Mountain of Evidence is Theoretically Driven 2

An analogy to an Olympics track meet might be helpful.

In the Olympics track meet competition, one event…the historical length…mile-relay…has four runners per team each running one lap around the track…receiving the baton from the previous runner and passing the baton to the succeeding runner…to complete a continuous and unbroken four-lap circuit around the track.

But this relay baton is not passed off to the other distinct and unconnected events outside of the mile-relay.  The baton is not passed to the high-jumpers, pole-vaulters, high-hurdlers, 100-meter sprinters, or the competitors in the shot-put or javelin throw…thereby creating an unnatural, artificial, and unwanted connection between these disparate events.

These other events are discontinuous and unconnected to each other and to the mile-relay, even though they are all a common part of the Olympics track meet.

A network schedule of logic-lines connecting the start-times for each track and field event…simplified into printed program schedules for the spectators…would have to be created ahead of time to organize the track meet.

But these organizational lines connecting the start and the finish times between the individual events…head-to-tail…would never be confused with the fundamental differences between pole-vaulting, high-jumping, the long-jump, the triple-jump, and the 5,000-meter (the historical length 3-mile) run.

The essential characteristic of each distinct event creates a discontinuous gap between each event that is unbridgeable in terms of mixing and blending…other than their logical sequencing for start-times and spacing within the overall management of the track-meet competition.

The passing of the baton between all of the track and field events to create an artificial connection…a connection that does not logically exist…simply because at a general level all these events belong to the same track-meet…would be nonsensical.

To attempt to blend and mix all of these disparate track and field events together into a connected whole through small, incremental, transitional phases using the relay baton as the connecting link…would be a forced arrangement falling so far outside of the intentionally designed, fundamentally discontinuous gaps between each of the individual events of an athletic track meet…as to render the entire competition gradualistically intermixed…hopelessly indecipherable…and thus incomprehensible.

If all of the track meet events were blended together in infinitesimally small incremental steps…it would be difficult to determine when and where one event finished and another started.

Each track and field event also has a predetermined goal…an outcome…that entails a different “lifestyle habit” program of training and technique.

Even though running hurdles, the pure sprints, and the long-distance running events share similarities, they are vastly different in their “lifestyle habits” of length of distance, agility requirements, pure speed, endurance, time-span, and the physical characteristics of the competitors.  Specified function…running fast, leaping high, jumping far…are inseparably connected to the lifestyle habits unique to each athletic event.

Darwinian common descent must, by definition, have the relay batons at each branching node of the ever-expanding tree of life…passed safely from one species to the next without falling to the ground (becoming extinct).

But fitness in “lifestyle habits” in each track-meet event does not carry over into fitness in lifestyle habits in another event.  The Olympic gold medalist in the high-jump cannot pass along gold metal technical proficiency to the pole-vaulter simply by handing off a relay baton.

The relay baton in this instance would be a nonsensical addition…inapplicable to both high-jumper and pole-vaulter.

The gold metal “lifestyle habit” proficiencies in each event are too different and discontinuous to be connected by the unrelated, unhelpful element of a relay baton.

The tautological statement that the fittest organisms will produce the most offspring…the fittest organism being defined by circular reasoning as being the one that produces the most offspring…stays entirely within the boundary-lines of a single, track- meet event like high-jumping.

It describes the proficiency level attained through the microevolution of that single track meet event of high-jumping.

Macroevolution…hypothetically producing diversity (in our track-meet analogy) has absolutely nothing to do with the gold metal high-jumper passing the relay baton to the pole-vaulter.

How the high-jumper reaches gold metal proficiency…fitness in lifestyle habits…has no correlation to reaching an equivalent level of technical proficiency in the entirely different track meet event of pole-vaulting…although they each share the similar goal of going as vertically high as they can.

To functionally train for both the pole-vault and high-jump events…to obtain dual proficiencies…a program of transitional “crossover” conditioning and training techniques would be an obvious regime in preparation for competing in these two events…at the same track meet.

We should expect to see the same obvious crossover transition at both the bottom portion entering into each branching node in the tree-of-life …and coming out the top portion of each node…according to common descent.

Identifying fictional nodes in Darwin’s tree of life…in the physical characteristics side of the equation alone…using creative imagination, would not explain the diversity of lifestyle habits for the tens of millions of living species on earth.

This would only get us half-way there.

Simply identifying where and when during the track-meet the high-jumper passed the relay baton to the pole-vaulter…would not explain the vast differences in gold metal “lifestyle habit” techniques between these two events.

The architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits…observable in the “track meet” in-the-wild…are widely different for lions, leopards, and cheetahs.

Did lions, leopards, and cheetahs evolve from a common ancestor?  The philosophical leap to common ancestry…due to the similarities between these three “big cats” is irresistible.

Yet did it actually happen this way?  Do we know this for sure?

The body-plans, lifestyles, and performance dissimilarities between lions, leopards, and cheetahs are so different and discontinuous…that the mere introduction of a relay-race baton connecting them at a hypothetical ancestral node in the long-ago past…does not explain the brilliant creative imagination that defines the unique essence of each of these big cats.

These unique dissimilarities must be in-place at their original inception near the first branching event from lion to leopard to cheetah…close to the ancestral node…or conversely…we can chalk their brilliantly unique existence to blind, mindless, unguided, accidental trial-and-error…falling into place according to random-chance luck.

But then we must consistently apply this concept to all living organisms.  Do finches, ducks, and eagles share a common ancestor?

Again, the philosophical pull toward common ancestry is irresistible.

But where is the line drawn?  When we get to the large classification groupings…the discontinuous gaps between the phyla divisions are as wide apart as the Grand Canyon.

Darwinian macroevolution…based upon naturalistic materialism…would have us believe that all living things today came from a single ancient ancestor.

But this requires an unimaginable quantity and quality of creative brilliance in crafting the unique lifestyle habits that accompany every distinct architectural body-plan.

This requires us to imagine Mother Nature sitting at the designer’s drafting table with an overhead magnifying lamp, tee-squares and triangles, sharpened pencils and erasers…yet being blind and mindless…scribbling endlessly in a probabilistically hopeless random-chance search strategy…for the most complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information that comprise every living organism on earth…and the varied ecological systems to support them.

This is a part of the illogic of the tree-of-life of Darwinian common descent.  The empirical relay baton of explanatory mechanism must connect each discontinuity gap between-the-dots being birds, fish, mammals, insects, reptiles, amphibians, plants, trees, bacteria, and fungi…which are analogous to discontinuous track and field events like pole-vaulting, discus throwing, high-jumping, and the mile-relay.

These connections between hundreds of billions of distinct (and thus classifiable by human taxonomists) life-forms must account for both physical and lifestyle characteristics.

The discontinuous lifestyle habits of the multitudes of living creatures renders the hypothetical “relay baton” connection through common descent to be implausibly forced, stretched, and logically unbridgeable.

            Naturalistic materialism is the philosophy that superimposes an unnatural “relay baton” to connect all of the track meet events. 

Naturalism creates the evidence that supports naturalism.  This is circular.  Take away the common descent interpretational framework and we are back in time to the neutral facts of pre-1859…the “standard Olympics track meet” of typological and discontinuous life-forms…which did not point toward macroevolution at all, prior to Darwin’s book The Origin of Species.