Atheists routinely say any naturalistic explanation, however far-fetched, is more likely than any supernatural explanation. For a reductio ad absurdum of that principle, consider the claim that Jonah was swallowed by an ancient alien submarine!
Of course, the book of Jonah doesn't say the fish had bronze ribs. That's from an unrelated, mythopoetic passage in Job 40:18.
I'm not saying it's Aliens..
ReplyDelete....But it's Aliens.
Deletehey steve. have you seen this article on creationism? this man says that whales have genes for smelling, though they can "no longer" smell, and this "proves" that they evolved. how could a creationist answer this claim? (I'm a 6-day creationist by the way, though i don't know what to do with articles like this)
ReplyDeletehttps://biologos.org/blogs/dennis-venema-letters-to-the-duchess/ask-an-evolutionary-creationist-a-q-a-with-dennis-venema
Darwinists like to pretend that proof of a minor change is proof of their whole theory, sort of like a prosecutor saying, "We are going to prove the defendant committed murder by demonstrating beyond all doubt that he jaywalks on the way to work, and enough jaywalking adding up through enough time will eventually yield murder."
DeleteIncidentally, I think even most 6-day creationists (I am not one, for the record) agree that evolution happens, e.g. the various breeds of dogs came from one dog/wolf type. But there's a difference between those variations and what Darwinism seeks. So, I would suspect that a 6-day creationist wouldn't have problem with a whale losing the sense of smell. Especially when you add in the fact that sin corrupted the natural order, and losing the sense of smell seems to fit into that concept too.
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DeleteI'm a professional biologist, for what that's worth, and my response is that the functions of the coding and non-coding parts of eukaryotic DNA isn't well enough understood to use the presence of genes for "air-based olfaction" as prima facie evidence of anything other than the presence of sequences themselves without also doing the work to find out what those genes are doing, if anything.
DeleteIt used to be that part of the central dogma of biology (and that's how it was put to me as an undergraduate) is that a gene acts as a transcript for mRNA which then serves as a template for a single protein. Well, we know that isn't the case anymore since we've discovered microRNA translation control. The DNA that codes for the miRNA may not even be genes as they are located within the introns or extrons of certain genes. They
apparently never become proteins. Humans may code for 1000 of these things but we don't have anything like an authoritative number.
When you find genes that you normally ascribe to aerial olfaction in an aquatic mammal, the correct question to ask is, "What function are they doing _there_?"
I suppose you could argue that such useless genes have been conserved intact for millions of years but that's a scientific dead-end and it doesn't make good biological sense. It seems more likely to me that those genes are actually doing something, which is why they've been conserved.
Perhaps they are important in whale fetal development. Who knows? Certainly not the guy who assumes they are useless.
Maybe unrelated, but Steve can you shed light on the belief that some Jewish traditions thought that Jonah did in fact die in the belly of the fish thus accurately fulfilling Jesus' prophecy of Jonah.
ReplyDeleteI have heard Christian apologists mention it... But I am not sure of the source or it's realibility.
Thanks, brother!