In order to consider whether Evolution is "just a" theory we first need to define what we mean by Evolution. How do you define "evolution" in this context? Also, how do you define 'Creationism"?
Roger
Roger
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Evidence proved evolution is just a theory
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TheBear
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Your statement makes absolutely no sense at all. Why don't you re-group, get some logical thoughts together, and post something credible.
BTW, are you implying that anyone giving any plausability to evolution, is either a non-Christian, or a 'lesser' Christian than you?
Thanks,
John
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seebs
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Exactly! Everything I've seen suggests that God made me the way I am, and did so on purpose. It was not some weird accident; this is what I am meant to be.
I believe that God provided us with simple stories when we didn't have the educational framework or knowledge to understand the complicated stories; He treated us the way we treat *our* children; he explained things as well as we could understand them.
And it is the amazing accuracy with which a carefully considered model can predict the world that reinforces this faith...
Indeed. I have not yet seen a quote saying that God is required to do everything simply by declaring it to be so. He seems fond of careful processes of building and development.
If I were to describe my day job to someone not in the field, I would probably say "I decide what the computer is to do, and then it does it." In fact, the process is endlessly complicated, and very hard to explain... So I don't try to explain it completely, but I capture the essense: It is through my will, and its application, that my computer does certain things.
That's how I've always interpreted the creation; God tells us "I say let there be light, and there is light", but He doesn't, in the scripture, explain about photons, relativistic velocity, or molecules in excited states emitting photons as their electrons settle back into the shells they'd normally be in.
We can observe these things, though, and in doing so, we come closer to an understanding of how God makes the world. If you don't approach it with a confrontational and hostile attitude, science can be a great way to grow in appreciation of God's work.
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I don't know, but I think if God's purpose in Genesis was to speak down to the education level of his ancient audience, He would ahve made it a little bit more straight foreward. "Billions of years ago, I spoke and there was a great explosion."
A big part of the whole purpose of the creation according to the Bible seems to be to have people act on their own without the kowledge or thought of someone watching them over their shoulder. At some point God reveals Himself, and people weigh that with their desires and so forth. A person who wants to reject God, though, needs to have some safe way to deny God's authority. Apparently, Satan had some idea he could beat God at His own game, being the annointed covering cherub of the throne of God, but people by and large would probably not think that way. In fact, the society of Abrahams seed that followed Moses out of Egypt reluctantly did do what they were told, with much goading and miraculous sings and so forth.
I guess I believe that Genesis is, like Jesus parables and so forth, meant to be a method of putting the word out without making it so obvious that God exists that everyone would weight that heavily in their decision making.
God appears to be showing us something aboutourselves, and about Him.
Very few people read Genesis closely. It is a difficult book and full of important but rarely discussed little tidbits. Many people aren't even aware that the tree of life was right there inthe garden with the tree of knowledge.
These things mean something. I don't know exactly what. What I do know is that extrapolating what we think we know about life now back millions of years is risky science. This is why I have my doubts about evolution. I also know that refusing to teach the creation idea alongside in school is a serious infraction on the free exchange of ideas. I don't care if scientists acknowledge it as "science" or not, the creation story exists and people have a right to a forum that is open and fair. Instead of trying to reinvent an entire curriculum around philosophy so there is a "correct" place to put this discussion, it seems fitting enough to me to just place it where the discussion already comes up anyhow. Science itself has a philosohical base, and is explained in science classes, so this is a perfect opportunity to compare and contrast ways of knowing and the process of critical thought and analysis.
Blah blah blah blah I know I know you want me to shut up and go away. I find it frustrating to put forth this idea in thousands of different ways, even find myself uncovering the point at which the scientific community is actually shortcutting the scientific method here, and still be treated as if I am some sort of religious kook. I just absolutely hate being told what I may and may not think, believe, or know about.
A big part of the whole purpose of the creation according to the Bible seems to be to have people act on their own without the kowledge or thought of someone watching them over their shoulder. At some point God reveals Himself, and people weigh that with their desires and so forth. A person who wants to reject God, though, needs to have some safe way to deny God's authority. Apparently, Satan had some idea he could beat God at His own game, being the annointed covering cherub of the throne of God, but people by and large would probably not think that way. In fact, the society of Abrahams seed that followed Moses out of Egypt reluctantly did do what they were told, with much goading and miraculous sings and so forth.
