Can Evolution and Creation Co-Exist?

[Lemmiwinks]

Theists who start out thinking of Genesis as allegorical are far less likely to lose their faith than theists who are creationists and then pursue an education.

True. I was raised to believe it was literal, and I've had a tough time maintaining faith.

 

[Chalnoth]

True. I was raised to believe it was literal, and I've had a tough time maintaining faith.

As was I. I'm very happy now because of this: if it hadn't been for my literal upbringing, the specific beliefs I was brought up with wouldn't have been so obviously and clearly wrong, and so I may never have really examined my beliefs. Now I'm very glad I did.

 

[Doveaman]

True. I was raised to believe it was literal, and I've had a tough time maintaining faith.

I was raised to believe it is literal, and thanks to the scientific evidence I'm even more convinced now that it is literal.

Thanks to science my faith in a literal Genesis has become much stronger.

 

[Chalnoth]

I was raised to believe it is literal, and thanks to the scientific evidence I'm even more convinced now that it is literal.

Thanks to science my faith in a literal Genesis has become much stronger.

Er, if you think that science is in accord with a literal Genesis, you have been horribly deceived. Genesis contradicts almost every major scientific discipline out there, in one place or another.

Or do you mean that you've bought into the lies promulgated by places like the Discovery Institute and Answers in Genesis?

 

[Agonaces of Susa]

I was raised/brainwashed by fundamentalist Darwinists to believe the Bible is a myth and a lie.

Then I got an education and learned that meteorites and parthenogenesis are scientific facts that any child can observe.

 

[Chalnoth]

I was raised/brainwashed by fundamentalist Darwinists to believe the Bible is a myth and a lie.

Fundamentalist Darwinist? I don't think they exist.

Then I got an education and learned that meteorites and parthenogenesis are scientific facts that any child can observe.

And what, pray tell, do you think meteorites and parthenogensis say?

 

[Doveaman]

Er, if you think that science is in accord with a literal Genesis, you have been horribly deceived. Genesis contradicts almost every major scientific discipline out there, in one place or another.

That's because scientists don't understand Genesis, because they are scientists and not theologians.

Many theologians don't understand Genesis either, by the way. That's why there is so much confusion between theologians and scientists over Genesis.

Or do you mean that you've bought into the lies promulgated by places like the Discovery Institute and Answers in Genesis?

No. I mean I discovered a literal creation in Genesis that has nothing to do with the macro-evolution myth.

 

[Chalnoth]

That's because scientists don't understand Genesis, because they are scientists and not theologians.

Many theologians don't understand Genesis either, by the way. That's why there is so much confusion between theologians and scientists over Genesis.

Yeah, there's no conceivable way. Heck, Genesis contradicts Genesis. Here's a question for you: which chapter of Genesis tells the correct order of creation, birds first (Genesis 1), or people first (Genesis 2)?

No. I mean I discovered a literal creation in Genesis that has nothing to do with the macro-evolution myth.

Well, if you want to call a body of knowledge supported by over a hundred years of observation and study by tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of scientists a myth, what the heck would you call a fact?

Evolution is perhaps the single most well-supported scientific fact in all of human history. Descent with modification from a common ancestor is supported by such a panoply of evidence that you would quite literally have to be either ignorant of the evidence, or positively insane to discount it. Questioning the veracity of descent with modification from a common ancestor, based upon the weight of the current evidence, is about as ridiculous as questioning whether or not objects fall when you drop them.

I mean heck, if you want to have this discussion, how do you want to go about it? Should we talk about human anatomy? About embryology? About genetics? About comparative morphology? About the fossil record? About biogeography? About forests? Each line of evidence has its own remarkable and beautiful discoveries that just scream out, "evolution!" Take your pick.

 

[BrianOnEarth]

Yeah, there's no conceivable way. Heck, Genesis contradicts Genesis. Here's a question for you: which chapter of Genesis tells the correct order of creation, birds first (Genesis 1), or people first (Genesis 2)?

Those who believe the bible, literally, can only do so by suspending reason. So it is a waste of time to try to influence using reasoned arguments, I fear.

