I like to think that it was a wise decision as well
, but as you're well aware, it isn't for lack of "substance."
I have sort of an implicit 3-strike rule (although not always 3).
My discussion partner can miss the point (willfully or accidentally, more the former in your case) only so many times before I deem it to be fruitless to respond. Buddyholly has almost reached that point as well (see below).
It is not a red herring at all, it has every effect on the objections that Aloimeh summarized.
No, it doesn't. You either just don't
get how a logical debate functions, or you do not understand what Aloimeh's objections actually are (for the sake of this discussion).
His objection to evolution is that it is contrary to God's word, as he understands it.
No, no, no, no. This is not his "objection to evolution," which is to say,
that which he is actually putting forward as evidence against evolution.
Any personal reasons or motivations that Aloimeh might have for rejecting evolution
have absolutely nothing to do with the validity of the scientific data that he offers as a challenge to evolutionary theory. He could believe that evolution is false because he had a dream in which gigantic ants told him as much and it would still have no effect on the
scientific arguments that he mounts against evolution.
I simply do not know how I can make this more clear, buddyholly.
And a billions of years old earth is crucial to evolution. But Aloimeh only backtracked to the point where he admitted maybe the universe is billions of years old, but that is unrelated to the creation of life at a much later time. Therefore, proof of an old earth with abundant life brings down his argument on the origins of life. You can't take it out of the debate. While an old earth may not ''prove'' evolution, it does disprove Aloimeh's argument of life on earth being recent.
Indeed, "billions of years old earth"
is crucial to the overall evolutionary narrative, but it has
no bearing whatsoever on the
scientific objections that Aloimeh is formally posing to it (which are, I will point out once more for the sake of clarity,
distinct from various other reasons that Aloimeh does not accept evolution).
You cannot overturn a biological objection to evolution by firmly establishing some condition of possibility for evolution.
And technically, your last sentence there is false as well. An "old earth" does not disprove recent life,
old life disproves "recent life."
In any case, it is tangential to the "evolution" debate here because
nowhere (that I'm aware of, anyway) did Aloimeh offer the notion of "recent life" as compelling evidence to reject evolution. That is to say, he did get dragged into a discussion of "old" vs. "recent" life, but
he did not offer this as an argument against evolution. And that tangent served its purpose beautifully: to distract attention from the objections that the "evolutionists" here were unable to answer.
In case you're still in the dark as to what those are, Aloimeh offered a generous reminder of them in his reponse to Lopez:
Aloimeh said:
It's not true that irreducible complexity is my only argument. It's just one of them. I also mentioned typology, embryology (completely different embryonic histories for homologous organs), and conserved transcription factors (e.g. pax6) that generate functionally the same organ in widely different species even though the structures of these organs are worlds apart.
Do you recognize, buddyholly, that the "age of the earth" does not touch the validity or invalidity of these objections?
The real red herring is your statement above that ''his objections are not logically dependent on a young earth.''
No, it is a factual statement borne up by rudimentary elements of logic.
To be fair though, your error here might well be that you did not understand
what his formal objections actually are for the purposes of this discussion. See above.
Maybe he has conceded that, but his objections are still dependent on a young origin of life. So let him come clean and say whether he believes the earliest hard shelled life forms are about 500my old and existed hundreds of millions of years earlier than any human form.
Incorrect. As above, you are conflating other elements of his overall worldview with
the scientific data that he formally offered as evidence against evolutionary theory. By "his objections," I do not mean, nor have ever meant,
Aloimeh's overall worldview and set of beliefs. As I've stated so many times already, the latter have no bearing on the validity of the
actual arguments that he submits as a challenge to the evolutionary narrative.
A "young earth," although defended by Aloimeh, was never submitted as a compelling challenge to evolution, at least not to the best of my knowledge.
(I asked for a simplification of the debate a few posts back. Maybe you and Aloimeh misssed the post. The above pretty much says the same thing.)
Now this is rich. One of the individuals largely responsible for leading the discussion down all manner of rabbit trails asks for a simplification. Well, you're in luck; you are free to reread Aloimeh's quotation above, or go back to the beginning of the thread for a more thorough elaboration of Aloimeh's (as yet unanswered) principal objections.