Creation & EvolutionForum for the discussion of this important topic. This forum is open to non-believers. There is a Christians-only forum in the Christians-only section too.
Again, I am talking about scientific data. Are you now saying that working with the data we have today, that we will one day prove God scientifically? Sorry lucaspa, but I don't think it works that way.
Not the data we have today. If that were the case, then we would have already supported or falsified the existence of deity. However, I'm not willing to speak for all data that might be gathered in the future. Are you? Maybe someday we can find a way around methodological materialism. Or we can detect an effect for which there is no viable hypothesis except direct causation by deity. Until and unless that day comes, science is agnostic. But I'm not willing to state categorically that science will always be agnostic.
If we want to discuss anecdotal spiritual experiences, then we have plenty of evidence for God. But I was not referring to such experiences in my post.
Scientific data, lucaspa...not revelation data. In order to see God in the scientific data, I believe you need to have faith first.
OK. Nice qualification. Now you are on solid ground.
However, I think you are still cheating religion by saying "anecdotal spiritual experiences". You are downgrading those experiences.
Mike, all evidence is personal experience. Including scientific evidence. Take a look at this paper:
Lucas, P.A. Chemotactic response of osteoblast-like cells to TGF-beta. Bone, 10: 459-463, 1990.
What is that but my personal experience? Nothing. It was repeatable otherwise I never would have tried to get it published, but it's still my experience. Now, to be science anyone and everyone has to be able to repeat my experience under approximately the same conditions. IOW, science is personal experience where everyone has the same personal experience.
But there is nothing in that to say that personal experience not shared by everyone is wrong. It's not part of science, but that is not to say it is any less valid. So, as you say, there is plenty of evidence for the existence of deity.
If someone looks at the beauty and complexity of a cell and realizes that God is real in that moment...they weren't convinced by the scientific data. They were convinced by a personal revelation. Otherwise, anyone who looks at such data would come to the same conclusion. You don't need faith to experience a revelation, but you need faith (or a revelation) to see God in the scientific data.
OK. Well said. Now you are making your claims more precise.
Now, to get you to think about something related and an implication of your statements. There is always a subset of people who are not convinced by the data. Look at creationists. We point them to massive amounts of data against the Flood. But they are not convinced. Does that mean the scientific data is not convincing? NO! So don't paint yourself into a corner such that unless "anyone" comes to the same conclusion then the conclusions is not valid. In this case, the conclusion "God is real" is not valid from the scientific data because the material processes in the cell could operate on their own. IOW, there is an unfalsified alternative hypothesis to deity as an explanation. The person with the "revelation" is rejecting that alternative on faith. Because of that, I agree that the person must qualify his position as an opinion.
__________________ "If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437
"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890
Well, while we are waiting for evolutionary proof #2, I thought we could all read a nice Sunday sermon on the:
I can see the pattern now. You make claims. We counter them and show them to be false. You ask for proof. We give it. You ignore the counters and post something else copied entire from a website!
Oh, well. That's OK. The responses will help others on the forum. And simply shows how empty your posts are that you can't discuss the claims you make.
Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer and Dr. Morris pointed out that the theory of
evolution, with its idea of "the survival of the fittest," was the
viewpoint behind both Fascism and Communism. Darwin's ideas induced
Hitler to attempt to exterminate the Jews in World War II.
Actually, I can document that it was creationism that led Hitler to do this. However, you realize that "survival of the fittest" is not Darwin's phrase. It comes from a sociologist, Herbert Spencer.
Dr. Morris and Dr. Schaeffer pointed out that Darwin's theory is what produced the mindset that abortion is a woman's "choice."
LOL! Then what produced the "mindset" of African women having abortion sticks dating back at least 4,000 years! No evolution then. Or the mindset that led Greeks 3,000 years ago to expose unwanted babies to kill them? No evolution then.
