Moontanman

I'm not completely sure who but some few of the ancients did indeed get parts of it right, I read this many years ago but if memory serves me there was some Greek ( i think) BCE that suggested a hierarchy of complexity among animals and even suggested some relationship with each other but he didn't get a mechanism or he didn't quite go far enough with decent... it's been many years but i am quite sure there were some in the ancient world who questioned these things but never quite got all the parts at once. The ancients did find fossils, fossil proto-ceratopsins were mistaken for the mythical mammoth fossils were thought to be cyclops, there are a few more examples i think.

That sort of thing is suggestive and would seem to discount the supernatural not by virtue of being miraculous but by virtue that almost all humans would hold information that miraculous with suspicion in every aspect of life but the supernatural...

Do we even have independent eye witness accounts of god? What is this theory you speak of? goddidit is not a theory...

Pears, do you not see the difference in magnitude of the claim that my head hurts and the claim god talks to me?

I would think that depends on your definition of morality and the justification of behaviors demanded by god... Also there is the fact that I admitted the unicorn in the bible was plainly a mythological characterization of a rhino.... There are things of real substance wrong with the bible, I have no need of strawmen...

You have misrepresented what I said, i agreed that a description of something doesn't mean condoning it but to say you can approach the bible in the way you suggest accomplishes nothing. If you are going to assert the good parts as true you have to assert that bad parts as true as well. You can't ignore the thorns to get the cherries any more than you can ignore the cherries and point out the thorns, neither is an honest appraisal of what the bible says. I would suggest that the tree in question has far more thorns than cherries and in fact most of the cherries are poisonous as well... You say you can point out as many cherries as i can thorns, i doubt that very much, I am quite familiar with the bible and it contains few if any cherries... but the thorns are everywhere....

If they had feathers and they lost most of them I would expect to see feathered crests and such as a sexual display.

Warmth would be an important function but I've read of running stabilization as an additional function as well as helping to catching flying insects, I would guess sexual display was also an important aspect of the feathers as well. They can be an important part of the sexual display in modern birds.

IMHO you can't cherry pick and get a reasonable determination of what is going on. Yes you are correct, relating something that happened is not the same as condoning it but if you are to make a clear call on this you cannot give passes for some things but ignore others. IOW if you are going to assume Lot's story is true and the result of humans acting immorally not God condoning it you have to examine the places where God is clearly condoning or demanding immoral acts and acting immorally as well...

Feathers are considered to be superior to fur, feathers allow animals as small as birds to retain body heat even exposed to very cold air, most small mammals require some protection from extreme cold, dens or other cover, birds do things like swim around on very cold lakes or fly in sub zero air and it's why we have down insulated clothing that is superior to fur but fur can be modified to increase it's insulation, hollow hairs for instance...

I agree Pears, the two are not the same but it is also true that god demanded or condoned actions much worse than this. I pointed one out in post #161 but there many more things like slavery, murder, rape, genocide, and just killing children for reasons of petty vanity.

Ok let's pump it up a bit... I am going to assert that not only does time exist but it is the only thing that exists independent of everything else. If you were to cut your brains ties to the world, no sensory input at all you would still be aware of time, if you exist so does time because with out time nothing could exist...

Gotta love the nonstampcollector...

Christian values? So keeping slaves is ok? Do you follow the commandments of the bible? all 613 of them?

No, the personal experiences of alien abduction are no better or worse than the personal experiences of god, neither have any credible evidence. Don't forget faeries and trolls as well, there is quite a long list by the way of entities various people believe in...

This video shows a shark that walks with it's fins as well as any bony fish and better than some amphibians. I would like to speculate on the possibility that this is close to the way land vertebrates developed but would a animal like a shark be able to make the move to land since it lacks a bony skeleton. Also does this say anything about how many limbs a vertebrate can evolve or is the number of legs too closely connected basally to our genetics for there to be more than four?

I think pyramids make time go sideways...

How does religious faith have any basis? What is it's basis other than faith? I would say there is zero empirical evidence for god... There is personal experience of alien abductions, literally millions of them, does that make aliens abductions credible? Obviously you don't know many Pagans... There are still people who worship Thor, believe in faeries, elves, the green man, Adrianna...

So this plan includes things like disease, abuse, disasters, crashes, injury, death, if these are part of the plan then i think I can do without being watched over by this planner...

I'm not sure how this supports your position... ?

Have you forgotten about seasons? Even at the edge of the ice sheets the summer woke up the landscape of the "frozen" tundra just like it does now and taiga forests rolled across the landscape just like it does today but just further south. These animals were capable of migrating vast distances from summer to winter feeding grounds just like caribou, musk oxen, bison, bears and other large fauna do today. Large animals like elephants migrate huge distances even to day to follow the growing season why couldn't the mega fauna have done that as well?

Why does there need to be a higher being, why couldn't the origin of the universe be as naturalistic as the formation of the solar system?

I do agree with you, unicorn was probably a mythological rendition of a rhino, but "Auroch" was not an African cow with horns that looked fused together. Aurochs were the ancestors of modern cattle but the original beast was much larger and more powerful than domestic cattle and lived manly in Europe, Asia, and India with a smaller range in North Africa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs They were large dangerous beasts.

I am not sure what you are asserting here, why would mega fauna have any problem finding food during the ice ages?