Evolution is perhaps the single most well-supported scientific fact in all of human history.

I think you weaken your position a little by exaggerating here. The laws of gravity or motion or electromagnetism or just about any observable and repeatable laws are the most well-supported. Evolution by natural selection is not as well supported; it is largely based upon historical deduction and as far as I know there is no observable and repeatable method to create life from dirt, yet. However, many of the basics of evolution are proven such as selective breeding and the DNA trail is a dead give-away. My opinion is that if we say that the laws of motion are 100% supported facts that evolution by natural selection from dirt with no extra-terrestrial influence is 95% supported.

 

[Chalnoth]

I think you weaken your position a little by exaggerating here. The laws of gravity or motion or electromagnetism or just about any observable and repeatable laws are the most well-supported.

You might think so, but it's not quite so simple. If you consider simple precision, quantum electrodynamics, the most accurately-measured theory in physics, is measured to an accuracy of about 10^14 or so.

By contrast, being confident of the relative relationship of just 20 different species is equivalent to a measurement accuracy of about 10^20. See here:
29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: Part 1

So no, I'm really not exaggerating. Now, granted, there are lots of different ways of comparing how "well supported" various theories are, and none of them are really non-arbitrary, presuming the theories aren't directly competing with one another. But I really wasn't exaggerating when I said that evolution is perhaps the single most well-supported fact in human history. These others you mentioned would also be contenders, for different reasons, but I don't think you can definitively say they're better-supported.

Evolution by natural selection is not as well supported; it is largely based upon historical deduction and as far as I know there is no observable and repeatable method to create life from dirt, yet.

This is really a parochial and simply false understanding of how science works. Scientists really don't care about repeatability per se when verifying theories. They care about independent verification, which can include repeatability, but doesn't have to, and is actually quite a bit more powerful.

Simple repeatability just means that a different scientist somewhere else can do the same work and get the same answer (provided everything was done properly). This is important, but it isn't enough. This can be done in any sort of observational science, because any observation anybody makes can, in principle, be made by anybody else. All that repeatability gets you is simple facts: Yes, that bird indeed has green plumage. Yes, this weight indeed rolled down the hill at 3 meters per second per second. Yes, the input of three joules of heat increased the temperature of this volume of stuff by one degree centigrade.

But for science, that isn't enough. Verification of collected facts is important, but it is also insufficient for understanding. In order to really understand things, you have to compare different sorts of facts to one another. That is, a theory links observations that we might otherwise think are disconnected. Take gravity, for instance: gravity unifies the behavior of rocks dropped on Earth and the way the Moon goes around the Earth. Without this theory, we might think that the rate at which things fall has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the moon takes one month to go through its cycle. In fact, before Newton, people had no idea that those two facts were related at all.

The way that you verify that these very different facts are related isn't by demonstrating that some scientist in a lab didn't make errors. Instead, a theory, by its very nature, states some crucial underlying fact about reality (in the case of gravity, that it's an attractive force between any two objects proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them).

This underlying fact, if the theory is a good scientific one, makes very specific predictions about how a wide variety of experiments should turn out. It relates, for instance, the rate at which objects fall at the surface of the Earth, the radius of the Earth, how long it takes for the Moon to go around the Earth, and the distance from the center of the Earth to the center of the Moon. These independent facts can be checked in various ways, and Newtonian gravity makes very specific predictions for how they must be related to one another, and in fact to the relative motions of any two objects in our solar system (or elsewhere).

And verifying common descent can be done in this exact same way: common descent makes a tremendous variety of predictions that can be verified by cross-checking the results of very different observations. We don't know that evolution is correct because we've been able to demonstrate that the avian lung and feathers always go together. We know that it's correct because the theory relates a tremendous variety of fact about organisms to one another, making very specific predictions about how future observations of different facts should turn out based upon the facts we already know.

To sum up, the power is not in verifying that the distance to the moon is actually the parameter that Joe Bob measured it to be, which is all repeatability gets us, but rather in showing how a wide variety of observations all have the relationships to one another predicted by the theory in question.

 

[BrianOnEarth]

That was a lengthy response.
I don't really know what you are talking about.

