Creationism/Creation Science... approved by Arkansas house

The essential difference between the two sides here is that for creationists belief trumps knowledge while for evolutionary science knowledge trumps belief. If this shows anything it is that the two views are not a disagreement which can be resolved. They are incompatible ways of seeing the world.

Many - I would say most - people nowadays accept the thrust of evolutionary science. Some in this group understand that this need not affect their notion of a Creator God and can therefore accommodate the science as part of their system of belief. Others see science as rendering a Creator God unnecessary as an agent in the development of life.

BobRyan said:

True - and there is the dead-end for abiogenesis.

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As I am sure you already know. The idea of abiogenesis does not need thinking intentional rocks.
Your statement above is in my view intentionally dishonest.

BobRyan said:

Same is true of prokaryotes - they have no way to 'come up with' Eukaryotes.

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You are seeming to claim to have total knowledge or you think scientists should have total knowledge??
Science is a method of discovery. They start from not knowing and take steps to workout how to understand things.

BobRyan said:

A scientist can take rocks and create a computer - rocks can't do that. Rocks also can't come up with Prokaryotes.

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Noone has ever claimed that rocks used their intelligence and invented Prokaryotes. Please stop with this dishonest approach to conversation.

BobRyan said:

Now the amazing part of this is - neither can scientists.

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It's not amazing at all. Science is a method of discovery, they focus on the unknown.

BobRyan said:

It is all the same chemical elements and the intelligence of the scientist to arrange them as they wish - but still the scientist does not have the technology to get "life" from rocks. It is a bit unrealistic to then claim "yes but if you give the rocks enough time -- they will do that on their own"

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They haven't proven that hypothesis, but they are working on it.
Are creationists working on proving how their creator of choice exists and is able to create?

That Guy 11200 said:

Considerably more. But mammals didn't split from reptiles. Synapsids split from reptiles and some of their descendants evolved into what we would now classify as mammals. The earliest mammals would have been egg-layers, probably secreting milk through their skin like modern monotreme mammals.

Those that weren't part of the monotreme lineage diverged into different lineages of their own. Modern marsupials and placental mammals don't lay eggs. Placentals, like us, carry our developing young inside us using a placenta, while marsupials don't produce a placenta and give birth early in development and then carry their undeveloped young in a pouch.

Those are just differences in giving birth and rearing young. There are many more differences between mammal groups - living and extinct. Saying we're all still mammals is hiding a great deal of evolved diversity.

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I should have said the split between the groups, rather then off of :> I know that, just worded it badly.

And my point though, is saying they are still bacteria which is a MASSIVE group is like saying humans evolving from early rodent like mammals isn't evolution as were still mammals.

Strathos said:

And we always will be. Just like we always will be vertebrates, animals, and eukaryotes. This post displays a fundamental misunderstanding of cladistics.

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...I was poking fun at the still bacteria comment, as that's like SAYING it's not evolution from early rodent like mammals to humans because were still mammals. it's that common creationists nonsense.

Wolseley said:

I don't find it any more comic book-ish than the idea of dark spot on the outside of a lizard's skin magically transmogrifying into a functioning eyeball....but that's just me.



You gotta think outside the box, man. Maybe the giants (Nephilim in Hebrew) were visitors from a different galaxy? (I know...here we go with comic books again; but since neither you nor I were actually there at the time, it's entirely plausible.) Perhaps we're the fruit flies they're tinkering with, and they decided to inject some of their own DNA into our line to see what would happen.



Well, I will grant you that the cosmos might be considerably older than 6000 years (again, neither of us were there, so we can't really say for sure), but insofar as life walking around in it, it hasn't been here that long.



Oh, they'll do about as well or ill as the rest of us will. The real problem will be trying to learn how to read, write, and speak Cantonese once the Chinese take over the world.



From the way its adherents savagely attack everybody who challenges it, you'd certainly think it was a religion---and an intolerant, violent one at that.

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So your attempt to not be cartoonish, is to be even more carttoonish congrats.

stevil said:

I've done a quick research on this. I am a layman, so I am not speaking for science, just my layman findings on a quick search.

The origins of life on Earth.
It is likely that eukaryotic cells, of which humans are made, evolved from bacteria about two billion years ago. One theory is that eukaryotic cells evolved via a symbiotic relationship between two independent prokaryotic bacteria. A single bacterium was engulfed by another one, and the smaller cell continued to exist inside the other, which was beneficial to both.

My take on the above is that, scientists don't know how eukaryotic cells evolved from prokaryotic cells. They have some unproven ideas and don't see the problem as insurmountable to the theory of evolution.

You, on the other hand are claiming that "prokaryotes such as bacteria do not turn into something higher up the ladder of taxonomy from prokaryote to eukaryote."
I'm not sure what you are basing this claim off. How do you know this is impossible?

Do you have an alternative mechanism for how eukaryotic cells came to be?
What evidence do you have in support of this alternative?

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well we already have evidence for this with the mitocondria, which have their own DNA, and have ring DNA, there is a type of bacteria that has ring DNA and spends part of it's life cycle in human cells, the bacteria that causes I believe rocky mountain fever. Not hard to see over time a similar species finding it easier to stay in the cell.

