Francis Collins is not a Christian.

[Alpha Beta]

Francis Collins believes in Evolution.
Christians are creationist.

Many top biologists were Christian creationists, such as Mendel, Pasteur and Linnaeus.

[John Harshman]

Yes, but he's definitely a True Scotsman, which none of those other guys
were.

[Bill Rogers]

I'm not sure what the point of your one-liner posts is. You are a fundamentalist, creationist Christian already. No doubt you find your one-liners convincing. But they won't convince anybody who does not already agree with you. To do that, you'd have to understand the opposing arguments in detail and refute them in detail. You don't even try. Those who accept evolution, non-Christians, by your definition, have already heard all the creationist arguments and provided counterarguments. Unless you make an effort to understand those counter arguments, your posts are pointless. They may give you a good feeling and recommit you to your faith whenever you say them over to yourself, but they certainly won't convince anyone else.

[dale]

Catholics believe in evolution?

micro only?

--
Minister Dale Kelly, Ph.D.
https://www.dalekelly.org/
Board Certified Holistic Health Practitioner
Board Certified Alternative Medical Practitioner

[RonO]

The Pope isn't Christian, news at 11. AB would not have gotten along
with Ray who was the only true creationist Christian posting on TO. My
guess is that AB wouldn't make Ray's cut either. They both could have
counter claimed forever.

Ron Okimoto

[RonO]

On 6/24/2020 8:31 PM, dale wrote:
> On 6/24/2020 8:08 PM, Alpha Beta wrote:
>> Francis Collins believes in Evolution.
>> Christians are creationist.
>>
>> Many top biologists were Christian creationists, such as Mendel,
>> Pasteur and Linnaeus.
>>
>
> Catholics believe in evolution?
>
> micro only?
>

Well, according to Behe, who is a Catholic, everyone has an ape like
ancestor and biological evolution is a fact of life. Not just micro.
Behe claims that the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammals was
devolution (no designer required).

Ron Okimoto

[Glenn]

It's good to see you make a positive claim that can be verified. Now verify them.

[erik simpson]

On Thursday, June 25, 2020 at 3:05:00 PM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:

That sounds pretty reasonable. And now, concerning Behe himself, is he an
example of devolution from terrestrial mammals too? If not, why not?

[Glenn]

On Thursday, June 25, 2020 at 3:25:00 PM UTC-7, erik simpson wrote:
> On Thursday, June 25, 2020 at 3:05:00 PM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
> > On 6/24/2020 8:31 PM, dale wrote:
> > > On 6/24/2020 8:08 PM, Alpha Beta wrote:
> > >> Francis Collins believes in Evolution.
> > >> Christians are creationist.
> > >>
> > >> Many top biologists were Christian creationists, such as Mendel,
> > >> Pasteur and Linnaeus.
> > >>
> > >
> > > Catholics believe in evolution?
> > >
> > > micro only?
> > >
> >
> > Well, according to Behe, who is a Catholic, everyone has an ape like
> > ancestor and biological evolution is a fact of life. Not just micro.
> > Behe claims that the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammals was
> > devolution (no designer required).
> >
> > Ron Okimoto
>
> That sounds pretty reasonable.

To you, of course. and apparently necessary and sufficient.

[erik simpson]

Devolved apes should be seen, but not read.

[Glenn]

It's ok with you to suggest that Behe claims humans are devolved apes. I like it.

[erik simpson]

Don't put your words in my mouth.

[Glenn]

Don't tell me what to do.

[RonO]

Look it up on Evolution news. I even put it up in a thread a while back
about what Behe was saying about whale evolution. You could try to
actually learn something from the creationist scam site once in a while.
The whale stuff came up within the last 2 years. It was after the ID
perps put up their Top Six, and you were still going back to them for
second rate junk, so you likely saw it and ran.

The part about having an ape like common ancestor has been common
knowledge since before the Dover fiasco. You did know that Behe
believes that biological evolution is a fact of life. He just doesn't
think it was due to totally natural causes.

Ron Okimoto

[Glenn]

On Thursday, June 25, 2020 at 6:15:00 PM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
> On 6/25/2020 5:18 PM, Glenn wrote:
> > On Thursday, June 25, 2020 at 3:05:00 PM UTC-7, Ron O wrote:
> >> On 6/24/2020 8:31 PM, dale wrote:
> >>> On 6/24/2020 8:08 PM, Alpha Beta wrote:
> >>>> Francis Collins believes in Evolution.
> >>>> Christians are creationist.
> >>>>
> >>>> Many top biologists were Christian creationists, such as Mendel,
> >>>> Pasteur and Linnaeus.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> Catholics believe in evolution?
> >>>
> >>> micro only?
> >>>
> >>
> >> Well, according to Behe, who is a Catholic, everyone has an ape like
> >> ancestor and biological evolution is a fact of life. Not just micro.
> >> Behe claims that the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammals was
> >> devolution (no designer required).
> >>
> > It's good to see you make a positive claim that can be verified. Now verify them.
> >
>
> Look it up on Evolution news.

