Evolutionary Science-v- Creationism

[OnyxCougar]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Well, there's this way to go about it then.

Evidence of evolution: tons and tons

Evidence of humanity created by a Xtian god: a bunch of stories written a long time ago

Check.

Please show me your evidence for evolution, UT.

[OnyxCougar]

Originally Posted by Kitsune

This is snipped from talkorigins.org

Talkorigins.org appears to just be an archive of a usenet newsgroup -- it is not a scientific journal or publication and isn't really any different than The Cellar. Their FAQ entry on why they keep referring to the evolutionary theory as a fact is based on the broken logic that because something is so overwhelming with evidence that is must be 100% correct. This isn't the way theories work.

I agree, Kit. My point in bringing this one up first was that whenever there are debates regarding E/C, the Christians bring up AiG and ICR, and the Evolutionists bring up talkorigins. This illustrates thinking on the topic. It's that kind of reasoning we're dealing with.

Like Wolf's post. NO WHERE did I say it's not ok to believe in Evolution, yet she implies it in her post. What's her belief about the subject? How sure is she? Why did she come to that conclusion? What evidence suggests I'm wrong?

I'd love a dialog without personal or condescending attacks. I really would. I'd love to explore this concept with intellectual people without the sarcasm. Like Clodfobble's post. He/She brought up a point, and I responded with information. That was great! Let's do more of that!!

I'm not trying to convert anyone, I'm just trying to reveal that perhaps the issue isn't so cut and dried as some of the evo's think it is.

[OnyxCougar]

I found this:

we must remember that origin-science of whatever flavour is inherently different from operation science (how the universe presently works—gravity, physics, chemistry, etc.) because we can’t directly test or observe stories about the past.

[Kitsune]

I'd love a dialog without personal or condescending attacks.

And you came to an internet forum?

I'd love a dialog without personal or condescending attacks. I really would. I'd love to explore this concept with intellectual people without the sarcasm.

I think The Cellar is about the closest place you're going to get it. Of course, its all just armchair tactics -- I don't think anyone here is an expert on any of this.

I'll have to return, later, and describe what theory I subscribe to and why I've come to believe it more than the others I've heard. (Note: it is not Darwin's.)

[OnyxCougar]

Originally Posted by Kitsune

And you came to an internet forum?

Of course. Most of the people here I think of as extended family. I'm comfortable here. I've opened up here. Why wouldn't I talk to friends about this?

I think The Cellar is about the closest place you're going to get it. Of course, its all just armchair tactics -- I don't think anyone here is an expert on any of this.

Agreed. But I'm not looking to debate Hawking.

I'll have to return, later, and describe what theory I subscribe to and why I've come to believe it more than the others I've heard. (Note: it is not Darwin's.)

I can't wait

[xoxoxoBruce]

That is a lie. There are KNOWN cases where really good (and smart) scientists poke holes in the established theory and get railroaded, grants taken away, fired and pressured. You get rewarded if you try to further evolution's hold on society. This guy obviously not a scientist or he would know that. He was talking out his ass there.

Talk about snide pompous assholes, you're quoting one here. Rather than refute with these known cases he browbeats with "This guy obviously not a scientist or he would know that." Wow, that gives him lots of credibility...not.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by OnyxCougar

Nothing in the real world has ever been rigorously proved, or ever will be.

Uh.... huh? I have a problem with that statement.

Proof, in the mathematical sense, is possible only if you have the luxury of defining the universe you're operating in. In the real world, we must deal with levels of certainty based on observed evidence.

OK, this is getting weird. So this guy is saying nothing has ever been proven, and we're dealing with levels of certainty based on observed evidence. um...ok... And they call Fundies nutcases!

The guy is right. Nothing has ever been proven, with the possible exception of "Cogito, ergo sum", though some think that that is just a grammar trick. Everything else could be wrong. Science is only the sum total of the current best explanations. ALL of science has levels of certainty less than 1.0. Not just evolution.