The essence of science is to make observations, guess/deduce a model to explain the observations and then test the ubiquity and accuracy of the model.
The observations are King, models are Queen. Always. Otherwise we end up relying on faith.

I object to your argument that the theory of evolution is the best supported theory in science simply because it is not the best evidenced theory in science. So I object to your inaccurate and non-intuitive supposition because I feel it weakens the scientific position. When we depart from absolute reliance on evidence we are no longer being scientists.

 

[Chalnoth]

That was a lengthy response.
I don't really know what you are talking about.

The essence of science is to make observations, guess a model to explain the observations and then test the ubiquity and accuracy of the model.
The observations are King, models are Queen. Always. Otherwise we end up relying on faith.

And my point was that the toy idea of a scientist sitting in a lab checking that another scientist in a different lab did his work properly is vastly inadequate to do this. Perhaps this will illustrate it better. You said:

Evolution by natural selection is not as well supported; it is largely based upon historical deduction and as far as I know there is no observable and repeatable method to create life from dirt, yet.

And yet you mentioned the law of gravity as being part of this, but the law of gravity is primarily built upon observations of our own solar system (and further away). We can't build a solar system from scratch, can we? Your claim that we need to build life from dirt (which has the wrong components anyway) is just as specious as the statement that we would need to build our own solar system from scratch to test the veracity of gravity.

That is not necessary.

I object to your argument that the theory of evolution is the best supported theory in science simply because it is not the best evidenced theory in science.

Well, as I've said, that just isn't clear at all. As far as simple precision is concerned, it most definitely is, as I explained at the top of my previous post.

So I object to your inaccurate and non-intuitive supposition because I feel it weakens the scientific position. When we depart from absolute reliance on evidence we are no longer being scientists.

I just wish you'd at least read what I wrote before calling it inaccurate. I understand not wanting to read it, but then claiming it's wrong without doing so is just being dishonest.

Edit: By the way, if you want to get a feel for the depth and breadth of the evidence for evolution, I highly recommend Richard Dawkins' latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth. It's quite well-written, an enjoyable read, and really gives you a feel for just how much there is out there. For an easier take, if perhaps not as well written, this essay is great (I linked to part of it earlier):
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

It doesn't go through quite as many lines of evidence, or explain things in as easy-to-understand of a manner, but it still gets you a rough idea of just how strong the evidence is.

 

[BrianOnEarth]

Of course, the assertion that evolution is not the best supported theory in science does not detract form the fact that it is massively more supported than the theory of creation (as in Genesis). And I think "massively" is such an understatement that it deserves an adjective more like "infinitely" but the latter would not be scientifically correct.

So to me the question is not about how well supported evolution is but why do some people choose their beliefs on the basis of evidential support and some choose not to. Aiming at the root cause of this may be a necessary prerequisite to persuasion by weight of evidence.

 

[Chalnoth]

Of course, the assertion that evolution is not the best supported theory in science does not detract form the fact that it is massively more supported than the theory of creation (as in Genesis). And I think "massively" is such an understatement that it deserves an adjective more like "infinitely" but the latter would not be scientifically correct.

So to me the question is not about how well supported evolution is but why do some people choose their beliefs on the basis of evidential support and some choose not to. Aiming at the root cause of this may be a necessary prerequisite to persuasion by weight of evidence.

Well, being convinced by the weight of evidence may not be that common for creationists, but it does happen. Happened to me.

As far as I'm concerned, the reasons for belief are a private manner. But if we disagree, and the other party is willing, I'll argue over most anything. I'll usually enjoy at least some of the argument. At worst I'll get a little annoyed. At best I'll find that I'm wrong and manage to improve the validity of my own beliefs.

I'd just like to reiterate that when I say that common descent is perhaps the most well-supported fact in all of science, I do not make this claim lightly, or in ignorance of the evidence supporting our various physical theories. The evidence for evolution is just that comprehensive.

 

[BrianOnEarth]

First, I would respectfully ask you not to call me dishonest or I shall report you to the moderators. You are not in the Richard Dawkins Forum now!