Morris and Schaeffer are committing the Naturalistic Fallacy. That what happens in nature is what should happen in human society. Evolutionists for 150 years have battled this idea. "3. Whatever Darwinism represents on the playing fields of nature (and by representing both murder and cooperation at different times, it upholds neither as nature's principal way), Darwinism implies nothing about moral conduct. We do not find our moral values in the actions of nature. One might argue, as Thomas Henry Huxley did in his famous essay "Evolution and Ethics," that Darwinism embodies a law of battle, and that human morality must be defined as the discovery of an opposite path. Or one might argue, as grandson Julian did, that Darwinism is a law of cooperation and that moral conduct should follow nature. If two such brilliant and committed Darwinians could come to such opposite opinions about evolution and ethics, I can only conclude that Darwinism offers no moral guidance." Stephen Jay Gould, essay "William Jennings Bryan's last campaign" in Bully for Brontosaurus, 1991 pp. 426-427.
" We should give the last word to Vernon Kellogg, the great teacher who understood the principle of strength in limits, and who listened with horror to the ugliest misuses of Darwinism. Kellogg properly taught in his textbook (with David Starr Jordan) that Darwinism cannot provide moral answers:
"Some men who call themselves pessimists because they cannot read good into the operations of nature forget that they cannot read evil. In morals the law of competition no more justifies personal, official, or national selfishness or brutality than the law of gravitation justifies the shooting of a bird." Stephen Jay Gould in the essay "William Jennings Bryan's last campaign" in Bully for Brontosaurus, 1991, pp. 429-430.
That Hitler and others misused Darwinism says nothing about the validity of the theory. Any more than the misuse of Christianity by the Inquisition says that Christianity is invalid.
"And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned
unto fables" (II Timothy 4:4).
That describes creationism very well.
I. First, there is no real evidence for evolution.
It remains the "theory" of evolution after one hundred and fifty years,
simply because the evolutionists have no real proof, to make their
theory a scientific fact.
LOL! Semantic games. It's Cell Theory and the Theory of Gravity. Should we say that neither is true because they are both "theories"? All this does is show how Morris and crew are playing on your ignorance. And you swallow the lies hook, line, and sinker.
Dr. Joe White and Dr. Nicholas Comninellis say,
We would expect that the oldest and deepest layers of fossils would
contain the earliest, most primitive forms of life. As we search through
younger, shallower layers, we would expect to find gradual transition of
the most primitive life forms into more complex ones...Since the
transition from fish to amphibian would have required many millions of
years (during which time millions, even billions, of transitional forms
must have lived) fossils of many of these transitional forms should be
discovered.
Consider, Lyle, what is the purpose of Flood Geology for creationism? It is to explain the fossil record, which otherwise shows evolution!
Dr. White and Dr. Comninellis continue, If reptiles turned into birds, as claimed, then we should also expect to find fossils with gradually extending of the front feet of the reptile into the form of wings like a bird.
.
Strawman. Birds evolved from two-legged theropod dinosaurs. The forelimbs of the dinos were already extended. They were used for grasping prey. This is called "exaptation". It's where a feature evolves for one function and then is useful for another.
But they do not! There is no credible fossil evidence to support
evolution!
And you put this up after I gave you sources for transitionals! Talk about the "bury your head in the sand" syndrome!
II. Second, examples of hoaxes used to "prove" the theory of evolution.
I could give several of these hoaxes, but I have selected three, the
first one from fifty years ago, the second one from the 1990s, and the
third one from the early twentieth century. First, consider the hoax of
"Piltdown Man."
The American People's Encyclopedia (Chicago: The Spencer Press, Inc.)
was written in 1948. My father gave me a set of this encyclopedia in
1954, when I was thirteen years old. I still have this set of
encyclopedias in my library. Here is what that encyclopedia said about
"Piltdown Man" back in 1948,
A fossil human skull found near Piltdown, England, in 1912. It was taken
from a gravel pit cut into an ancient alluvial fan. The deposit itself
probably dates from the third glaciation but contains much older
materials washed in from higher levels. The skull while exceedingly
thick and showing some primitive characteristics is essentially that of
modern man (ibid., volume 15, p. 782).