Textbooks for kids treat the latest science as fact in the same sort of shorthand as kids' history textbooks say "the Civil War was about slavery" and "the American Revolution was about tea taxes". If they put every detail about every intricacy of every theory, there wouldn't be room in the kids' backpacks. The chapter on Newton doesn't go into special relativity.

Evolution is not special in that regard just because certain religious groups still view it with the same suspicion Galileo once attracted.

[wolf]

The ACLU is suing the school district that mandated teaching intelligent design.

Interesting how the ACLU will trample free speech in it's quest to see to it's interpretation of the freedom of religion ...

[Happy Monkey]

A public school system is not free to teach religion in science class.

[Troubleshooter]

You teach the theory of evolution in science class.

You teach intelligent design in a comparative religion class.

It's not terribly complicated.

Intelligent design isn't a theory because it cannot be tested.

You would also have to teach all of the intelligent design "theories", pagan, hindu, xtian, etc, before I would even accept it as a true intelligent design concept.

[elf]

I’m not the most eloquent person in the world so bear with me if you please . . .

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why couldn’t it be that God did make people from primordial ooze? Did He carve Adam out of rock or sculpt him from clay? It makes more sense to me that a higher power would have prompted it to grow with a mere thought or will to make it so. Does God have hands? Why would he? ‘In his own form’, so it says . . . but then, his own form would have needed air and food to survive just as we do. If He doesn’t need it, then why do we breathe and eat? Is it ‘in his own form, only not as spiffy?’

It says it is so in the bible, and therefore that’s the way it is. Would it be too much of a stretch that pehaps the bible had been simplified to understandable terms for the mindset of the peoples thousands of years ago? Just like schoolbooks are simplified to make it so that children can grasp the concepts, and then move on to make their own decisions and understand more deeply.<b> School is not the end-all be-all of education, and seeing as the bible is a tool of religious education, isn't there room for your own questions or conclusions? </b>Or do you have to read it and accept it just as it is worded (translated? How many times? To mean how many different things?) and not question?

To be perfectly honest, I find it difficult to believe any one theory. People’s minds and their souls are so very complicated that it is rather difficult to think that it was completely and purely evolutionary, and yet, to have God just decide to and proceed to slap together what is now ‘human’ and make everything just the way it is now, and just plunk them down onto a fertile ground seems kind of hokey to me as well.

The fact that different people view God differently tells me that there’s more than one way to believe and to have faith. The bible is not the only way, and therefore it doesn’t belong in school. The teaching of religion belongs in your house or your church.

Something scares me about teaching creationism in the classroom. It begs children not to question. No? I was taught evolutionism. No one ever brought me to church and told me “this is what you need to think” – or even “This is what we believe”. I was taught that science is just that, ‘science’ – studying, assuming, testing, drawing conclusions and linking things together in a way that makes sense. And yet still I believe in <i>a</i> god. it’s just not necessarily <I>your</I> God. Or, rather, not the <i>same way</i> you think of Him. I think it would be comforting to close you eyes and imagine that God looks familiar.

It seems so much easier to <i>know</i> wholly and completely that your belief is correct.
…

Wow, this got a lot wordier than I had intended. Must be off for now, work to do and all that rot.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Very eloquent, elf.

[alphageek31337]

