samedi 29 octobre 2022

3b) they think the Egyptian defense was too good for a people to invade them + compression


Is Joseph = Imhotep Still Defensible? · So, Starting to Answer ... 1 & 5, 2, 3a ... · 3b) they think the Egyptian defense was too good for a people to invade them + compression

This one actually brings in the already mentioned 3a) argument as well, and is one of the articles linked to.

Did the Exodus lead to the Hyksos Invasion?
Was Egypt completely destroyed by the events of the Exodus?
by Gary Bates, 28.X.2020
https://creation.com/exodus-hyksos-invasion


It states two things on the issue of 3b, namely:

First:

After the Hebrews left it seems that Pharaoh made a hasty decision to chase them. If so, there is no way that there was time to assemble all the garrisons encamped elsewhere from all over Egypt. Anyone should be able to reasonably understand the implausibility of being able to gather ‘the whole army’ from ‘the whole country’ to pursue them. What country keeps its entire army in one location? Rather it was the chariots and horsemen at his disposal who were able to do this. Chariots were very expensive to make. Egypt had limited resources of wood and some of the chariots preserved in museums today show they were made of elm wood from the eastern and northern Mediterranean. Given that the Egyptian chariots formed part of Pharaoh’s elite forces (perhaps due to their expense), it might be plausible that the entirety of his chariots were located near Pharaoh’s palace at the time. Exodus 14:7 does seem to indicate it was all of his chariots which were 600 in total.


Gary Bates' Conclusion:
Egypt was not sufficiently weakened for a wholesale Hyksos invasion over all of the country.

Second:

The Hyksos did not take over the whole country of Egypt. If the whole of Egypt was decimated and defenceless due to the Exodus, why did they limit themselves to just the northern part of the country ruling from what was called Avaris (which was later built upon and called Pi-Rameses)? Native Egyptian rule continued over large parts of the country, although it was mainly confined to central Egypt with their capital at Thebes (modern day Luxor). So, ‘Egypt’ was never destroyed or completely subjugated by the Hyksos.


Well, what if these two match and cancel out?

Hyksos did not invade all of the country because the land was not sufficiently weakened, but they did invade the North because:

  • a) an élite force was knocked out
  • b) the Pharao was dead
  • c) and the Pharao's oldest son was also dead.


We are not just speaking of the impact of an eliminated élite force. We are speaking of other fortresses in the North being swept along with the Hyksos because they had neither the recent pharao nor any successor for him.

Meanwhile, other parts of Egypt were not subdued and as Gary Bates himself states:

During the Hyksos occupation of mainly northern Egypt (lower Nile) Ahmose, the first Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty (New Kingdom) ran them out of the country and subsequent pharaohs even ruled and resided there.


It can be mentioned that, the Abydos King List, which really does go clearly into New Kingdom:

  • 1) has cartouches 62 to 65 where I would place pharaos before the Exodus (ending with 65 = Amenemhat IV = Moses)
  • 2) has cartouches 66 to 74 as 18th Dynasty (starting with Ahmosi I, the one who expelled the Hyksos.


The Saqqara Tablet omitted "rulers from the Second Intermediate Period, the Hyksos, and those rulers... who had been close to the heretic Akhenaten". Quoted from: Gerald Verbrugghe, John Moore Wickersham. Berossos and Manetho, Introduced and Translated. University of Michigan Press, 2001. Page 104.

The Turin King List ends before the 18th Dynasty - or continues beside it. No Ahmose I in sight.

The Medinet Habu king list and the Ramesseum king list are internal to the New Kingdom only.

And this means, a point raised in response to David Down and accepted by him need not be valid, see previous with linked to pdf:

JDA
Secondly, if you move the 12th dynasty forward 350 years, you have to move the rest of them forward by the same increment as well. This would place the New Kingdom (the 18th and 19th Dynasties) existing from roughly 1200 BC to 950 BC.
DD
Yes, it does mean that other dates have to be reduced and that includes the 18th dynasty, but that is a bonus because it brings Thutmosis III down to the time of Solomon and Rehoboam and identifies him as the Shishak of 1 Kings 14:25.


