Natural Selection

It will continually be the same, because God has His hand on it.

Rate at which it turns Hydrogen into Helium compared with the total amount of Hydrogen and Helium it currently has.

God could have made it that way, couldn't he have? Since God can do anything? Maybe He made it like that for a reason.

The same can mean different things. I think it meant having the same validity, not the same interpretation. So in other words it meant "no matter how much you discover, you will see that the Bible aligns with it, along with complex things humanity will never know." Not "the current literal interpretation of God's word will forever be taken literally."

The Bible is different for everyone, hence the name the living book. But it is also forever the same, if that makes sense.

That makes perfect sense, different meanings found in it at different times, forever the same in that it retains it's validity and people continue to believe it.

Yeah, that's it. But I think the only things that are metaphors are obvious that they're metaphors, like the picture of the dragon with seven heads in Revelation is a metaphor, but the creation account among others are not metaphors.

A possibilty, but an unlikely one. Is it really easier to create a Star that has half of it's fuel used up, or would it be more reasonable just to insert a line about the creation of the sun so ancient humans are not confused by it. (There's a reason God never told us directly about Star cycles, humans were not ready for it then.)

God can do anything. Maybe a star that had any more or less fuel would make the earth too hot or cold?

Say some human beings, while a larger number say that they are.

Anyone who claims that God tells people whether parts of the bible are metaphors or not is a charlatan.

It's like the origin of the bible itself. It's not that there was a single answer to the question of what the bible consists of. Rather there is a history of disagreement, and there are significantly different versions even today. To be sure that say the King James bible is valid, you both need to agree that the bible of an entire millennium was incorrect, but also that Martin Luther, who threw out some of the books, was wrong when he believed that one book was a forgery, but which was later added to the version of the bible he came up with.

Any chance of getting this back on topic? Why do all discussions with YEC's descend into arguments over scripture?

The only reason it gets there is that essentially the whole of evolution deniers' motivation is the belief that certain sentences in the bible (unlike others) are to be taken absolutely literally. The fact that this is based on the unsubstantiated opinions of individuals (who disagree) on what is literal and what is metaphor should be enough alone to make every such person realise their position is unsound.

But I thought this was intended to be a platform for explaining the principle of Natural Selection & how it works to bring about variation in species?

To scientists, what people who cling to religious dogma choose to believe is less than irrelevant. The soundness of any scientific principle, the truth of any statement we make regarding the functioning of natural systems, is founded on evidence & the most rational conclusions that can be drawn from it.

The opinions of people of faith are neither here nor there. Our scientific understanding of the natural Universe will go on apace, unhindered by what dogmatists may or may not think.

The pressure to justify what they believe to be the case, regarding the creation of the Cosmos & life, is entirely on the shoulders of Bible literalists who are forced to fight from an ever shrinking space.

It's not a coincidence that while YEC's search out forums such as this to fight their hopeless cause, people of a more rational & evidence based way of thinking don't seek out religious audiences to explain & justify this or that scientific theory.

There's simply no need because even people of faith accept all manner of scientific conclusions in large numbers.

If everyone jumped off a bridge...

Experts are those whose conclusions are the most reliable in a field. That could be used as a definition. It's just ignorance to place quotes and think it dismisses people who know and understand vastly more than you.

Here's an example of "experts"

About ten to twenty years ago, health "experts" claimed that all cholesterol was bad for your arteries. Now, health "experts" say that some cholesterol is actually good for you.

They were scientists that had access to good equipment and labs, yet they were wrong.

Yep.

Medical science does indeed advance. Until recent history it remained primitive, although some of the nonsense in ancient texts had been long discarded, but it took modern science to cause rapid advance. I don't see why you would point out the scientists with their equipment merely do a million times better than the bible (purportedly with God to help - how does that compare to equipment?) rather than a billion times better.

There was high infant mortality from infectious diseases and a large fraction of the population dying before they were old from the same (eg TB) until modern science came up with vaccination and antibiotics, leading to a life expectancy in the 30s for most of history.

So you can claim God is never wrong, but modern science does medicine much better than what you claim he/she provided. Unsurprisingly it also does the history of life on planet Earth much better (as well as many other fields, such as astronomy and cosmology).

If science is chess, science deniers are in the position of being continually checkmated and claiming it has not happened.

Who said I deny science?