Although the 1953 edition of this encyclopedia does throw some doubt on
"Piltdown Man," it still presented it that year as a credible proof of
the theory of evolution.
That isn't what the quote from the encyclopedia says! It simply says Piltdown is a mixture of primitive and modern characteristics. Nowhere is it given as "proof" of evolution. Your source can't even read its own evidence correctly!
No wonder they say evolution is a lie. It's projection from the fact that all the anti-evolution arguments they are using are lies.
Now, the truth is that Piltdown was a fraud perpetrated on scientists, not by science. Dawson and de Chardin perpetrated a practical joke on the scientist. One that got out of hand. Remember that de Chardin was a Catholic priest. So the incident is not a comment on evolutionary hoaxes, but the integrity of Christians!
Actually, altho de Chardin wrote extensively on an evolutionary theology, he never used Piltdown in his writings.
The evolutionists, flushed and excited, pointed to their "missing link"
for more than 40 years [from 1912 until 1953], and boasted about it in
all the textbooks as being "proof of evolution."
No, they didn't. By the 1920s A. africanus fossils were found in Africa and Piltdown became more and more an anomaly that didn't fit. It was downplayed in the literature and no longer boasted about in the textbooks and encyclopedias. Notice that the quote from the encyclopedia above doesn't say Piltdown is any kind of evidence for evolution. This is just one example of how Piltdown was quietly ignored.
Dr. Henry M. Morris points out that Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin has been "implicated by a number of his fellow evolutionists as
one of the perpetrators of the infamous Piltdown Man hoax" (Henry M.
Morris, Ph.D., The Long War Against God, Master Books, 2000, p. 23).
And Morris did this only after Gould did his exhaustive historical research into the matter. Morris forgets to mention that de Chardin did it as a practical joke.
De Chardin was one of the leading evolutionists of the twentieth century.
Here false witness is committed by implication. The implication is that de Chardin used Piltdown prominently as evidence in support of evolution. The fact is that de Chardin never used Piltdown as evidence!
Dr. Michael Pitman writes:
Only in 1953, when a method for determining the age of fossil bones by
analyzing their fluorine content was revived,
Actually, the method was not "revived", but "devised". It was a new method.
The human skull and ape-like jaw, contradicting updated ideas about man's evolution, had aroused suspicion.
Well, lookit here! Where did those "new ideas" come from? From data that none of the creationists claim is fraudulent!
Arthur Smith Woodward was the head of the anthropology department at the British Museum - who collaborated with Dawson. Although he was an expert on fish bones, Woodward was "certainly not an anthropologist" (ibid., p. 91).
Woodward, as advisor to Teilhard, was the victim of the joke. Not the
"And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables" (II Timothy 4:4).
And this is certainly what creationists have done with the history of Piltdown!
Next, consider the case of "Nebraska Man."
On receiving a tooth [found in Nebraska] from a Mr. Harold Cook, H. F.
Osborn (head of the American Museum of Natural History) declared it had
characteristics which were a mixture of human, chimpanzee and
pithecanthropus. He named it Hesperopithecus haroldcookii (Harold Cook's
Evening Ape). In Britain Sir Grafton Elliott Smith fully supported him
and, on the basis of a single tooth, there appeared in the Illustrated
London Times (24 June 1922) a center-spread of an artist's impression of
"man-ape" Hesperopithecus cavorting with his wife.
1. Osborn found the tooth.
2. Osborn did not authorize the illustration.
You may have seen the classic movie, "Inherit the Wind," or the TV
movie, made in the 1990s, ... Bryan did not respond in kind.
Yes, Bryan did. Read the transcripts.
Darrow was clearly the media favourite [What else is new?]. Darrow
[used] two main lines of evidence for evolution...the Piltdown Man and
Nebraska Man (Michael Pitman, ibid., pp. 99-100).
Sorry, neither came up in the real trial. Scientific evidence was excluded by the judge. The truth is that Osborn and Bryan had conflicting essays in a magazine and Osborn used Nebraska man there as support of evolution. But not at the trial.