It is assumed by Gary Bates too:

Per the previous point, to accommodate the VIC, one has to compress the entire New Kingdom period and the 3rd IP down by some 500 years. We believe this is simply not possible. See my article on Egyptian Chronology, where I highlight how we have more information about the New Kingdom period of Egypt than any other period, for two reasons. (1) It was the wealthiest period of Egyptian history. The whole country was unified under a single rule during this time with Thebes as the capital. (2) It was the most recent period of native Egyptian rule so we have more artifacts to go on. There are no missing pharaohs so we have a complete lineage and their details are exquisitely preserved in places like the Valley of the Kings, where the underground tombs have preserved the hieroglyphs from the harsh climate.


The statement is not substantiated by the referred to King Lists and also not by what wikipedians have had to say on the tombs of the Valley of Kings with 23 tombs or tomb like structures having unknown burials if any at all, and not all of the rest being pharaos, in King's Valley.

So, no, the "compression impossible" argument does not hold.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Day after Sts Simon and Jude
29.X.2022

PS As time compression argument was 4 on my list, I think my answer is here : yes, Joseph = Imhotep is still defensible. I do not need to revise my new tables./HGL

So, Starting to Answer ... 1 & 5, 2, 3a ...


Is Joseph = Imhotep Still Defensible? · So, Starting to Answer ... 1 & 5, 2, 3a ... · 3b) they think the Egyptian defense was too good for a people to invade them + compression

Take points 1 and 5 first.

1) Doesn't lead to any controversy with CMI. Nevertheless, the point I am coming from is, by the time of the Trojan War (which Christian scholars over centuries have seen as a real series of events, even if some explanations, like the magic about Achilles "invulnerability" would be misrepresented) carbon dates and real dates have started to merge.

This happened before King David, so, by the times of Solomon and Rohoboam, uniformitarians would no longer be misdating things from back then (other than slightly).

5) The most salient parts of the LXX chronology is of course Genesis 5 and 11, and the differences between Roman martyrology and Ussher after these times would be due to other things. Nevertheless, I do have some regard for scholars who did this calculation, notably St. Jerome, so, I would place Exodus in 1510 BC and the beginning of the soujourn 215 years earlier, 1725 BC. And I am here speaking of actual years, not misdating due to undue regards for carbon dating or Egyptian lore.

This brings us to beginning of the soujourn the number 2 in previous.

2) They put him under a Hyksos pharao. An Egyptian one, they argue, would have hated shepherds. Once they got an Egyptian one, the hatred for Hebrews took on.

My objections would be:
a) for reasons of that chronology, I am putting Joseph before any Hyksos pharaos;
b) the Egyptian hatred for shepherds dates from when, and how intermittent or durable was it?

So, for instance, would someone in the Old Kingdom already be hating shepherds (Djoser was in the Old Kingdom)?

3a) they think the Hyksos came with the chariots, so must have preceded the chariots of the pharao

My tables place the Exodus in the real year 1510 BC, but in the space between carbon years 1671 and 1618 BC, these being my values for the real years 1521 and 1498 BC, 11 years before and 12 years after the Exodus.*

This means the Hyksos could well have arrived with chariots and if they were Amalecites, this could be pharaos who did not know Joseph.

The problem is, these values come in a table where the salient years at the start and end with nodes are 1590 at birth of Moses and 1470 at taking of Jericho, and I posed Sesostris III as dying at the birth of Moses. This is based on ...

Searching for Moses
by David Down | This article is from
Journal of Creation 15(1):53–57, April 2001
https://creation.com/searching-for-moses


and when trying to find it right now, I saw there had been some debates on it ...

I think I'll pause and see how that debate went.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Day after Sts Simon and Jude
29.X.2022

PS, after pause** : 1) David Down's view on Exodus need not be linked (though it was in his case) to his wholesale acceptance of Velikovsky's chronology, taught under Sir Colin Renfrew in Cambridge, apparently; 2) he wanted to have Thutmosis III as Shishak; 3) both he and his critics assumed:

JDA
Secondly, if you move the 12th dynasty forward 350 years, you have to move the rest of them forward by the same increment as well. This would place the New Kingdom (the 18th and 19th Dynasties) existing from roughly 1200 BC to 950 BC.
DD
Yes, it does mean that other dates have to be reduced and that includes the 18th dynasty, but that is a bonus because it brings Thutmosis III down to the time of Solomon and Rehoboam and identifies him as the Shishak of 1 Kings 14:25.


My tables are on the contrary assuming a compression between 12th and - for instance - 22nd dynasties, with - for instance - Shoshenq I still as Shishak.