Since this got dredged up from the dark, horrible recesses of the Cellar, I feel I must add my opinions. I don't necessarily buy evolution part and parcel, but I see it as a much stronger jumping off point than "God made the world as it is today and it has not changed at all ever". Darwinian competition ("Survival of the Fittest") can be observed in the world today, with the evolution (yes, whether you believe evolution started it all or not, you cannot deny that it is happening today) of such things as antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the commonly cited case of Peppered Moths in Britain. For those of you unfamiliar with the moths, the basic idea is thus: there are moths in England that tend to gather on a tree with white bark. These moths varied in color from almost pure white to pure black. A pure black moth is easy for predators to spot, so the population tended to include very few pure or mostly black moths, with the dominance of color leaning toward the white moths. Around the time of the industrial revolution, however, a shift occurred. Coal smoke from nearby factories blackened the trees, suddenly making white moths very visible and black moths quite well hidden. Thus, obviously, the population swung toward black moths. Now, it has been argued that since no new genetic information was created, that evolution did not occur, and this is true. The moths are simply an example of natural selection, the driving force, the keystone if you will, behind evolution. If an omniscient, omnipotent being created all the creatures of Earth, why do things like this have to change? Creatures needn't adapt, because they were created in perfect balance by a perfect being. One might also note Albert's Squirrel on one side of the Grand Canyon versus the Kaibab Squirrel on the other side. The two are almost perfect genetic matches, with minor physical variations, and cannot interbreed. New genetic material and a new species were both created, theoretically by the Grand Canyon forming and splitting the populations. There we have proof that evolution does happen, though it will be impossible without some interesting manipulations of the fourth dimension to prove that it *did* happen. Never has it been observed that God plopped a new species onto the Earth, though if Creationism is correct in its assumptions, he wouldn't have to. There will also always be gaps in the fossil record, because we must note that it is an extremely rare occurence for an animal to be fossilized after death. Even in extremely successful species with millions in population at one time (and, we must assume, an exponentially greater number of deaths), there are not terribly many preserved fossils, especially those of full bodies of a single organism, which would prove infinitely more useful than single or small groups of bones, which could easily be attributed to the animal before or after the transitional species. Transitional species are just that, transitional. They exist for a short time as one archetype moves toward another. There are not nearly as many of them as there are of successful archetypes, and they do not exist for as long a time (hence, fewer bodies and exponentially fewer fossils).

On another note, one of the more common arguments for intelligent design is what I refer to as the automobile theory, essentially that evolution is just as likely as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a complete, running automobile. The problem with this theory is that it assumes one junkyard, one planet on which life could possibly have evolved. Given that the universe is infinite (space is nothingness, nothingness can extend onward indefinitely, therefore the universe must be infinite in size), and that there are an absolutely mindblowingly large number of planets in the universe (a number large enough that it can be considered, for practical purposes, infinite), what is the likelihood that there is *not* a planet on which life could evolve? Essentially, given 1 junkyard and one tornado, the chances of assembling an automobile are infintessimally small, but given an infinite number of junkyards and an infinite number of tornados blowing through each of them, it is almost a guarantee that, at least once, the parts will come together by chance and form a running automobile. This is the same theory I present to people who don't believe that intelligent life exists off of the planet Earth: given an infinite number of attempts over time, even at infintessimally small odds, Earth cannot be the only place in the universe that fell within that precise range on the bell curve that permits intelligent life to develop. In fact, it is safe to assume that there are a vast multitude of civilzations throughout the universe.

Also, as a sidenote for intelligent design theorists who wish to argue, "your theory is wrong" != "my theory is right". Simply poking holes in evolution does not mean that there is a God. Come up with scientifically backed data that withstands scrutiny and provides mechanisms to explain the changes in organisms that we have observed, and you will begin to actually prove your theory.

[Undertoad]

Good summary alph! Good work by you!

The junkyard thing is just a dumb analogy; there are plenty of junkyards right here on this planet, given that you have billions upon billions of years to wait and every day is another combination of the primordial soup.

More importantly, it only looks like a tornado because we experience things in such a short burst of time. We experience a split-second in our lifetimes, of all the time that we could be aware of. We have but a moment to make sense of it all. It's like the whole thing was set up all day and we wake up at 11:59:59 PM and only have until midnight to figure out the previous 24 hours.

[Kitsune]

Agreed -- some very nice takes on various sides in here, recently.

One thing that bugs me about Creationists is that they "cannot believe that we evolved from apes". Even though this is a poor (and incorrect) simplification of a very complex theory, there is one aspect about this that bugs me: many creationists, in argument, indicate that humans are so vastly different from other species in the animal kingdom that we should be effectively removed from the catagory entirely. Why is this? The accomplishments of civilization aside, we really aren't much different when you get down to it. We bleed, we eat, we reproduce, we die.