And yet you mentioned the law of gravity as being part of this, but the law of gravity is primarily built upon observations of our own solar system (and further away). We can't build a solar system from scratch, can we? Your claim that we need to build life from dirt (which has the wrong components anyway) is just as specious as the statement that we would need to build our own solar system from scratch to test the veracity of gravity.

You are confusing different things here. The laws of gravity and motion do not require a genesis of a solar system to be observable and measurable. The theory that life began from non-life has not been observed. Circumstantial evidence is very strong but it has not been observed. Circumstantial evidence that the Earth is flat used to be very strong too.

Edit: By the way, if you want to get a feel for the depth and breadth of the evidence for evolution, I highly recommend Richard Dawkins' latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth.

Pretty arrogant to imply I am not familiar with evolution theory. To return the favour, perhaps you should familiarize yourself with psychology if you want to take a scientific approach to influencing theists.

 

[Chalnoth]

First, I would respectfully ask you not to call me dishonest or I shall report you to the moderators. You are not in the Richard Dawkins Forum now!

All I was doing was pointing out what you were doing. If the moderators don't appreciate it, then so be it.

You are confusing different things here. The laws of gravity and motion do not require a genesis of a solar system to be observable and measurable. The theory that life began from non-life has not been observed. Circumstantial evidence is very strong but it has not been observed. Circumstantial evidence that the Earth is flat used to be very strong too.

This is a creationist caricature of evolution. It has nothing to do with the scientific theory. Evolution isn't a theory about the origins of life. It's a theory about how life progressed once it began. Now, what our understanding of evolution does say is that however life began, it is descended from a single organism (or, more likely, a single population of pre-organisms that gradually became what we call organisms, with no hard distinction where you can say, "Here! This is where life started!").

And you also misunderstand the evidence for gravity when you think it is somehow direct and absolute. It isn't. Just to pick a simple example: how do we know how far away the moon is?

You can't just measure it. You can't simply take out a measuring tape and say, "Oh, it's this far away!" So how do we actually go about figuring this out? Indirectly, of course! Consider this ingenious method: look at the shadow the Sun casts on the Moon during a lunar eclipse. This shadow will be about as wide as the Earth, so if we know how big the Earth is, and we know how long it takes the Moon to cross this shadow, then we know how far away the Moon is, provided the Moon has a circular orbit!

If you want to learn more, here's a nice presentation that goes into some detail as to how we measure distances in astronomy:
http://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/cosmic-distance-ladder2.pdf

All of our measurements in astronomy are indirect in this fashion, and are only corroborated by performing a measurement of the same physical feature using different methods. Our understanding of the theory of gravity is critically dependent upon these indirect measurements of distance.

Evolution really is no different. You don't need to build a new life form to be able to deduce the family tree of various living organisms. You don't need to build a DNA molecule from scratch to examine what various changes in DNA do to organisms. You don't need to construct a protein to decode the relationship between DNA and proteins. And so on and so forth.

Our evidence for evolution is as direct, comprehensive, and precise as the evidence for any theory in physics.

Pretty arrogant to imply I am not familiar with evolution theory. To return the favour, perhaps you should familiarize yourself with psychology if you want to take a scientific approach to influencing theists.

When you make statements that are contradictory to the very definition of evolution (such as talking about life coming from nonlife when discussing its evidence), it is not arrogance to point out you are wrong.

 

[Bushido216]

For one thing --- evolution would require death --- and death is God's enemy.

Okay, fine.

I admit that we're created.

Why are we still dying?

Second question. Are you upset that you've been replaced by Agnonaces as the person who annoys the scientists the most here?

 

[Bushido216]

Wow. My bad on the thread necro.

 

[jpcedotal]

So.....can it?

Why couldn't it be possible for God to create everything, and then allow things to run there own course after that?

no.....evolution was thought up for the sole purpose of taking away from the glory of God, whether those of you believe this (or in God, Himself for that matter) or not.

It is a secular religion, nothing more.

 

[Chalnoth]

no.....evolution was thought up for the sole purpose of taking away from the glory of God, whether those of you believe this (or in God, Himself for that matter) or not.

It is a secular religion, nothing more.

Why do you think this, pray tell?