More Questions

Many still believe in Noah’s ark. If you believe in the historicity of that event, please answer the following. Why are certain species only on certain islands? Why are they not found any other place after the ark landing? Did the ark deliver each species to their end location after the flood? No sample appears to ever have died along the long journey home. If they weren’t delivered, why are there no Kangaroos whose remains have been found on the long journey back home to Australia? Why are there lizards on the Galapogos islands found nowhere else on earth? And why do those lizards only resemble lizards found on the nearby continent? Evolution would contend that lizards from the continent would have arrived after some ocean crossing and then evolved away from their cousins on the mainland. How would ID explain this?

Why many remote islands have no frogs? Were the frogs not taken back home? Dawkins asks the same question about many different species that are found in only very specific locations. In the case of frogs, they are not there because they could not survive an ocean crossing.

Per pp. 330 Dawkins, the conservative estimate is that there are 10 million species. How would Noah have saved so many species? Also, many species of trees would have undoubtedly died in the flood. Why didn’t they?

If you no longer believe in Noah and his ark, how do you account for the persistence in this Christian belief though there is no evidence to support the existence of what would have been quite a ship.

Here’s another question. Do you feel these questions demeaning? If so, I’m very sorry. But I have to ask. If I were you, I’d be embarrassed. I recall the first moment, I was ever embarrassed to be associated with Christians. I’m not sure, but I think it was associated with climate change. I know you agree with me that climate change is an issue. So, I don’t think you will disagree that it can indeed be very embarrassing being associated with a group who don’t use science as its way of gaining knowledge. Maybe you feel I’m being mean or abusive. But, I think these ideas should be considered. And if you’re not embarrassed… forget the whole thing! I’m done. (I realize you already said you’re done. But, I don’t think you’ll be able to keep yourself from trying to defend your positions. :^)

Perhaps the next one will give you something to sink your teeth into and make you feel good again…

Per pp. 324 discussion of The Penny study, 1982, haemoglobin-B anc cytochrome-C were used to match genetic sequences for various species. This method has been greatly expanded and is converging on a single tree of life. This appears to support evolution. How can ID be true if there is a single tree (that is, bush) of life?

If evolution by natural selection is false, why are there so many observations that can only be explained by evolution in the environment of continental drift? Pick any observation you like from the section beginning Dawkins, pp. 273.

Here’s a good Darwin question. Why is it that one can tell which Galapagos island a tortoise is from by its shell? How would ID explain that? It’s completely consistent with ideas Dawkins discusses regarding separation of populations and divergent structures being caused by different survival pressures. See pictures, Dawkins color page 21 for some absolutely fascinating pictures.

Here’s another. Why are there birds that don’t fly that have wings? Below is the adorable Kakapo.

Evolution by natural selection can easily explain this. As an example, the Kakapo ended up on an island where food on the ground was plentiful and no natural predators threatened it. Ultimately, ground dwelling Kakapos no longer needed to fly in order to avoid predators. So, spending the extra energy on flight was no longer adaptive (that is, required or advantageous for survival.)

To show you how Christians can be mislead, one person I know is certain the continents are moving in the exact opposite direction reported by science. I think you know that rocks can be and have been sampled across the atlantic ocean and that as one approaches the mid-atlantic ridge from west or east, rocks get younger and younger down to a point where they appear to be completely new. What would you think of an organization so distrusting of science that it would lead people to deny such a fact a fact?

I can’t resist asking questions. Why do humans have goose pimples? Per Dawkins, pp. 340, its because we evolved from mammals who would straighten their fur to increase the layer of air surrounding their bodies when cold. Then later, that machinery was hijacked for social reasons to show fear or anger. But we don’t particular have hair that all that works on and yet we still have the apparatus to make that happen. That is a vestige. Why would a designer create such a useless function all over our bodies?

Here’s another design question. Why would a designer give lungs to the dolphin? It will drown like a land animal if it is not allowed to come up for air per Dawkins, pp. 341. As I recall from a nature show, when orca whales are trying to hunt blue whale calfs, they try to tire them out and push them down into the water. It is then the mother’s desperate attempts to push them back up out of the water to give them oxygen that sometimes makes the difference in their survival. If they had gills, it wouldn’t be an issue.

Apparently, the muscles around the blow hole are a wonderful “work of art and design”. But it’s still a kluge placed on top of a bad design. It reminds me of the DC-10. It had a design flaw where if the cargo door burst open in flight, the passenger deck would fall and cut all the control cables. The flaw was identified and fixed in North America. However, a foreign owned aircraft was not retrofitted and a plane was lost. This single accident led to an existential breakdown of the McDonnell Douglas company. I worked there on a project after they were bought out by Boeing. One could say the new door was a magnificent design. But it was too late. The systemic flaw still devastated confidence in the company. And this is what happens all the time. It’s too expensive to do the right thing: a redesign. So, a band-aid is put on the design. These band-aids accrue and at some point you look at the code of a Flight Management System or an Autopilot and you see more band-aids than original structure!

I am a designer. That’s what I do for a living. As an example, I designed and implemented a state machine that responded to failure events on the flight deck of a small aircraft. This function reverted the glass cockpit functions to maximize chances of providing the pilot with enough information to get the plane safely to the ground. I don’t know how Dawkins got his insights, but when I read his pp. 341, it makes sense to me. What experience do you have, Casey, that qualifies you to discuss design? When you talk design, you don’t make any sense. And when you start feeling insecure, you say that God can do whatever he wants and then we need to go back to the book of Job to see where you got that line from.

Another question regarding the blow hole… if the designer knew what he was doing, wouldn’t he design the blow hole at the top in the first place (assuming we accept lungs in the first place)? Why did the blow hole have to migrate from the front of the snout to the top of the head over many generations? This reminds me of the crappy FMS and Autopilot code I have seen plenty of times: full of band-aids. A real designer—an omnipotent designer—will do it right the first time.

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