JWs: not creationists but believe in creation...

by TheStumbler 56 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  TD

  You laugh, but I can think of a good half-dozen JWs who would come up with some variation of the above as an explanation.

  I've actually had that discussion with JW's and didn't know whether to laugh or just weep for them.

  That's the "Existing features were put to a different use than what God originally intended" argument, which orginated with St. Augustine.

  It's a form of the fallacy of reductionism. We could argue over the intended purpose of a propeller if the propeller is all we had. But when the airplane is considered as an integrated whole from nose to tail, the function of the propeller becomes self apparent. The design of the whole is a higher level of design than that of the component parts and with an airplane, it is no less the product of a designer.

  It's especially interesting to me, that prior to Darwin, this fact was invoked as an argument against evolution. For example, the French Naturalist, Georges Cuvier said:

  "That the claws may be able to seize the prey, there must be a certain amount of flexibility in the toes, and of strength in the nails; and this requires a peculiar form of the bones, and a corresponding distribution of the muscles and tendons. The fore-arm must possess a certain facility in turning, whence also result certain forms of the bones of which it is made up; and these bones of the fore-arm articulating to the humerus, cannot undergo change without corresponding changes taking place in this latter bone. The bones of the shoulder, also, require to have a certain degree of strength when the anterior extremities are to be used in seizing prey; and in this way again, other special forms become involved."

  Cuvier understood that it's not just claws or teeth that make a predator; it's the integration of teeth and claws with the rest of the body. (Which would not be necessary for a creature gathering things like coconuts that don't actively try to evade capture. ) This is especially problematic for JWs when it comes to creatures with either tiny brains or no brains at all. Did the jellyfish and starfish just decide one day that they were going to be predators? What did they make that decision with?

  So although JW's believe in creation, they don't understand and actually reject one of the basic building blocks of creationism.
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  Apognophos

  Is vegetarian animals actually one of the tenets of creationism? I didn't think it was. The Flood account only gives Noah permission to eat meat; it says nothing about what the animals were doing before or after. Scriptures about predator and prey animals living peacefully together could easily be interpreted symbolically, and the Society has done so at times.

  Personally, as a believing JW I figured the vegetarian bit was probably wrong, but it didn't seem like a critical flaw in "the truth", just something we would have to be adjusted on in the new system.
• 

  TD

  Is vegetarian animals actually one of the tenets of creationism?

  No, because it actually violates most creationist arguments at a basic level.

  This can be seen in the fact that one JW publication will praise things that very obviously are not vegetarian as evidence of a wise Creator while another publication will claim that this wasn't Jehovah's original purpose at all and happened by itself.

  JW's can't have it both ways.

  Again I was mostly being humorous in pointing out that JW's don't really believe creationist arguments. --Not even their own.
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  DocHouse

  How does the Tooth Fairy (Natural Selection) help the first fish
  (ASSuming the first living 'amino acid cell' was able to survive & develop)
  that 'wanted' to become a land animal begin choosing modifications
  so it could move about on LAND, and the physical attributes it would need to survive
  THAT new environment?
  
  How long does the fish keep flopping onto the shore?
  Since, according to the Magic Formula of Evolution,
  adaptations of this magnitude take "millions and
  millions of years", how do OTHER fish carry out his
  objective when he dies? Do millions of OTHER fish die, flopping
  around on the shore, until some changes finally begin taking place?
  
  When magically being able to walk around, eat, find shelter, etc
  on land, how does it reproduce, unless he is joined by a female companion?
  Has one been evolving "side by side"?
  (We know what evolutionists will say: autogamy- SELF reproduction...
  for, as with Religious discussions, they will grasp at ANY
  straw to support their belief- but this 'fish' is now a different creature-
  HOW did it reproduce?)

  Can any kind of honest ANSWER to such serious questions be given?

  Do you have a fear of discovering yourself Wrong- or
  WELCOME it if you are; NOTHING is more important than the Truth!

  Overthrow Gullibility!

  To elaborate;

  Think of how EVERYTHING in the first living organism had to change to an EXTREME degree:
  it's 'brain'(motor center'), a skeleton, organs, nervous and digestive system had to be formed-
  and much more! AND they had to do so in HARMONY with one another!
  To accomplish that, SPECIFIC methods had to be chosen and PERCEIVED!

  Buuut- they have no intelligence, and there is no God to direct!
  So all the impossiblilites of this scenario take place by one accident after another-
  trillions of times in an organized series of patterns!

  Adults have their OWN Fairy Tales!
• 

  Apognophos

  There's actually a simple answer to your question. We have fossils of fish (and living species of fish) that give us the answer to this. The thin bones in the fins of some fish strengthened in order to let them push through marshy plants in shallow waters, walk along the bottom of a body of water, and even leave the water for short periods to move to nearby bodies of water. The bones articulated into the shapes that mammals' arms and legs would later inherit, except still being very short and part of the fins.

  Gradually fish were able to come onto land more and more. There wasn't a need for a single fish to die trying to move onto land, nor would they of course known what they were doing. Life always explores new niches and finds new sources of food, using natural variations to fill in these niches over time.

  As a short answer, all the needed changes including strengthening of the skeleton and the development of lungs, could have been performed in baby steps over many generations. So it's not really such a mystery after all.

  Further reading: Tiktaalik (one of the biggest pieces of evidence for evolution in the fossil record), Lobe-finned fish, Timeline of human evolution. Note in the last article how scientists know just about all of the steps back from humans to the first cells, and each of those steps is a viable life form preserved in the fossil record, which was successful in its own niche. No fairy tales or sudden leaps of evolution required.

  ETA:

  how does it reproduce, unless he is joined by a female companion?
  Has one been evolving "side by side"?

  Yes, exactly. Males and females evolve side by side because they are the same species with the same set of DNA. It would be very odd if the fairer sex in humans, for instance, had failed to keep up with us and still looked like chimpanzees.
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  DocHouse

  " The thin bones in the fins of some fish strengthened in order to let them..." How did the bones determine that was necessary, and carry out the specific processes necessary to carry that out?

  Good ol' 'Natural' Selection?

  " Gradually fish were able to come onto land more and more."

  So, it was a Joint Venture, eh? Fish all over the world made up their minds to live on the land, and forced their boidies to develop accordingly?

  That is why Evolutiuon is even more retarded than even church dogma.
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  Apognophos

  Natural selection is a very simple concept. We can see it in action on a human timescale. Animals which are born with a trait that makes them more likely to survive will pass the trait on to their descendants. There's no need for a mind to be at work.

  Fish don't have to know that their bones are getting stronger. When a fish sees an insect it wants to catch or finds itself in an unpleasant body of water, it may leap out of the water. If it cannot find water again because its fins do not support it, it dies.

  If this happened to all fish, then we simply would not be here. Life would still be aquatic (or, more likely, it would have found another way to survive on land). But since it worked out for some fish, they were able to survive, and gradually life was able to extend into dry land, a new environment, through the development of amphibians.

  It's all about baby steps. If something can happen gradually through tiny variations in the genes, then statistically, it will happen as long as that feature is useful, or even just not harmful enough to the survival of the species.

  I think the common error that people make when asking how animals "know" to evolve is assuming that there was some particular direction that things "had" to go in. But evolution is unguided. Life just wants to keep on living, so it seeks out new niches, new kinds of food, etc. The particular results of evolution are just happy accidents. Naturally even if a fish could "want" to evolve in a certain way, the same could not be said for plants or mushrooms, and yet they all evolve equally well.