Oh, I forgot to tell you, in 1930, it was discovered that the tooth,
upon which Nebraska Man was based, was actually the tooth of an extinct
pig!
And who discovered that? Osborn. It turns out that teeth of humans and pigs are very similar. It's an honest mistake. Osborn funded the expedition back to the original site to locate hominid bones, if possible. Instead, they found a jaw with teeth still in it. All this is documented again by Gould.
"And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables" (II Timothy 4:4).
And here the creationists do it again.
If there really were "missing links," or "transitional forms" between
the ancestors of apes and humans - there ought to be millions and
millions of fossils. But there aren't.
Below is a list I have compiled of transitional skulls in the hominid lineage. Care to show any of them to be frauds? Can't. If everyone looks carefully, you see that "creationists" didn't discover the Piltdown fraud or the Nebraska man error. It was evolutionists. So how would creationists discover a fraud? And if evolutionists discover their own frauds, then the fossils viewed as genuine are really genuine, aren't they?
F. Clark Howell, Early Man Time Life Library, 1980
Francis M Clapham, Our Human Ancestors, 1976
Afarensis to habilis: OH 24 is in between A. afarensis and habilis
B Asfaw, T White, O Lovejoy, B Latimer, S Simpson, G Suwa, Australopithecus garhi: a new species of early hominid from Ethiopia. Science 284: 622-629, 1999. All individuals are intermediate between A. afarensis and H. habilis.
Habilis to erectus:
Oldovai: Bed I has Habilis at bottom, then fossils with perfect mixture of characteristics of habilis and erectus, and erectus at top. At bottom of Bed II (top of Bed I) have fossils resemble H. erectus but brain case smaller than later H. erectus that lies immediately above them. pg 81
OH 13, 14 was classified by some anthropologists as H. habilis but others as early H. erectus. 650 cc
D2700 from Dmasi has features of both hablis and erectus. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/d2700.html
Koobi Fora: Another succession with several habilis up to 2 Mya, then transitionals, and then erectus at 1.5 Mya.
Erectus to sapiens: Omo valley. Omo-2 "remarkable mixture of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens characteristics" pg. 70.
Omo-1: another mix of erectus and sapiens
Omo Valley, Ethiopia: ~ 500,000 ya. mixture erectus and sapiens features
Sale in Morrocco: skull discovered in 1971, ~300,000 ya. also shows erectus and sapiens features.
Broken Hill skull: another skull with mixtures of erectus and sapiens features
__________________ "If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437
"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890
III. Third, the recent examples of flying dinosaurs and
peppered moths are also proven to be hoaxes.
Left over from the previous post: Tautavel, 200Kya: large brow ridges and small cranium but rest of face looks like H. sapiens.
"We shall see the problem of drawing up a dividing line between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens is not easy." pg 65.
Ngaloba Beds of Laetoli, 120 Kya: ~1200 cc and suite of archaic (erectus) features.
Guamde in Turkana Basin, 180 Kya: more modern features than Ngaloba but in-between erectus and sapiens.
Skhul, Israel "posed a puzzle to paleoanthropologists, appearing to be almost but not quite modern humans"
Skhul and Jebel Qafza caves: "robust" H. sapiens at 120 Kya that have brow ridges like erectus but brain case like sapiens.
Bouri http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...iesthuman.html http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/r...ckground.shtml
actual paper: http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPa...re01669_r.html
A report from the Los Angeles Times recently had the byline, "Once
Hailed as a Missing Link, Forgery is Found to be Mosaic of Fossils from
Microraptor and a Bird" (Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2002, p. A12).
Here are the highlights of that news report:
NEW YORK - When the smuggled stone slab first surfaced at a Tucson
mineral show, it seemed the likely key to a mystery of evolution.
Newspaper hype. Archeoraptor was simply going to fill in a small gap. The major transitionals from dino to bird had been known for over 100 years. Marsh, O C. 1877. Introduction and succession of vertebrate life in America. American Journal of Science and Arts 3rd Series XIV(83):337-378.
