious lack of foresight on his part, or a really bad design as far as both the lifeforms and the climate are concerned. If God knew he was going to eventually flood the place to punish humans when he designed these lifeforms, he would have given them the ability to survive in an aquatic environment.
Last modified October 16th, 2005, 2:06am by Silencer
Hi Silencer, It's good to see you back. I've joined http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dBoard.cgi which seems like a pretty good forum since the people are basically friendly and there is a lot of conversation. There is also a "chat" feature which is pretty interesting. I'd rather debate there just so I don't have to keep going back and forth if you don't mind. This place is almost like a ghost town.
Debunking Apologetics! › Anti-Apologetics › Scientific Inaccuracies › Scientific errors list
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