The Narrow Path Ministries

Steve, the video is ready but I'd like to get some references from you on a few of your statements if you have them handy so that people can read more if they find something interesting. The following statements made by you would be nice to have citation posted as you say them:

• Breeders have found a limit to dog diversity. (clarification on what that limit is would be helpful and a link to a study if there is one)
  
  Hermit crabs and centipedes came about in the Cambrian. (everything in the Cambrian was marine. Marine centipedes may have existed back then but hermit crab fossils don't go back that far. I can put a small correction note in the video there. I have some correction notes for me as well so it won't look lopsided)
  
  No vertebrates are found in the Cambrian. (Chordates are found which are technically considered primitive vertebrates but they don't have ossified bones, clarification here could be nice)
  
  Scales are just rough skin, they are a surface condition. They are in no way related to feathers. (I seem to have heard something similar to this from a paleontologist once but can no longer find the quote. When I googled it I found a national geographic article stating the opposite. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/ ... immer-text)
  
  The simplest cell has more information than 30 billion copies of the encyclopedia Britannica (you said that comes from Richard Dawkins but I'm having trouble finding the quote. I suspect that number is off since the entire nuclear human genome is 3.2 billion base pairs long which could fit in about 4 copies of the encyclopedia.)
  
  Only the scientists that believe in evolution are allowed to publish (Is there a list some place which we can reference of people who have been professionally discriminated against for creationism? I remember seeing one years ago but can not find it now)
  
  Any other points you made that you'd like to add references to in the video?

I'd like these references as soon as possible so I can embed them in the video before uploading to YouTube. If you can't get them to me right away I'll add them in after the video is published as notations. The problem with YouTube notations is that they don't show up on iPads (about 30% my viewers watch on iPads or similar devices)

After the video is posted, If you'd like to clarify or do rebuttals to any specific things said in the video, just create a YouTube video with your response, send me a link. I will add notations to the main video allowing viewers to click the notations and immediately view your comment video. No rush on this part as we can add notations when ever we want after the video is uploaded.

One more thing, just to clarify about ambulocetus, since that reference you gave can not be verified and all other references contradict it, I will be adding a correction on the video during that part. Is this okay with you? There are a few similar correction notes that I will be adding to my part as well so it will not be lopsided.

Your correction will read:

The statement that true whales come before Ambulocetus is incorrect. All whales found with and before Ambulocetus are 4 legged creatures considered to be walking whales.

References:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.100 ... ltext.html
http://www.theos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=4600

Jon,

Feel free to add any corrections you need to. I will try to find my sources for the various statements, which is not that easy, since I was making use of many books in my preparation. Any "fact" I gave, which you find incorrect, go ahead and correct. I will provide references when and if I can locate them.

You should know that I do not have lots of time to devote to this subject, since I am constantly studying and addressing subjects more pertinent to my field, which is biblical studies. I apologize for any factual errors that may have slipped into my off-the-top-of-my-head remarks.

The dog breeding information, I believe is common knowledge. If not, at least, I have never heard it challenged. My impression is that my statements about dog breeding reflected the uncontroversial state of the case.

One quotation to that effect is found in Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial. After quoting evolutionary expert Pierre P. Grasse, saying:

"In spite of the intense pressure generated by artificial selection (eliminating any parent not answering the criteria of choice) over whole millennia, no new species are born. A comparative study of sera, hemoglobins, blood proteins, interfertility, etc., proves that the strains remain within the same specific definition. This is not a matter of opinion or subjective classification, but a measurable reality. The fact is that selection gives tangible form to and gathers together all the varieties a genome is capable of producing, but does not constitute an innovative evolutionary process...."

Johnson observes:

"In other words, the reason that dogs don't become as big as elephants, much less change into elephants, is not that we just haven't been breeding them long enough. Dogs do not have the genetic capacity for that degree of change, and they stop getting bigger when the genetic limit is reached." (pp.37f)

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As for the contents of the Cambrian rocks, I have read from various sources that virtually all invertebrate phyla are found there. Some sources say only one phylum is absent, whereas a source or two have said "very few" are absent. Not having counted the up the specimens one-by-one myself, and going on these common statements from authorities, I assumed virtually all invertebrates were found there. This would include centipedes and hermit crabs. My mistake!