"It is now generally admitted by biologists who have made a study of the vertebrates, that Birds have come down to us through the Dinosaurs, and the close affinity of the latter with recent Struthious Birds will hardly be questioned. The case amounts almost to a demonstration, if we compare, with Dinosaurs, their contemporaries, the Mesazoic Birds. The classes of Birds and Reptiles, as now living, are seperated by a gulf so profound that a few years since it was cited by the opponents of evolution as the most important break in the animal series, and one which that doctrine could not bridge over. Since then, as Huxley has clearly shown, this gap has been virtually filled by the discovery of bird-like Reptiles and reptilian Birds. Compsognathus and Archaeopteryx of the Old World, and Ichthyornis and Hesperornis of the New, are the stepping stones by which the evolutionists of to-day leads the doubting brother across the shallow remnant of the gulf, once thought impassable"
Notice that no creationist is saying that any of these is a hoax.
Researchers in China and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York now have completely deciphered the deception.
Now, who are these researchers? Evolutionists! Wait! Where are the creationist paleontologists who would be looking at these? There is only one -- Kurt Wise. Where was he in all this? SILENT.
The find wrongly hailed as a crucial link between the dinosaurs and the birds
It's not a "crucial" link. Marsh already had the crucial links over 100 years ago! Newspaper hype.
a hoax to deliberately mislead scientists, as was the case with
the infamous Piltdown Man.
Notice this! Not a hoax by scientists, but a hoax to mislead scientists! IOW, not a hoax by the scientific community to "prove" evolution, but a hoax by people wanting money. Kinda blows the whole thesis of the article, doesn't it, Calvin?
In the same way, the discovery of the Archaeoraptor forgery was a twist
in a scientific dispute over the origin of birds.
Publicity compounded the problem, turning the volatile mix of
paleontology and profit into something more toxic to sound science.
When the fossil find was made public, it did help buttress the argument
that birds are the direct descendants of carnivorous Theropod dinosaurs
such as Tyrannosaurus rex.
When it was revealed as a fake, however, it then served to discredit the
theory by calling into doubt the veracity of other fossils from China
that document the link between dinosaurs and modern birds. Moreover, the
fraud was exploited by religious fundamentalists eager to undermine any
evidence of evolution.
I need to say here that the last statement shows once again that the Los Angeles Times is "eager to undermine any evidence of Christianity!"
Not at all. Creationism is not Christianity. No matter how much creationists want to think so. The paper was careful to report it accurately: creationists made a fairy tale out of this to try to undermine any evidence for evolution. Just what you are trying to do with this post. The Time hit the nail right on the head.
The fact is that there really isn't credible fossil evidence for the link
between reptiles and birds.
"The fossils of two new species of dinosaur have been discovered in China – dinosaurs with feathers. These creatures effectively close the debate on whether or not birds and dinosaurs share a close evolutionary heritage. The answer is a resounding 'yes'. Yet these fossils make it clear that feathers appeared in evolution long before flight, and long before the appearance of birds in anything like their modern form.
The dinosaurs are described in the 25 June 1998 issue of Nature by the multi-national team of Ji Qiang and Ji Shu-An of the National Geological Museum of China, Beijing, China; Philip Currie of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, Drumheller, Alberta, Canada, and Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History, New York.
Both the dinosaurs come from Liaoning Province, north of Beijing, and are very roughly 145 million years old. Both would have looked, in life, like very stringy turkeys, with long necks and legs, and relatively stubby arms. They would probably have been fast runners, though incapable of flight.
One of the dinosaurs, Protarchaeopteryx, had a switch of feathers at the end of its long tail. The rest of its body may have been covered with downy, feather-like structures similar to those seen in the dinosaur Sinosauropteryx, a smaller and more primitive creature that comes from the same part of China, but in slightly younger rocks. Although doubt has been cast on the relevance of the feather-like body covering of Sinosauropteryx to the origin of 'true' feathers, there is no doubt about the tail-feathers of Protarchaeopteryx. They are indistinguishable from bird feathers: each one has a central stalk, with barbs on either side forming vanes. Yet in most other respects, Protarchaeopteryx is hardly distinguishable from Velociraptor, the fierce hunter that starred in the film Jurassic Park.