I guess I believe that Genesis is, like Jesus parables and so forth, meant to be a method of putting the word out without making it so obvious that God exists that everyone would weight that heavily in their decision making.
God appears to be showing us something aboutourselves, and about Him.
Very few people read Genesis closely. It is a difficult book and full of important but rarely discussed little tidbits. Many people aren't even aware that the tree of life was right there inthe garden with the tree of knowledge.
These things mean something. I don't know exactly what. What I do know is that extrapolating what we think we know about life now back millions of years is risky science. This is why I have my doubts about evolution. I also know that refusing to teach the creation idea alongside in school is a serious infraction on the free exchange of ideas. I don't care if scientists acknowledge it as "science" or not, the creation story exists and people have a right to a forum that is open and fair. Instead of trying to reinvent an entire curriculum around philosophy so there is a "correct" place to put this discussion, it seems fitting enough to me to just place it where the discussion already comes up anyhow. Science itself has a philosohical base, and is explained in science classes, so this is a perfect opportunity to compare and contrast ways of knowing and the process of critical thought and analysis.
Blah blah blah blah I know I know you want me to shut up and go away. I find it frustrating to put forth this idea in thousands of different ways, even find myself uncovering the point at which the scientific community is actually shortcutting the scientific method here, and still be treated as if I am some sort of religious kook. I just absolutely hate being told what I may and may not think, believe, or know about.
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I think you meant to say that "technically, evolution is not a religion." Is that correct? And many people have use evolution to rationalize their world view just as many have used religions to justify their actions. This argument is really a non-starter, but it gets a lot of air time.
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seebs
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And how would he have explained "billions"? What would an "explosion" be to people without explosives? Why not just say "see this? I made it." Anyway, as I recall, we're told that a day is to man as ten thousand years to God, and "ten thousand years" strikes me as allegorical for "longer than you can possibly imagine". So, in seven periods, longer than you can possibly imagine, God made the world, starting with light, then gradually cooling things off until some of the matter turned into firmament... I really can't imagine how you could describe it *ANY* better in terms that could be comprehended by nomadic people who barely have agriculture down.
I think it is also, like the parables, full of allegory and metaphor.
I disagree. Creationism is interesting, but it's not the slightest bit like science. There's no testing and refuting of hypotheses in sight. Evolution is science. Maybe it's risky, but no one will be horribly hurt if we have to revise it a few more times. Science is all about revising and updating your theories.
Hmm. "The world was made when the people in the next universe over tried to use a black hole for garbage disposal." Should I get equal time now, too?
Science classes should cover science, not theology.
The scientific community is not, in general, shortcutting the scientific method. If you propose a testable hypothesis, people will be happy to test it... Unfortunately, insofar as creationism is testable, it *fails* every test we have, unless we assume that, in fact, all of our physics, statistics, biology, and chemestry are wrong.
The only way out is to declare it untestable, at which point, it's no longer science.
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You left out evening and morning in your counting argument. I know, I liked that idea myslef for a while, before I really studied the Bible. Still, I don't leave off the idea that there are some time alegories involved there. I am just saying it is not that simple.
The idea of large numbers was certainly not foreign, neither the idea of a fire, and anyone who has started a fire and put green wood on it knows about pops and explosions.
As for the philosophical part, one also learns from tradition. How do we find tradition to be reliable? because it has lasted many hundreds of years. Is tradition fallible? Certainly, sometimes people make mistakes and hold to them for a long while.
Likewise, science gains reliability through testing and time. If you trust history and tradition, you have to trust the historians. If you trust science, you have to trust scientists and the scientific community.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing is I can't even get an evolutionist to admit they can't test the hypothesis. All the bones and rocks and dating in the world cannot equal the old "seeing is believing" standard of proof, and hard science rests firmly on that rock.
There is too much politics flying around academia today to ignore the encroaching bias there. You are losing trust. Too devoted and fiery eyed argumentation about something that supposedly happened billions of years ago just naturally sets people's teeth on edge. And then the argument that if all the species didn't evolve from a common ancestor that this sets all of biology off its course, as if we wouldn't have modern biochemistry. No. That fails even the most basic smell test.