I have not so far taken into account the possibility of a compression this far on. Except in much earlier versions of my tables, where the meeting point of carbon and real is more like Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. Which is too late./HGL

* Creation vs. Evolution : New Tables
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/08/new-tables.html

** Pdf from 2006:
https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j20_1/j20_1_43-44.pdf

vendredi 28 octobre 2022

Is Joseph = Imhotep Still Defensible?


Is Joseph = Imhotep Still Defensible? · So, Starting to Answer ... 1 & 5, 2, 3a ... · 3b) they think the Egyptian defense was too good for a people to invade them + compression

CMI has over a few articles accumulated a few objections. They prefer the idea of Joseph's pharao being a Hyksos pharao.

They could of course have notified me, when I was notifying them on my tables, a few times even I think.

Now it's a few years' delay, and I am confronted with it at once. Following article and some it leads on to:

Is CMI confusing Egyptian chronology?
Feedback archive → Feedback 2022
https://creation.com/confusing-cmi-egyptian-chronology


1) For starters, I do not endorse any other synchrony than Shishak = Shoshenk.

2) Second, here is the first divergence. I put Joseph, as Imhotep, under Djoser (also called Geser or Zozer).

They put him under a Hyksos pharao. An Egyptian one, they argue, would have hated shepherds. Once they got an Egyptian one, the hatred for Hebrews took on.

3) I have endorsed the idea that the Exodus led to the Hyksos invasion = Amalecite invasion.

They oppose this based on their view on 2, but also for two other reasons:

a) they think the Hyksos came with the chariots, so must have preceded the chariots of the pharao;
b) they think the Egyptian defense was too good for a people to invade them.

4) I endorse the idea, Egyptian chronology is decent from New Kingdom on (after both Hyksos and Exodus), but too ill documented before that to get a real argument against compression with Bible and my carbon dating tables.

They say that the chronology is too well established to allow such compression.

5) For Biblical chronology, they use Masoretic, I use Roman Martyrology, a version of LXX chronology.

If they are right, I have some recalibration to remake in my tables. Stephan Borgehammar warned me a few years ago, but referred to source material I could not get at unless basically buying books, which my situation does not allow. The sites he linked to have been less upfront on the arguments than CMI are.

Meanwhile, this is a preliminary opening on the questions, I'll wait to later with answering.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Sts Simon and Jude
28.X.2022

jeudi 20 octobre 2022

No True Sc...


No True Sc... · To Show that Creationists Too are True Sc ...

I was debating on French Quora with Olivia Williams who disputed that "consistent Christianity" even existed, let alone implied YEC. Here is a meme she brought up ...



I wonder, isn't there some kind of occasion when Evolution believers and Heliocentrism believers and a few more are doing such a fallacy ...?

There is another word than Scotsman that begins with Sc...

Scientist? /HGL

samedi 15 octobre 2022

But of Course Astrophysics is a Science, Right ...?


New blog on the kid: Deflating a Star Size, Again, or Two · What Would an Astrophysicist Object, and Why Don't I Buy It? · Supernova of Kepler - 20 000 light years away? · Crab Nebula · Creation vs. Evolution: "Beams of Distant Starlight" · But of Course Astrophysics is a Science, Right ...?

Like the Gravitation of a Black Hole is and remains a thing which can suck everything in and let nothing out ... or can it?

Astronomers baffled by black hole burping out spaghettified star years after eating it
By Ben Turner 14.X.2022
https://www.livescience.com/black-hole-pukes-up-star-three-years-later


But AT2018hyz is unusual: Not only did it wait for three years after snacking on the star to emit a flash, but the speed of the material sent flying from its mouth is staggering. Most TDE outflows travel at 10% the speed of light, but the ejected star matter of AT2018hyz is traveling as fast as 50% the speed of light.


Obviously, the 50 % of light speed is by a speed obtained by distance / time. And while the time can be observed (with delay), the distance is calculated by really complex things, one of them being Earth moving around the Sun, and certain regularly observed movements of stars therefore being parallactic in relation to Earths movement.

Let's try to see what the distance is supposed to be compared to what it is ...

A light year is
9,460,800,000,000 kilometers.*
The black hole is closer, namely just
665,000,000 kilometers from us.**

665,000,000 / 9,460,800,000,000 = 0.000,070,290,038,897,3 of a light year.