The second dinosaur is even more interesting. This creature, Caudipteryx, had vaned feathers not only at the end of its tail, but also on its forearms, which would have looked like miniature wings. Details of its skeleton show that it is more closely related to birds than is Protarchaeopteryx. It also has peculiarities of its own: its jaws lack teeth entirely, except for a fringe of long, pointed teeth at the front of the upper jaw. "
So much for the "no credible fossil" claim!
The two men behind uniformitarian evolution were Charles Darwin
and Charles Lyell. Darwin's only degree was in theology. Lyell's only
degree was in law. Neither one of them studied one thing about science
when they were in college!
That isn't true. Darwin studied geology under Rev. Adam Sedgwick, the world's foremost geologist. He studied biology. The reasons the degrees aren't in science is because there were no degrees in science at the time! A little false witness here.
"Naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace admitted
that he received the basic tenets of the Darwinian...heresy while in an
occult trance in a Malaysian jungle. It does not take a theologian to
figure out the identity of the revealer...Modern evolution is simply the
continuation of Satan's long war against God" (Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.,
The Long War Against God, Master Books, 2000, p. 10).
Another false witness. Wallace was in a malarial fever at the time. Of course, both Darwin and Wallace were anticipated by 27 years :
"In 1831 Mr. Patrick Matthew published his work on ‘Naval Timber and Arboriculture,’ in which he gives precisely the same view on the origin of species as that (presently to be alluded to) propounded by Mr. Wallace and myself in the ‘Linnean Journal,’ and as that enlarged in the present volume. Unfortunately the view was given by Mr. Matthew very briefly in scattered passages in an appendix to a work on a different subject, so that it remained unnoticed until Mr. Matthew himself drew attention to it in the ‘Gardener’s Chronicle,’ on April 7th, 1860. The differences of Mr. Matthew’s view from mine are not much importance:" Origin of the Species, Historical Sketch
I wonder how Morris plans to character assassinate Mr. Matthew?
"And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables" (II Timothy 4:4).
Creationists do this a lot, don't they? So far, every story you have given us is an example of this.
James Perloff says,
The latest Darwinian "evidence" to bite the dust: the peppered moth.
Most high school biology textbooks today cite this creature as a proof
of evolution...According to the evolutionary scenario, the peppered moth
rests on tree trunks during the day. Industrial pollution blackened the
tree trunks, making the dark moths invisible to preying birds, which
caused them to become the dominant variety. Later, pollution controls
caused the light variety to resurge.
Biologist Jonathan Wells, who holds PhDs from Yale and Berkeley, exposes
the myth of the peppered moth in his book Icons of Evolution
(Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000). As it turns out, peppered moths do not
rest on tree trunks during the day.
1. The peppered mothsw are an example of natural selection.
2. Yes, they do rest on trunks. Miller has gotten the data from the original paper. Look at it yourself. http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/ev...pril-2002.html
In some studies, this was faked by gluing and pinning dead moths to trees and photographing them. (James Perloff, The Case Against Darwin, Refuge Books, 2002, p. 59).
This was only to take the photographs. Since the moths aren't cooperative to pose for the camera. The dead moths were placed where the observations said the live moths landed.
I remember studying about these moths at Los Angeles City College. They said it proved evolution. No one told us students that it was a hoax,
Because it wasn't. The claim that it is a hoax is the hoax.
"And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables" (II Timothy 4:4).
Yep. And creationists did it again with the peppered moths. They are batting 1,000 so far!
Evolution is a lie, based on frauds and hoaxes.
Put creationism in place of "evolution" and you have a true statement.
The Bible is the truth, sent from God.