BobRyan said:

I never claim it needs it - just some scientists claim they are not technologically advanced enough to do what they claim rocks did at one time.

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Oh boy....
Not at all clear what you are getting at here. You are intentionally conflating very different things. Such dishonest discourse.

BobRyan said:

True - and there is the dead-end for abiogenesis.

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No dead end at all.

BobRyan said:

Same is true of prokaryotes - they have no way to 'come up with' Eukaryotes.

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You have not proven that.
Just because scientists don't know how it happened that does not equate to "they have no way to 'come up with' Eukaryotes"

At one stage scientists didn't know why the sun shines. That didn't mean that there is no way for the sun to shine.

BobRyan said:

I am saying that their own "long term evolution experiment" is yielding the result that creationists predicts - not the expectation of evolutionism.

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Well actually, the creationist "prediction" isn't really fascinating.
It would be like me saying that my god belief predicts that a seed won't grow.
A person then takes a seed and tries to grow it, but it doesn't germinate. That doesn't prove that my god exists and it doesn't prove that my god beliefs are right.

It might be just that the person is using a dead seed, or haven't provided the conditions right for the seed to germinate. A prediction that doesn't predict change or doesn't predict anything too unexpected isn't really a useful prediction.
I'd say when trying to discover things like abiogensis or evolution from prokaryotes to Eukaryotes the safe money would be on failure not because it can't ever happen, but because it is very difficult for scientists to discover the conditions necessary for this to succeed.

It would be like me predicting that if we had a set of sick patients and we divided this into two sets.
one set has a bunch of people praying for their recovery, the other has noone at all praying for them. My prediction would be that there would be no recovery advantage at all for the set that was prayed for.
The tests will bear that out, I know they will but a religious person could quite rightly argue that they didn't pray properly. Because of course, we have no idea what "proper praying" would be needed to improve recovery of the sick.

BobRyan said:

Many if not most cosmologists at one time accepted "steady state" over the cosmological expansion model.

Many if not most scientists at one time accepted spontaneous generation... that idea was also eventually put to rest.

Ad populum -- not the "Best" scientific instrument if history is any indicator.

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What replaces older scientific theories is never 'God did it' or any other supernatural explanation. It's a better scientific theory.

Even if the theory of evolution were overturned tomorrow, it's not going to be an answer from Christian creationism or any other religious creation story that replaces it. It's going to be a natural explanation that has better explanatory power for the available evidence and results in more accurate predictions.

HARK! said:

I really don't see much of a distinction between spontaneous generation, and abiogenesis.

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Then you don't have a proper conception of either.

The ELI5 versions:

Spontaneous generation: The idea that some (existing) animals sprung fully formed from certain types of living or non-living matter without any parental reproduction involved. For instance, that scallops form spontaneously from sand, or that fruit flies form spontaneously from rotting fruit or that fleas were created from dust clumping together.

Abiogensis: The idea that the first life developed from a process chain involving earlier, less complex biological self replicators. Which themselves developed from earlier, less complex non-biological self replicators. Which themselves developed from simpler self-organising chemical building blocks. Which developed from simple chemicals found commonly in nature.

I haven’t posted much in the C&E sub forum lately, it became a bit boring seeing the same tired creationist talking points trotted out again and again.

If only our creationist friends would subject their own beliefs about the history of life to the sort of critical examination they like to apply to whatever particular aspect of evolution AIG (etc) has told them has “holes”.

All these arguments we see presented focus on gaps in our knowledge, as if not knowing absolutely everything about a subject invalidates what we do know.

The mountains of evidence from every relevant branch of science all lines up to give us a clearer picture of how life evolved, and these aren’t just speculations about the distant past, it’s an applied science too, getting actual results in areas like medicine and agriculture.

The point of my rambling is this... what scientific evidence supports creationism? What research do it’s supporters find most compelling? You need to teach something in a science class, what would such a curriculum include?

If creationists can’t answer these questions they have no right supporting the teaching of creationism outside of the RE class.

Not rambling, Jimmy D! This has put the discussion to bed as far as I am concerned.

There is nothing in this thread which gives the slightest illumination as to why Creationism should be treated as a science. I gather that creationist ideas are not legitimately substituted for actual science in schools despite the efforts of creationists and intelligent design advocates - not even in Arkansas.

BobRyan said:

Ad populum -- not the "Best" scientific instrument if history is any indicator.

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That is why I said 'the thrust of evolutionary science' and not 'evolutionary science as it is currently expressed'. I do understand that science will always be provisional. Indeed evolutionary science has been repeatedly modified and may one day be abandoned for a better hypothesis. This has all been said here a dozen times at least.

But enough of the nit-picking! Let's hear it for Arkansas! Let's have the rationale for creationism!

What is in it for children's understanding of the physical and biological sciences?

HARK! said:

It appears that abiogenesis is merely a later revision of spontaneous generation.

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Yes, it does appear so, but it hardly matters. It is nit-picking when set against the broader, convincing evidence for biological evolution.

HARK! said:

I really don't see much of a distinction between spontaneous generation, and abiogenesis.

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Then hydrogen and oxygen coming together to make water must be a complete mystery to you.