A light day would be ...
1 / 365.2425 = 0.002,737,907,006,988,5 of a light year.

Oh, here is a problem which reduction to a light day will not solve ...

In fact, the black hole is much closer to us than one light day.

0.000,070,290,038,897,3 (of a light year) / 0.002,737,907,006,988,5 (of a light year) = ratio of 0.025,672,909,531,947,166,8

It's just two point five percent of a light day away. It's much closer than Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 (though not in the same direction, no doubt).

This means, we have seen bright, luminous matter make the speed of 50 % of the speed of light ...

And this means, some things in astrophysics need to be reconsidered, again.

So, astrophysics is not a set science, it is in fact a philosophy where conclusions are very provisoric, and therefore, the astrophysics case cannot be made against my view on the universe. While I think stars are each day going 618 % 628 % of the speed of light around us, this would not refer to their speed through the aether, but with the aether. Which imposes a speed limit on movement through itself, but has no speed limit itself.

I did not actually expect to see the observation confirmed even within my framework. It was.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Theresa of Avila
15.X.2022

Albae, in Hispania, sanctae Teresiae Virginis, quae Fratrum ac Sororum Ordinis Carmelitarum arctioris observantiae mater exstitit et magistra.

* Source
NASA : Exoplanets : What is a light-year?
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/faq/26/what-is-a-light-year/

** Source
Black hole “burps up” the remnants of the star with a delay
13.10.2022
https://universemagazine.com/en/black-hole-burps-up-the-remnants-of-the-star-with-a-delay/

jeudi 13 octobre 2022

"Beams of Distant Starlight"


New blog on the kid: Deflating a Star Size, Again, or Two · What Would an Astrophysicist Object, and Why Don't I Buy It? · Supernova of Kepler - 20 000 light years away? · Crab Nebula · Creation vs. Evolution: "Beams of Distant Starlight" · But of Course Astrophysics is a Science, Right ...?

Keaton Halley in a response to feedback* said:

Unfortunately, however, Plantinga does claim that evolution is compatible with Christianity. Is this because he has sufficiently answered the many points of incompatibility that creationists have raised? No. For the most part, Plantinga doesn’t even interact with creationist arguments or the many biblical texts that contradict evolution. In fact, he displays his utter ignorance of creationist literature when he claims that we believe God created the world with built-in fossils and beams of distant starlight (p. 10).


I have indeed not seen any Young Earth Creationist writer (perhaps some pastor making a sermon transscript available) presenting God as creating the world with built-in fossils.

However, my introduction to systematic creation science was a book by one Edgar Andrews. It was Ur Intet, a translation of two writings, that later on in English, after the Swedish example, were published together - From Nothing to Nature. The publication date for this English one volume access to the two writings was 1989, and by then I had left SSHL after completing 12th grade, done two years of university and was starting my military service. The Swedish volume Ur Intet was given me as a birthday present back when I was in ninth or tenth grade, by my mother. I was fifteen in 1983 and 16 in 1984. When I first read it, I had not yet planned on becoming Catholic, and by the end of 1984, I was "down that rabbit hole,"** after revising what I thought I knew about the Inquisition.

Now, in that book, one possibility (cited as such) for distant starlight was precisely beams of distant starlight built-in into creation, or starlight created in transit.

Considering this the only option Creationism has to deal with "Distant Starlight Paradox" is ignorant, but presenting it as one option actually given is not.

My own view is stars were close in creation week, one light day up, and perhaps still are so now. Indeed, this gives an elegant explanation to why the week has seven days with one day of rest. While the light of one star takes 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds and some to reach earth, the star itself is making 6.2831853 times this distance around Earth and is in the same spot as it was 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds before, while its light from then is observed. The distance of the radius, the distance covered by light in 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds, corresponds to week days with work and the fact that the seventh of them is less than half complete means that the Lord's day must have the work burden reduced. Note also, 2π after the obvious 6.28 (twice affirming Exodus 3.14) has decimals that involve 318 (the men of Abraham) or 53 (Hail Mary's in a Third of the Rosary).

This would be impossible if the 0.76 arc seconds in comparison to the c. 20 arc seconds back and forth per year of alpha Centauri were a parallax in relation to aberration - but quite possible if they are instead a proper movement, performed by angels, and Earth shall not be moved.

