Of course, if the transmissions were only superficially similar, then we could declare convergent evolution. But of course in cars, we can speak of the exact the same trait. For instance, you can’t place these four cars into a nested hierarchy

2 door Toyota Corolla
4 door Toyota Corolla
2 door Honda Civic
4 door Honda Civic

If you assume the 2 doors share a more recent common ancestor, the hierarchy breaks because the two civics share the exact same engine as do the two Corollas; if you assume by classes first on the trait of enginess, you would group the two civics together because they share an engine and likewise the corollas. But then you break on the trait of doorness, since the 2 doors group on this trait and likewise the 4.

That is just two traits. Lets not get into shared radios, seat coverings, radiators, etc. It is simply impossible to put cars into a nested hierarchy.

For instance, if you chose “vehicle class” as your “kingdom” and “transmission” as your “phylum” and “doors” as you “class” - you will end up with the “car” kingdom, the “truck” kingdom, and the “SUV” kingdom, and each kingdom will have both the “automatic” and “manual” transmission phylums, and each phylum will have the “2-door” and “4-door” classes - and so forth and so on. 10 different people can come with 11 defferen phylenogys - which makes them trivial.

The cool thing about the standard phylenogy is biology is that there is an objective way to do it that perserves the groups within groups. You don’t have to arbitraily decide the hierarchy of characteristics because it’s nontrivial. It’s built into each species, literally!

Thanks for the comments and I hope you are a regular visitor to the BTF blog!

-GJG

Very well said. Unfortunately, my own experience has been that when you start to question, “Why didn’t God create outside of these patterns in order to clearly falsify common descent”, Christians tend to shut down immediately, get defensive, and assert that we can’t know the mind of God. That is correct of course but totally misses the point. I am fairly convinced that anyone, upon fairly examining and truly understanding the evidence would have a hard time denying common descent is a reality. However, I have found that most people presented with the cross correlated nested hierarchy have a hard time understanding what they are seeing. And once we start adding questions about how God could have created they get caught up in that single point; even misunderstanding the point to conclude we are saying God is incapable of creating this way (of course He can; indeed, He also could have created us last Thursday, complete with our memories!:) Sometimes I give up and try to focus just on what common descent would predict; and see if they can agree with what it should look like. But the concept of a nested hierarchy seems difficult to understand for some; they continue to assert it is just arbitrary. Indeed, even AiG had a essay that claimed it was arbitrary and that you could place cars into a nested hierarchy (of course you can not!) And it was terribly ironic they choose this as an example since I usually use cars to challenge others to place them in a nested hierarchy if they think they can. AiG only gave a few details on how this would be done and even then they gave enough to clearly show how the nested hierarchy breaks down.

[quote]Have we reached a similar point in our opposition to common descent? Are we nearing that point where continued opposition to a scientific reality hurts the kingdom of God more than it helps its inevitable advance? I think we are.[/quote]

Exactly right. And as some recent comments over at Quintessence of Dust have suggested, we need to get some evangelical theologians on board to start tackling some of these difficult questions. I think you have done an amazing job in your book; and both Collins and Falk have offered up some theology of their own; but lets face it, we are coming from the science side. Questions of original sin (especially in relation to Romans 5), the atonment, and Biblical innerency need to be challenged by the professionals (you yourself did a good job with Genesis 1 and innerency: I would like to see the discussion continued through chapter 11 though:)