This subject is so absolutely inaplicable to modern life. Ideas about the begining of all life and all reality are not scientific arguments. They are by their very nature deeper, and have to take more of philosophy and human nature into account. If anything, the refusal to let creation even be mentioned in a science class looks a lot like fear, which is of course absolutely irrelevant, but politically it has its effect.
Hrm... Don't get it. Oh well.
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seebs
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Just a couple of points on the reasoning:
Imagine the following statement: First, I'm posting to this BBS, and second, I am the owner of three thousand Bengal tigers, all named Herb.
I bet you can convince yourself, quite easily, that one part of that statement is right, and another is wrong.
Secondly, note that "scientists" are a broad and varied group; they don't necessarily agree on everything.
Thirdly, while I think the guy doing the search is fascinating, I would never in a million years call it "science". What's the testable, falsifiable, hypothesis? Imagine that I find a boat in the mountains; what does it prove? For that matter, try to imagine, if you will, a boat large enough to hold two of everything - and probably many more, once you allow for the need for diverse populations. You'd pretty much have to rule out insects entirely, or you'd never be able to come close.
Finally, I don't see any announcements on the site saying they've found anything.
So, in short, they haven't found anything, they're not scientists, and even if they found something, it would hardly prove anything else to be true - and that's even assuming that the thing found could come anywhere close to being big enough to be a real ark.
(Just think about elephants, lions, bison, and a few other animals; you run out of space real fast.)
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seebs
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I don't know enough to say what to make of evening and morning, but frankly, it sounds like pure poetry to me.
Frankly, given a choice between that, and "let there be light, and there was light", I think the Bible is much closer to any reasonable guess at the cosmology of the universe than what you describe. Once again, think poetically and allegorically.
There is no *POINT* in trying to tell these people exactly what happened; they won't understand the details, and they don't care. They mostly just want to be assured that this world *IS*, and that it *IS* because someone said so, and that this someone is going to be laying out some ground rules.
But tradition doesn't adapt well when it doesn't work out. This is its central weakness; if you've always done things a certain way, and that way doesn't work, "it worked last year" doesn't save you.
True. Most importantly, though, you have to understand that the concept of "trust" or "results" is a bit different there. Every few years, an airplane goes down because engineers and scientists weren't *quite* right about a theory. Do I believe that airplanes fly? You betcha. And yet, I know that there *are* accidents, and that some of them are the results of failures to understand the technical issues.
Actually, this isn't quite true. A great deal of modern science is based on inference and testing. Are you familiar with the terms "predictive power" and "explanatory power"? A theory is said to have good explanatory power when there is no data available that does not fit the theory. A theory is said to have good predictive power when you can, from the theory, conclude that a given thing should exist, but you haven't seen the thing yet... and then you *find* it.
Evolution does well on both of these. "Perfect" isn't quite measurable, but to the best of my knowledge, there's nothing in the fossil record that creates a real problem for evolutionary theory, and we've found a number of "transitional" things similar to what we would have expected. So, for instance, there are things that are "between a reptile and a bird".
That's not the claim. The claim is that, if we throw out the *basic* model - the belief that species change over time, and that new species can be formed through change from old species - we have a lot of biology, and even some computer science, that have to be reevaluated, and in many cases, the results in those fields are *so* obvious that it's very hard to say "but we should throw this out".
The beginning of life certainly is. It's part and parcel of our attempts to understand life well enough to be better equipped to deal with it. Theories about how species form, and how evolution works, are crucial to modern medicine; the idea of "antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria" is 100% output of the theory of evolution.
So, is it "fear" if someone says you shouldn't teach that pi is exactly 22/7 in school? I don't think so; it's just the recognition that the theory in question won't stand up to casual observation.
Creationism is great myth, and awful science. There are literally thousands upon thousands of pieces of data which are poorly explained by creationism, and it is totally useless for making predictions.
The theory of evolution allows me to suggest that, if I use not quite enough of an antibiotic on an infection, not only will I not cure it, but the resulting bacteria will be resistant to the antibiotic.
Creationism, in this context, tells me that it's quite possible that God created those bacteria. It doesn't tell me what to do about them, and it doesn't even tell me what day He created them on, because the story doesn't address kinds of life we didn't know about. What about mushrooms? Single-celled life? How about symbiotes which can only exist in cooperation with one of the forms of life he created on a given day, but which we would otherwise think were created on another day.