Other example, when it comes to Dating, the views of Setterfield are sometimes described as the ultimate or only go-to, these implying, apart from another solution to the Distant Starlight (speed of light was higher) also that the decay rates were faster. Again, Andrews can help to answer this, in this case not to say "it exists" (though he may have done that too) but to say there is another solution. One I partly endorse. In the time of the Flood, carbon 14 levels in the atmosphere were much lower, they have risen since then.

However, I do not think we have not yet reached a stable level of carbon 14, rather that we did reach it by part of the time having a faster build-up of carbon 14 levels than now. Between Flood and Fall of Troy in medium c. 5 times faster, but starting out 10 times faster.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Coloman of Stockerau
13.X.2022

* https://creation.com/plantinga-conflict-evolution
cited in
https://creation.com/epistemic-abyss-naturalistic-evolution
** Somewhat irreverent way of putting it, it is after all the Church that Christ founded!

dimanche 9 octobre 2022

What Does Creation Mean - Answering Carl Krieg


New blog on the kid : What is the Common Providence · Creation vs. Evolution : What Does Creation Mean - Answering Carl Krieg

I just saw part 7, and now am going back to part 6 of Carl Krieg on Progressive Christianity (dot org), here:

Fifty Years Later – Part 6
What does Creation Mean?
by Carl Krieg on September 22, 2022
https://progressivechristianity.org/resources/fifty-years-later-part-6/


Even fifty years ago, whatever creation means, it does not mean that in seven days God brought the universe into being out of nothing. That story was written by the priests while the nation of Israel was in captivity in Babylon. The pervasive fear was that the Babylonian gods were more powerful than YHWH, God of Israel, and the Priestly story was presented as an affirmation of faith and comfort. God, our God, is the only God, who, on the first day created….and this God loves us even though we are captives in a foreign land.


This is what is called a "just-so-story" - there is no document saying the creation story of Genesis or any of Genesis was written originally by anyone in Babylon, the one type of ancient indication we get is that Moses wrote it down several centuries before such a captivity occurred, nearly a millennium earlier. Obviously, it could be used like here suggested either way.

More generally, we may ask, why is there suffering and evil in the world if God is in control? My answer then was to say that in God’s omnipotence, God chose not to be omnipotent. There is suffering in the world because God chose not to interfere in the course of nature, does not perform miracles that contradict this course of nature, and does not answer petitionary prayer that asks God to violate this course of nature. That was the only consistent approach. Otherwise, why would God stop some tornadoes but not others? heal some people but not others?


I would say, there is another consistent approach - God choses to exempt one thing from being directly and totally controlled by His will. That thing being created free wills.

There is no law of nature against God healing every sickness in every hospital right now. There is a certain lack of miracle workers who God could confide the task to while at the same time making them courageous witnesses to truth. And with some experience of standing up for truth, I understand this lack very much - it is difficult to confront error whenever one is around, and even more difficult to do it orally offline. God choses those who work miracles of healing because they do some other work of His too, usually. Christ healing lepers was witnessing to truth and to His being God, and source for God's forgiveness of sins. And that His Church was the fulfilment of the latter half of Jeremiah 33. Next large scale miracle workers will probably be the two witnesses - who will also work punitive miracles over collective injustices. See Apocalypse 11.

Asking for a miracle is not asking God to violate laws of nature or violate anything else He respects.

But answering such a prayer at a given moment or not is a question of God making such and such a person's story right, in the case of those who get saved.

Why would God not stop the tornados of late 2004? Well, the area was one with lots of sexual sin involving prostitution (even of children) and contraception, and it was known to many tourists in that capacity.

But if you say that God does not directly interfere in the natural process, how, then, does God get anything done in the natural world?


I would absolutely not say any such thing! God's palette, as said on the other essay, involves:

  • divine fiat, like creation days, creation of spiritual creatures, including after the creation days new human souls, turning of the universe around earth, forgiveness of sin, infusion of sanctifying grace, final beatificifation of a soul granted to see Him;
  • angels obeying Him, like sun and moon and some other planets getting driven around the zodiac or like people getting warned by their guardian angels from dangers,
  • demons defying Him, like when they remove some obstacle to a man by doing evil around another man who had chosen evil, or like when they show their fear of God (St. Christopher before a Cross, and that demon who told a wizard "don't you EVER send me after a Christian again!")
  • men using and abusing our freewill, a very varied colour on the palette;
  • natural processes under the control of any or all of above - thunder and lightning are obviously to some extent phenomena of electricity and hot air heated by it, and static electricity uploading slowly in clowds - but you cannot prove that a cloud absolutely had to unload precisely there and then rather than five seconds or five minutes earlier or later. The scholastic idea that demons have some power in these phenomena is not off the chart - it is actually somewhat underlined by Christ's anger when stilling the storm.


