As a Christian, how many of you believe in evolution?

inquiring mind said:

You're not seriously calling Macro Evolution, based largely on inconclusive assumptions and speculation, an applied science?

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For starters it's not based on "inconclusive assumptions and speculation". It's based on evidence; quite a lot of it, in fact.

And for seconders, yes, ancestral relationships between species really is an applied science.

pitabread said:

For starters it's not based on "inconclusive assumptions and speculation". It's based on evidence; quite a lot of it, in fact.

And for seconders, yes, ancestral relationships between species really is an applied science.

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Ok, inconclusive evidence then.

inquiring mind said:

Ok, inconclusive evidence then.

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Oh, it's considered conclusive in terms of life sharing ancestral relationships with one another. At least insofar as what all the evidence points to up to now.

pitabread said:

Oh, it's considered conclusive in terms of life sharing ancestral relationships with one another. At least insofar as what all the evidence points to up to now.

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So, we're back to basing macro evolution on similar DNA?

inquiring mind said:

So, we're back to basing macro evolution on similar DNA?

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Huh?

pitabread said:

Huh?

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What type relationship are you talking about?

pitabread said:

Huh?

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Forget it; It's not relevant.

inquiring mind said:

What type relationship are you talking about?

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Shared ancestral relationships (i.e. common ancestry).

inquiring mind said:

Forget it; It's not relevant.

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Alrighty, then.

The one thing I will say is that there are numerous lines of evidence that support ancestral relationships including genetics (and it's not about strict similarity; rather, it's about patterns), developmental biology, biogeography, and physical morphology (both for modern and ancestral species).

When one puts all those pieces together, the picture that emerges is that life shares common ancestry with one another.

inquiring mind said:

micro evolution only

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Incorrect. What kind of biology do you do?

inquiring mind said:

You're not seriously calling Macro Evolution, based largely on inconclusive assumptions and speculation, an applied science?

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Um, yeah, it is. That is, common descent, based largely on enormous quantities of evidence from multiple disciplines, is routinely used for both basic and applied scientific research.

SinoBen said:

Plenty of info out there, I'm sure you can find them.

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I've been looking for genetic evidence against evolution for a long time and haven't found any. So tell us what you're talking about.

SinoBen said:

Evolution is misdirection, away from God, and is therefore a negative enterprise.

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Evolution is a scientific study and says nothing at all about God.

SinoBen said:

Why don't you investigate where the original information encoded in DNA & RNA came from and how they "evolve".

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Your body has created information in your DNA within your lifetime. So -- what the heck are you talking about?

pitabread said:

Alrighty, then.

The one thing I will say is that there are numerous lines of evidence that support ancestral relationships including genetics (and it's not about strict similarity; rather, it's about patterns), developmental biology, biogeography, and physical morphology (both for modern and ancestral species).

When one puts all those pieces together, the picture that emerges is that life shares common ancestry with one another.

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I hear you, but do you not see a degree of assumption involved with this evidence?

inquiring mind said:

I hear you, but do you not see a degree of assumption involved with this evidence?

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Not more so than any other field of science. Which is to say, the assumption of an objective universe.

If the universe isn't objective then any scientific findings are a moot point.

pitabread said:

If the universe isn't objective then any scientific findings are a moot point.

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Not to mention pretty much any other kind of finding as well.

SinoBen said:

Here's the thing. Genetics (the study of and discoveries) can also be seen to be providing more and more evidence for Intelligent Design.

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It can not. Even only for the simple reason that there is no ID model. There are no testable predictions. There's no way to verify it. It's just an enormous argument from ignorance.
It's fallacious to boot and just religious creationism disguised in a lab coat.

There's no such thing as "evidence" in support of an unfalsifiable model, or a model that is infested with logical fallacies.

This debate aint gonna end soon.

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In reality, this debate has been over for over 150 years. Creationists are just a bit stubborn.

SinoBen said:

Plenty of info out there, I'm sure you can find them. Evolution is misdirection, away from God, and is therefore a negative enterprise.

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"therefor"?
So, in other words, whenever a scientific theory doesn't agree with your particular religious beliefs, then it's the scientific theory that MUST be wrong, because it doesn't agree with your religious beliefs? Really?

So when reality disagrees with your mere beliefs, it's reality that must be incorrect?

Why don't you investigate where the original information encoded in DNA & RNA came from and how they "evolve".

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1. what you call "information", is exactly that which evolves.

2. if you are talking about the origins of life, that IS being investigated and researched. The field is called abiogenesis. Which is a seperate field, not evolutionary biology. Evolution explains the origins of diversity - not of life itself.

Behe posit the idea of "irreducible complexity" start there

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That's a purebred argument from ignorance. It is literally based on "I don't know how to reduce this systems, therefor it can't be done and therefor god dun it". When your argument starts with "I don't know, therefor X...." then you know you can safely discard said argument as it appeals to ignorance, which is a fallacy.