You look it up, bozo.

snip usual empty rant

[John Bode]

On Wednesday, June 24, 2020 at 7:55:00 PM UTC-5, Bill Rogers wrote:
> On Wednesday, June 24, 2020 at 8:10:00 PM UTC-4, Alpha Beta wrote:
> > Francis Collins believes in Evolution.
> > Christians are creationist.
> >
> > Many top biologists were Christian creationists, such as Mendel, Pasteur and Linnaeus.
>
> I'm not sure what the point of your one-liner posts is.

He (or she, who knows) a shitposting troll, and a lazy one at that. None of this is genuine, but
the real shame is that it’s so poorly done. No effort, no pride in craftsmanship, just hastily
slapped-together tropes tossed out with the least amount of work necessary.

It’s just...sad.

[RonO]

Why run from reailty? Why is it that you are the one that never does
anything to support your stupidity?

I actually started to look the junk up, but something came up and I had
to save and post what I had. It didn't take me any time at all to go to
the ID perps creationists propaganda site and just search Behe and whale
devolution.

https://evolutionnews.org/2019/10/darwin-devolves-evidence-keeps-rolling-in/

QUOTE:
The second paper is an in-depth look at genetic changes associated with
the evolution of the cetacean (whales and dolphins) lineage. This is the
kind of amazing work that is now possible in our brave new world of
relatively easy genome sequencing. The authors compared the genomes of a
half dozen different cetacean species to scores of other mammalian
genomes. So did they find some jazzy new cetacean molecular machinery?
Or complex, constructive changes in the whale genome to explain its
fantastic change in shape and lifestyle?

Well, no. They found a lot of devolution.

We found 85 gene losses. Some of these were likely beneficial for
cetaceans, for example, by reducing the risk of thrombus formation
during diving (F12 and KLKB1), erroneous DNA damage repair (POLM), and
oxidative stress–induced lung inflammation (MAP3K19). Additional gene
losses may reflect other diving-related adaptations, such as enhanced
vasoconstriction during the diving response (mediated by SLC6A18) and
altered pulmonary surfactant composition (SEC14L3), while loss of SLC4A9
relates to a reduced need for saliva. Last, loss of melatonin synthesis
and receptor genes (AANAT, ASMT, and MTNR1A/B) may have been a
precondition for adopting unihemispheric sleep. Our findings suggest
that some genes lost in ancestral cetaceans were likely involved in
adapting to a fully aquatic lifestyle.

Adaptation by Breaking Things
A couple of points:

1) At least 85 changes — and probably many more — were needed for whale
evolution. That’s a whole lotta intermediates that somehow didn’t get
stuck in adaptive dead ends, or persist for very long.

2) As I explain in Darwin Devolves, adaptation by breaking or blunting
genes is expected to be very much faster than constructive evolution, so
it should dominate all evolutionary time scales. As the current paper
helps to show, the evidence for that is growing. Not only is devolution
the dominant mode in microevolution we observe in real time in lab
experiments today, but also in the macroevolutionary change that we
infer from genome sequences over geological ages — punctuated by bursts
of new information. There is no hint of significant, constructive
Darwinian molecular changes at any time scale.
END QUOTE:

If you look up the paper you find that the "microevolution" of the 85
changes span the evolution of whales from land to their aquatic
lifestyle, and they occurred around 50 million years ago. This was
devolution to Behe, and it obviously was not a micro change that
occurred during the loss of these genes. A lot was obviously evolving
in these lineages.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw6671

QUOTE:
Unlike William A. Dembski[25] and others in the intelligent design
movement, Behe accepts the common descent of species,[26] including that
humans descended from other primates, although he states that common
descent does not by itself explain the differences between species. He
also accepts the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth and the
age of the Universe. In his own words:

"Evolution is a controversial topic, so it is necessary to address a few
basic questions at the beginning of the book. Many people think that
questioning Darwinian evolution must be equivalent to espousing
creationism. As commonly understood, creationism involves belief in an
earth formed only about ten thousand years ago, an interpretation of the
Bible that is still very popular. For the record, I have no reason to
doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say
it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms
share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular
reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who
study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary
framework, and I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed
enormously to our understanding of the world. Although Darwin's
mechanism – natural selection working on variation – might explain many
things, however, I do not believe it explains molecular life. I also do
not think it surprising that the new science of the very small might
change the way we view the less small." Darwin's Black Box, pp 5–6.
END QUOTE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Behe

When haven't you done something similar to what I just did, and why
would it be required of me and not yourself? Do you ever wonder why you
spend so much of your life running from reality? You should know all
this, but denial and willful ignorance is just a way of life for you.