Likewise, long ago I culled from the Time-Life book called "The Fishes" (by F. D. O'Manney) a quote that gave me the impression that the chordates were not found in the Cambrian. That quote is as follows:

"How this earliest chordate stock evolved, what stages of development it went through to eventually give rise to truly fishlike creatures, we do not know. Between the Cambrian, where it probably originated, and the Ordovician, when the first fossils with really fishlike characteristics appeared, there is a gap of perhaps 100 million years..."

I can see now that I was assuming the absence of fishes in the Cambrian was the same as the absence of chordates there (thinking the fishes to be the earliest chordates). The statement that the chordate stock "probably originated" in the Cambrian gave the impression that this was not certain, meaning the fossils for the chordates were assumed to be living in the Cambrian Period, but were not yet documented by fossil finds.

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The information about the scale/feather differences I found in Jonathan Sarfati (much maligned, I know, by evolutionists). He wrote:

"But scales are folds in skin; feathers are complex structures with a barb, barbules, and hooks. They also originate in a totalty different way, from follicles inside the skin in in a manner akin to mammalian hair." (In Refuting Evolution, p.64)

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I was trying to remember the figure given by Dawkins of the information content of the cell. Did I actually say that he said "30 billion copies..." or did I say, "something like 30 billion copies..."? I don't remember my exact words, but "30 billion copies..." sounds like a hyperbole chosen, in the absence of the actual figure, to indicate an incredibly high number. Dawkins gave some astronomical figure, in any case, relating it to volumes of Britannica. I may have been combining his quote (in my mind) with the similar one from Carl Sagen:

“The information content of a simple cell has been established as around 10 to the 12th power [100 billion] bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica.”
Carl Sagen, (The New Enclyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, “Life,” 1986, Vol.22, p.987 )

100 million pages is obviously a far cry from "30 billion copies..." but the effect of the statistic is the same as that of the hyperbole. Even if it was a single volume of the Britannica, it would be sufficient to make the point that we are dealing with complex information here—not just random units thrown together. The number of volumes is immaterial to the point being made—it is sufficient to say it is an unfathomable amount of information to organize itself by chance, prior to the emergence of life (and thus prior to the process of natural selection).

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Only the scientists that believe in evolution are allowed to publish (Is there a list some place which we can reference of people who have been professionally discriminated against for creationism? I remember seeing one years ago but can not find it now)

Anyone can prove this for himself. Where is there a mainstream scientific journal that prints anything written by an intelligent-design-oriented writer? It is not that these writers lack scientific degrees or credentials or that they do no original research experiments or do not write articles. It is simply that their philosophy is not welcome in the naturalistic publications.

Thanks, I actually found the Dawkins quote after posting here:

"There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.". (Richard Dawkins, 'The Blind Watchmaker', Page 116).

Anyone else know of a list of scientists who lost their jobs or had papers go unpublished because of creationism/intelligent design? A google search gave me two cases but I know I saw a full list some place and I think it would be good to link with the debate. This is an issue where I side strongly with Steve. As long as scientists are playing by the rules, in other-words, reporting the facts and applying solid logic to connect the facts, they should be considered legitimate and their work should indeed be published and taken seriously. I'm interested in looking into the supposed balckballing that creationists say is going on in science.

I have read from various sources that virtually all invertebrate phyla are found there

Yes this is true that members of many phylum's are found in the Cambrian (including our own which is the phylum Chordata) but they are all primitive marine animals. In evolutionary theory it is put forth that these primitive Cambrian creatures gave rise to all the modern members of their phylum's which we know today.

The fossil record of clawed lobsters (hermit crabs are closely related to lobsters) goes back to the early Cretaceous about 130 million years ago. For reference this is 350 million years after the Cambrian and is around the same time that we see some of the famous dinosaurs like Stegosaurus.

Genetics and comparative anatomy strongly suggest that Hermit crabs developed from lobsters. The fossil record seems to confirm this as the first hermits appear about 95 million years ago (35 million years after lobsters). Interestingly, living today we have a species of lobster with a softened tail which it hides in hollow bamboo reeds like a hermit crab hides inside a shell.

The Cambrian era is dated much earlier, spanning from 540 million years ago to about 480 (dates vary a few million years from study to study).

Hi Jon,

Yes, that was the Dawkins quote. I can see now that I was taking "30" from Dawkins, and "Billions" from Sagen, and totally confusing the two quotes. Thanks for finding that.

I'll just put the dawkins quote in there so the more inquisitive folks can look into and see that it was a speech slip. You are correct in that the meaning of your argument is unchanged by a correction in the numbers.