The answer was that although God does not interfere in nature, God does utilize natural processes to get things done. So God heals a person by guiding the doctor to do the right thing. But that line of reasoning goes nowhere. How does God guide the doctor?? Where does the chain of causality end? I had no idea.


First of all, God certainly does heal people miraculously still today, some people are diagnosed as incurable and then healed in Lourdes. Back when Tuberculose Peritonitis was a slow but fairly certain killer (before antibiotics), some such cases were healed in Lourdes.

But finding a doctor (or knowing a house cure that works) was in question here. Or generally speaking, the natural means (not just doctors) for any given end (not just getting well).

First, the line of causality is not one unbroken stream since the universe began, with everything causally decided for today being so through causes that left no other alternative since millions of years ago. God, angels and demons, human freewills are all of the time inserting new strands of causation in the causes studied by physics.

Second, supposing the line really went all the way back to creation, like storms being only physically caused (which as said I disagree with), CSL had an answer : God would have arranged all of the line of causation leading to one particular storm, leading to one particular shipwreck (like one without causalties on Malta) from the creation of the universe, it wouldn't be more difficult for Him than for you to arrange a line of metre to end in one particular rhyme. If you haven't, Carl Krieg, CSL has, Tolkien has, even I have.

On the cosmic scale and with regard to creation, God’s tool was evolution. That was how God created. It was easy to say that there is something rather than nothing because of the divine will, and also to say that how that something came to be was a natural process of evolution. There is no conflict, therefore, between science and Christianity. They speak of different dimensions of reality, the thatness, and the howness. That seemed like an acceptable solution.


It's not. Evolution has no howness for new cell types (remember that one celled organisms have one cell type, or perhaps a generational rotation of two cell types at the most, while beings supposed to have evolved from them have - in our case perhaps 200* - many different cell types) or the evolution of language (singular).**

Think of what we have discovered in the last fifty years:

There are trillions of galaxies. Trillions! The universe is expanding at an increasing rate, and we don’t know if it will ever stop. In the finite future, the outer reaches will have traveled out so far that their light will never reach us. We will never know that they existed. All we may ever know is our own galaxy. And it will be destroyed in its merging with the Andromeda galaxy.

There may be eleven or more dimensions. The protons, neutrons and electrons that we see make up only six per cent of the universe, the balance made up of dark energy and dark matter, about which we know absolutely nothing, other than that they exist.


Incredible how much one has to be credulous about to be incredulous about the true God!*** I don't believe in trillions of galaxies or in dark matter and dark energy. I do believe there is something about which we would even naturally know that it exists, and furthermore that it is good - God. Having revealed Himself, He has made sure more is available, thanks to Bible and Church Tradition. Including a universe created from nothing° and that as recently as little more than 7000 years ago.°°

And you know what? This is compatible with both all I know about scientific actual observations, and how God's providence interacts with what is already created. Both what I believe, and what I reject is compatible.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
18th Lord's Day after Pentecost
9.X.2022

* "Experts estimate that there are around 200 cell types in the human body."

Source : Medical News Today : What is a cell?
Medically reviewed by William C Lloyd III, MD, FACS — By Tim Newman — Updated on August 23, 2022
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320878


** The issue is confused because we say languageS (plural) "evolve" into other languageS and especially simply "evolve" all the time, but that is a misnomer for fashions, and especially it is no key at all to how language could have arisen in an evolutionary scenario.

*** Es ist unglaublich wie viel man glauben muß um ungläubig zu sein - Cardinal Faulhaber.

° 2 Machabees 7:28.

°° Historia scholastica and Roman Martyrology say Christ was born 5199 after Creation.

jeudi 6 octobre 2022

"But Random Mutations Aren't Really All That Random"


On Thomistic Institute, which has a Theistic Evolutionist stance (inconsistent with confessing that Adam and Eve existed, as they do), one video is put into the service of randomness actually being circumscribed by order. Which Uranium atom will decay when is random, but it is not random that it will become an atom of Thorium (in the case of Uranium 235 becoming Thorium 231), it will for instance not turn into a rabbit. That we very well do know, that is not random at all.