Ron Okimoto

[RonO]

Hey Glenn. Why keep lying about me and running away?

You might put up something to verify that I cannot support my claims.
Go for it or just stop lying to yourself about it. How long has it been
since you could support similar claims against me?

You could put up a post where you have dealt with the Top Six in some
type of competent and informed manner, instead of just running from then
since Nov. 2017. You could put up something where I have ever not been
able to verify what I have claimed about the ID perps. Instead you do
what you did and run.

Why is that all that you can do?

Ron Okimoto

[RonO]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins

You might learn something, but I doubt it. Lying to yourself is just a

way of life for you.

QUOTE:
Christianity
By graduate school, Collins considered himself an atheist. However, a
conversation with a hospital patient led him to question his lack of
religious views, and he investigated various faiths. He familiarized
himself with the evidence for and against God in cosmology, and on the
recommendation of a Methodist minister used Mere Christianity by C. S.
Lewis as a foundation to develop his religious views. He believes that
people cannot be converted to Christianity by reason and argument alone,
and that the final stage of conversion entails a "leap of faith".[80]
After several years of deliberation, he finally converted to
Christianity during a trip to the Cascade Mountains, where he describes
a striking image of a frozen waterfall as removing his final resistance,
resulting in his conversion the following morning.[80] He has described
himself as a "serious Christian".[29]

In his 2006 book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for
Belief, Collins wrote that scientific discoveries were an "opportunity
to worship" and that he rejected both Young Earth creationism and
intelligent design. His own belief, he wrote, was theistic evolution or
evolutionary creation, which he preferred to call BioLogos. He wrote
that one can "think of DNA as an instructional script, a software
program, sitting in the nucleus of the cell".[81] He appeared in
December 2006 on The Colbert Report television show and in a March 2007
Fresh Air radio interview to discuss this book.[82][83] In an interview
with D. J. Grothe on the Point of Inquiry podcast, he said that the
overall aim of the book was to show that "one can be intellectually in a
rigorous position and argue that science and faith can be compatible",
and that he was prompted to write the book because "most people are
seeking a possible harmony between these worldviews [science and faith],
and it seems rather sad that we hear so little about this
possibility.[84] Collins said he had been a Methodist, Presbyterian,
Baptist, and Episcopalian, emphasizing that denominational differences
were not essential to him.[85] He recalled that, growing up, he
participated in the choir of an Episcopal church.[86]

Collins is a critic of intelligent design, and for this reason he was
not asked to participate in the 2008 documentary Expelled: No
Intelligence Allowed. Walt Ruloff, a producer for the film, claimed that
by rejecting intelligent design, Collins was "toeing the party line", a
claim which Collins called "just ludicrous".[87] In an interview he
stated that "intelligent design is headed for collapse in the not too
distant future" and that "science class ought to be about science, and
opening the door to religious perspectives in that setting is a big
mistake."[84] In 2007, Collins founded the BioLogos Foundation to
"contribute to the public voice that represents the harmony of science
and faith". He served as the foundation's president until he was
confirmed as director of the NIH.[88] Collins has also spoken at the
Veritas Forum on the relationship between science and religion and the
existence of God.[89]

Christopher Hitchens referred to Francis Collins as "one of the greatest
living Americans" and stated that Collins was one of the most devout
believers he had ever met.[90] He further stated that Collins was
sequencing the genome of the cancer that would ultimately claim
Hitchens's life, and that their friendship despite their differing
opinion on religion was an example of the greatest armed truce in modern
times.
END QUOTE:

Ron Okimoto

[RonO]

On 6/24/2020 7:08 PM, Alpha Beta wrote:

It should be noted that Alpha Beta's stupidity, ignorance and
intolerance is the reason why the separation of Church and State are a
good thing.

What happened to Dembski when he got a taste of what his new World
Religious order was going to be like? Dembski was forced to apologize
to his students for telling them that Noah's flood may have been local,
and that the earth and Universe were likely much older than 10,000 years.

The stupid thing about the ID scam is that the ID perps would be among
the first up against the wall if they succeeded. The Ohio, Texas, and
Louisiana creationist rubes are probably just waiting to plaster them
for running the bait and switch. The Louisiana IDiots had the bait and
switch run on them 3 times before they apparently quit trying to teach
IDiocy in their public schools. They haven't made another attempt since
2013, and the ID perps deleted the claim of having the ID science to
teach in the public schools from their education policy. They still
have the switch scam legislation up, but no one wants to teach that junk
because the kids might learn something about how dishonest the whole
business is.

Ron Okimoto