That's true. However, we are not dealing with "The Bible" here. We are dealing with your interpretation of the Bible. And that interpretation is not the truth. It goes against the evidence God left us in His Creation. Your interpretation of the Bible is false idol worship. You will lose your soul following it.
However:
Believe the Bible and turn to Jesus Christ, and believe
totally in Him. Jesus will save you from sin and from judgment. He died
to pay for your sins. He arose physically from the dead. He ascended
into the third Heaven, where He is seated on the right hand of God.
Jesus will save you.
is true. But it has nothing to do with evolution.
As a famous Christian told his congregation:
"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, The Religious Aspects of Evolution, 2d ed. 1890, pg 68.
__________________ "If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437
"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890
Last edited by lucaspa; 30th November 2003 at 03:19 PM.
*Calvin's arguments fall to earth with a loud crunching sound*
Good shot, Lucaspa!
__________________ Greatest Hovind quote of all time, as voted for by members of CF:
"Teaching the pagan religion of evolutionism is a waste of valuable class time and textbook space. It is also one of the reasons American kids don't test as well in science as kids in other parts of the world."
*Calvin's arguments fall to earth with a loud crunching sound*
Good shot, Lucaspa!
Ah, but does it scream on the way down?
__________________
Don't talk like one of them. You're not! Even if you'd like to be.
To them, you're just a freak, like me! They need you right now, but when they don't, they'll cast you out, like a leper! You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these... these civilized people, they'll eat each other.
See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.
To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.
Thank you, gentlemen. I predict what we will see now is another long cut and paste from the Creation vs Evolution Encyclopedia website. (Monitors, isn't that against forum rules? Aren't you only supposed to use outside sources to support your argument, not as your argument?)
That cut and paste will not address my responses but simply move into a different area looking for some place I can't respond. It's a variation on god-of-the-gaps -- individual-can't-respond -- of the gaps. It doesn't occur to Calvin that the answer is out there. This isn't a search for truth. It's trying to win a debate.
__________________ "If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437
"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890
*puts on anorak and pulls out pocket creationist argument-spotter guide*
I hope he comes up with 2LOT or no new information, I haven't got those two yet.
__________________ Greatest Hovind quote of all time, as voted for by members of CF:
"Teaching the pagan religion of evolutionism is a waste of valuable class time and textbook space. It is also one of the reasons American kids don't test as well in science as kids in other parts of the world."
But I'm not willing to state categorically that science will always be agnostic.
Hmmm.... Perhaps you might be right. The trouble is, finding God through scientific study is somewhat incongruous with Christian theology.
Originally Posted by lucaspa
What is that but my personal experience? Nothing. It was repeatable otherwise I never would have tried to get it published, but it's still my experience. Now, to be science anyone and everyone has to be able to repeat my experience under approximately the same conditions. IOW, science is personal experience where everyone has the same personal experience.
But there is nothing in that to say that personal experience not shared by everyone is wrong. It's not part of science, but that is not to say it is any less valid. So, as you say, there is plenty of evidence for the existence of deity.
Of course personal revelations are very valid. And I believe they can actually be shared experiences as well. However, if they were predictable and repeatable, then the question of faith would be moot by now. Which is why I am doubtful about the prospects of science moving away from its agnostic position.
Originally Posted by lucaspa
So don't paint yourself into a corner such that unless "anyone" comes to the same conclusion then the conclusions is not valid. In this case, the conclusion "God is real" is not valid from the scientific data because the material processes in the cell could operate on their own. IOW, there is an unfalsified alternative hypothesis to deity as an explanation. The person with the "revelation" is rejecting that alternative on faith. Because of that, I agree that the person must qualify his position as an opinion.
Yes. However, its worth pointing out that these two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive.
This isn't a search for truth. It's trying to win a debate.
And thats all that matters to many of the creationism advocates that post here (not all however). The idea is to deliver your winning speech regardless of the results in the search for truth (and is doesn't hurt to drop a few condescending remarks in place of valid arguments). Its about winning votes. The sad part is that there actually people who fall for it.
Linear Mode