Therefore, since nature is ultimately orderly, there is also - we are led to conclude - an orderly fashion in which mutations in fish could lead to mammals.

In order to go for the problem of this argument, let's take a look at another "answer" argument. Nothing can come from nothing. Famously, Lawrence Krauss and Richard Carrier disagree. On Carrier's view, or explanation of Krauss' view, if at any given "time" (or stage or whatever) there is really nothing, there are also no actual constraints, except those of necessity. Hence from nothing, on this view, everything can come, since the "rule" that "from nothing comes nothing" is one of the things that is neutralised by the "lack of rules" in real "nothing" - I countered among other things that in such a chaotic situation, there was no way for Carrier to preclude that the first thing to spring from such a nothing could be a god, creating or giving birth to other gods and to the world.

Mutations are not random enough for this.

And that is why they are also not sufficiently "random" or "chaotic" or creative to turn fish into mammals.

For instance, the locus mutation is changing one specific "letter" of the DNA, and one of the outcomes possible is that this changes nothing at all. DNA strands are organised into triplets, and for many of the aminoacids that are meant to result from a specific triplet, another triplet with two first "letters" identic to the original one will do exactly the same thing. For alanine any of the triplets GCT, GCC, GCA or GCG will do, in the coding DNA strand base (with triplets not transcribed).

Another is, it changes one aminoacid. It could mean the protein does the same thing, it could mean the protein breaks down, it could mean the protein does a slightly different thing. Like producing red or yellow colours instead of brown or black ones.

Deletion events and reduplication events, provided the triplets are intact would have basically the same kind of results. One or several items less or more of one aminoacid or series of such.

How it could produce a very different thing is ... well, the thing is, if it were possible (I don't know it is) that triplet borders are displaced in a gene, like one or two bases deleted, that would mean lots and lots of triplets were newly formed and lots and lots of triplets were deleted ... and the result would be deleterious, not creative.

Genes are made up of promoter regions and alternating regions of introns (noncoding sequences) and exons (coding sequences). The production of a functional protein involves the transcription of the gene from DNA into RNA, the removal of introns and splicing together of exons, the translation of the spliced RNA sequences into a chain of amino acids, and the posttranslational modification of the protein molecule.


This is from Encyclopedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/science/gene


Perhaps, then, the introns inbetween would lock the displaced triplets inside a sole exon, but in that one exon at least, if the triplets were displaced, it would be dysfunctional. I explored this aspect back in last year:

Creation vs. Evolution : What Could Irregular Deletions Do?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2021/12/what-could-irregular-deletions-do.html


And if a gene were doubled, why would its correct copy remain correct all the while the incorrect one underwent more and more mutations until it became correctly coding for sth else?

The outcome of such deletion events would be death to the line or no big deal, the thing being muted into a pseudogene or a non-coding part of a gene, changing it from an exon to an intron.

And quite a lot of functions require in fact more than just one gene to be correctly functioning. A few years, perhaps even a decade ago, I saw a meme on what had happened with the blind chiclids in Mexican caves. A chiclid retina requires ten genes, some of them in use during more than one stage of gestation or development in eggs. In the case of the blind chiclids, exactly two of these genes were mutated.

And the chiclids have a retina which takes energy from the blood stream, which takes oxygen and so do the other parts of the eye, and yet the retina cannot do its work.

If you need ten functioning genes to make a function, and if just one mutation at a gene is enough to make it dysfunctional, like just one or two dysfunctional genes can ruin the function, there is no way in which there is an orderly way, because nature is orderly, in which one celled organisms could become more complex. You see, more complexity = more cell types than just one. More cell types = cell types with specialised functions, not there in the one celled organisms. That cannot arise from random mutations. It can only arise from either always being there or being deliberately added. Precisely for the same reason that a scrambled box will involve objects lying in an order that - quoting Fr. Davenport - "minimises gravitational energy" (whatever that means to a physicist). New functions arising would be as impossible as the scrambled box leading to candles standing up in chandeliers.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Bruno
6.X.2022

In monasterio Turris, dioecesis Squillacensis, in Calabria, sancti Brunonis Confessoris, qui Ordinis Carthusianorum fuit Institutor.