What day were dolphins created on?
I say it again: If it can't even *start* to answer questions like this, Creationism is not "science". I think it's reasonable to teach it along with other religious beliefs in a class which covers religious beliefs. However, as a Christian who doesn't for a minute believe in literal creationism, and never has, I would object to it being portrayed as "the belief of Christians".
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the thing i like about the scientific community is that they will (if they re doing their science properly) adjust their hypothesis when confronted with facts and data that will not fit with previously held ideas.
-case in point: creation. It was once assumed/believed by astronomers/ cosmologists that the universe was eternal, that it had no begining, no creation event. But when Hubble discovered the redshifts in galaxies and Einstien acknowledged his fudge factor in his equations - they had to admit that at some point in the distant past, the universe began.
Christian fundementalists when confronted with facts and data that don't fit their literal interpretation of biblical narratives shout and scream and wail as if they were being persecuted and thrown to the lions by the 'pagan academic intelligentia'
-case in point: creation. It was once assumed/believed by astronomers/ cosmologists that the universe was eternal, that it had no begining, no creation event. But when Hubble discovered the redshifts in galaxies and Einstien acknowledged his fudge factor in his equations - they had to admit that at some point in the distant past, the universe began.
Christian fundementalists when confronted with facts and data that don't fit their literal interpretation of biblical narratives shout and scream and wail as if they were being persecuted and thrown to the lions by the 'pagan academic intelligentia'
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I doubt that any religion practiced anywhere in the industrial world does not have at least a few members who believe in evolution.
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Oliver
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A theory is not a fact, that's for sure. However, the observation that species change (both genetically and morphologically) over time is a fact. The observation that different forms of life existed in the past (fossils) is a fact.
The theory we have to explain this (the theory of evolution) is not fact, but the phenomenon itself (evolution) is.
In other words, we know that species evolve. This has been and is observed.
The best explanation scientists currently have for these phenomena lies in the various mechanisms described by the theory of evolution (mutations, natural selection, ...): they think that this is how it happen.
This is not what scientists say: the evidence that today supports the theory of evolution could support another idea (and the theory of evolution has changed since Darwin first proposed it in order to better fit the evidence). But the theory of evolution is today the best theory we have.
Should someone come up with a better theory, scientists would test it and finally adopt it (after a careful and quite long process of scrutiny). But the changes that have been brought so far didn't change the theory so much that the nale should be changed.
See my answer to your first point to see why you should be careful to distinguish between evolution and the theory of evolution.
What you call "a guess at evolution" is, as The Bear already explained, much more than a mere guess.
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The concept of evolution by definition exists. I think the topic starter is thinking of a specific theory that evolves evolution but didn't identify which one.
For instance, if I have this brainstorm that blah blah with evolve by yada yada...it will be called GN's super duper evolutionary theory.
When you say that my theory is false by saying "evolution is false" you've really missed the mark.
"Evolution" is a fact.
Evolution
For instance, if I have this brainstorm that blah blah with evolve by yada yada...it will be called GN's super duper evolutionary theory.
When you say that my theory is false by saying "evolution is false" you've really missed the mark.
"Evolution" is a fact.
Evolution
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I have seen many fossils,stratigraphic evidence and the proof of many proposed theories. I have not seen jesus or evidence of gods work.
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Just read the book.Ihave read the bible several times. How many times have you read darwins work .........origin of the species. I would guess never. Clear your mind and think for yourself.
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Yes, microevolution is an observed phenomenon.
Yes, extinctions are an observed phenomenon.
Explain what? You're making a connection between microevolution and extinctions that doesn't necessarily exist, and even left any mention of that connection out of your argument.
Yes, but we've never seen a species evolve into a significantly different species. (I add significantly different only because the BSC defines speciation such that a mosquito can still be a mosquito but considered a different species, which is an arbitrary distinction and does not describe changes required by the macroevolution of a bacteria into a man).
That doesn't surprise me. What surprises me is that they refuse to think otherwise in spite of the evidence against it (lack of evidence in the fossil record, inability to reproduce macroevolution, irreducible complexity, etc.)
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lithium.
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npetreley, I just am wondering where you get your information, Why don't you try nasa.gov, or mit.edu, or UC Berkeley. Those are credible sources that you should use not the YEC sites. But thats MO.
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