Having said that... most all of the examples Behe has given over the years of what things are "irreducibly complex" have since then been shown by science to NOT be irreducibly complex. Things for which they DID find precursor genes etc.

Then explain dissimilarity of codes if we originated from a common ancient single cell (already a leap to understand how non life became life).

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What dissimilarity?
Life falls into nested hierarchies both genetically as well as morphologically and this hierarchy also matches geographic distribution of species if we cross reference it with historical geology (breakup of pangea etc - the reason why we only find kangaroo's in australia for example).

The exact opposite of what you are insinuating is in fact true.
The build up of life, as well as its geographic distribution, is exactly how it should be if evolution happened.

Then ask how much time you will need for "evolution" to bring that ancient single cell to become a chimpanzee.

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It took some 3.8 billion years.

inquiring mind said:

What type relationship are you talking about?

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The exact same type of relationship as the one that exists between you and your biological siblings, cousins, 2nd cousins, parents, grandparents, etc etc etc.

Mark Quayle said:

I don't know if you are familiar with the concept of science never finally proving anything.

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Science can't prove theories to be true.
But science CAN prove a theory false!

As Lawrence Krauss once said: "Science isn't in the business of proving things. If anything, science is in the business of DISproving things."

Science most certainly is able to disprove things.
Like I said, if you have a model that predicts X to be the case and upon investigation we see that Y is actually the case and X is nowhere to be found, then the prediction failed. Which means that the model must be inaccurate. It's disproven.

If you DO find X, then you did not just PROVE the model. At best you can say that X confirms the model. You can say that the evidence at your disposal, is consistent with the model.

You can't exclude that you won't find additional data tomorrow which will be inconsistent with your model.

See?

So to come back to Noah's flood... it predicts quite a few things, a genetic bottleneck being just one of them. All kinds of things about geological formation is another.
None of these predictions check out. There is no bottleneck. There are no such geological formations. The evidence of reality is not consistent with the bible flood idea.

Therefor, the evidence of reality disproves that idea.

Everything is subject to adjustment, correction, and even complete scrapping of assumptions. All science can say is, "at present it seems that...such and such". In other words, it is not an objective fact that there is no universal bottleneck in species.

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You're utterly wrong about that.
Facts are facts.

It's explanation (theory, hypothesis) that is provisional.
Theories explain facts (and predict them).

The fact is, that there is no universal genetic bottleneck in extant life. It's just how it is. We know what a bottleneck looks like. We know what it is and how it happens. We've identified plenty of bottlenecks in plenty of species. The most severe one being in the cheetah. So severe, that all cheetah's are all so closely related that you can do skin transplants between any two of them and their bodies won't reject it.

We know what bottlenecks are.

And there is no universal bottleneck anywhere in history.

That's just a fact. It was a fact yesterday, it's a fact today and will still be a fact tomorrow.

It only seems so.

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No, we observe it to be so.

Second, that your needed bottleneck is the only way the matter could be evident (as though the fossil history was the only indicator

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(or who knows what else God can do?)) is not provable.

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If you start with the assumption that an unfalsifiable deity that can do anything exists, then off course you can accomodate for anything (even the impossible), since by definition the cop-out deity can "do anything".

But I obviously fail to see the point of such a fruitless exercise.

Mark Quayle said:

How about 6000 years plus the one day that took 15 billion years to make. It is not nonsense.

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It is nonsense because a day is not the same 15 billion years. And it's not 15 billion btw, it's some 13.7 billion.

The last 4.6 of which, the sun existed.
The last 4.5 of which, the earth existed.

We have not finished the math to know how the big bang went. We have only done enough to speculate that there must have been one.

Neither one of us know what we are talking about, nor does anyone else, unless they begin with the disclaimer, "we don't know very much yet, but this is how it looks so far."

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Fallacy of "we don't know every thing, therefor we don't know anything"
Or the dishonest idea that because don't know everything, we can't know anything.
Or the variation thereof of that because we don't know everything, we don't have to take any scientific explanation seriously.


Measureing the age of the earth, btw, has nothing to do with big bang cosmology.
We can consider the age of the earth in a multitude of ways, the most accurate likely being through atomic theory (decay rates etc).

But there's other stuff as well that completely rules out any young age.
Even as silly as tree rings on old trees.

We can also count winter/summer cycles of snowice in ice cores, going well over 100 thousand cycles.

The very fact that oil fields exist, by itself, already rules out a young earth.

See?

You can pretend that faith trumps reality all you want, but in the end, no matter how passionatly you believe something, reality always gets the last word.

If reality disagrees with your beliefs - it's not reality that is incorrect.