Evolution Exposed

[Not_By_Chance]

SJG said it best.

"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered."--Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory"
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/speakout/gould.html

One man's view.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

Why do you refer to the "so-called" Theory of Evolution? What is "so-called" about it?

It's just a belief system - a religion if you like.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

The great paradox of evolution is that the product appears to be the product of special creation. It can be confusing to some.

The product, if you mean God's creation, is the product of special creation. "Gen 1: In the beginning God created..."

 

[Not_By_Chance]

The Big Bang model doesn't even claim that there was a singularity. It only claims that the visible universe was in a hot, dense state (cue the theme song from "The Big Bang Theory") and expanding. If you extrapolate backwards from there, the known laws of physics say that at some point you'd reach a singularity, but that just means the known laws break down there. Which we already knew, since gravity has to be combined with particle physics to handle that state, and we don't know how to do that.

Or, it could be that God stretched out the heavens, just like He told us in the Bible, e.g., "Isa_42:5 This is what God the LORD says— he who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it:" or "Isa_45:12 It is I who made the earth and created mankind upon it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshaled their starry hosts."

 

[HitchSlap]

[QUOTE=" It is the creationists who insist that science disproves the Bible.

No they don't - quite the opposite in fact. The creationists have nothing against honest science and have nothing to fear since such science must by definition, always be in agreement with God's laws, since He created them in the first place. What the creationists object to is unproven ideas being presented as fact or only half-truths being told - in other words, exactly what evolutionists accuse them of doing.[/QUOTE]


Yet science makes no presuppositions regarding evidence, as conclusions are based on data.
Cdesign proponentsists, on the other hand, start with the answer, then cherry pick data to support their position. This is the exact opposite of science.

 

[The Cadet]

Where does that idea come from and how, if indeed it were so, would it not completely undermine the Bible as God's Holy Book? After all, if God's book is filled with myths and half-truths then that would make Him a cruel [life forming by evolution is very cruel]

Life is a cruel, brutal farce.
Why not stop by Arby's?

 

[Not_By_Chance]

That seems to be a common theme among creationists lately. They really like to confuse the concepts of hypothesis/theory and facts. They somehow think that we observe the hypothesis. The SJG quote above is a good way of explaining the difference between the two.

The accounts given in the Bible would explain this just as well and since God knows everything by definition, a Christian ought to be able to trust what He has told us as far as He has chosen to reveal things to us. We can't expect to understand much of His handiwork and He even tells us that: Isa 55:9 "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

 

[Not_By_Chance]

From the National Academy of Sciences (US):
"Scientists most often use the word "fact" to describe an observation. But scientists can also use fact to mean something that has been tested or observed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing or looking for examples. The occurrence of evolution in this sense is a fact. Scientists no longer question whether descent with modification occurred because the evidence supporting the idea is so strong." [source]

The scientific consensus is extremely strong: every major scientific organization in the world says that evolution is real. A 1991 Gallup poll showed that 5% of scientists, including those working outside of biology, agree that evolution is real -- and it's probably higher inside biology, considering that it's a basic element of the field.

There's really no ground to stand on for creationism; all you can do is pretend that if you insist on something long enough, it will become real. But it won't, and the evidence shows that.

Don't creation scientists also believe in "descent with modification?" They believe and don't dispute that changes, coupled with natural selection do occur in nature, but they do not agree that one kind of creature can change into a completely different kind, no matter how much time were available.

 

[florida2]

Hmmmmmm...who to trust?

Thousands of scientists who use these ideas successfully in their everyday work or a guy posting a video on the internet? Gosh, that's a thinker.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

Dude, this is an 18-minute long video by a creationist whose voice is incredibly boring. But what the heck, I got nothing better to do right now.

...

Boy I regret that decision. I got to listen to this guy twaddle on for almost a solid 6 minutes explaining what "fact" and "theory" mean to an audience who clearly understands them better than him, and then immediately jumps to the typical crap argument of "The big bang cannot be observed". Um... Yes, it can. You want to observe the big bang? Measure the speed at which galaxies of different speeds are moving away. Measure the cosmic microwave background radiation. The fact that our universe is expanding and the distribution of the CMBR are facts which are easily observed and which point without question to the universe being smaller, denser, and hotter in the past. As Martymer81 points out in his (considerably less stupid) video, any model that would replace the big bang model would still have to account for all the same observations, and as a result would look more or less the same.

It's this same childish approach to science. "I didn't see it, ergo it didn't happen." I wonder, by this guy's definition of "fact", is the existence of Hurricane Sandy a scientific fact? After all, it's not repeatable, and not observable. But that's nonsense - science has no problem asserting that Hurricane Sandy existed. The problem here is not that science is unable to access the past, it's that he's completely ignorant of how science examines the past.

Then he goes on to claim that the origin of the universe is a problem for the big bang model. Um... No. The big bang theory points to the existence of a singularity. It makes no claim about how that singularity got there or what happened before there was a singularity. He clearly does not understand the theory he's critiquing. Why, pray tell, do I have the feeling that this is going to be a running theme? The claim that the spiral shape of galaxies is a problem for the big bang model is also total bunk. The spiral shape is energetically stable.

Here comes what I hope is the dumbest thing said in this video (ha, as if!):

"What happened when the cosmic background radiation was not what the scientists expected? They changed the big bang to accommodate it. That's not good science."

...Oh, so what, we throw out the model entirely in favor of... Some other explanation which reflects both the expansion of the universe and the CMBR? No, when the model is flawed, we see if we can change the model to better fit the evidence. This is how most progress happens in science. It's iterative. Newtonian physics could not explain the procession of mercury (or whatever cosmological effect it didn't explain that was known about in the early 1900s). Did we chuck it? No, we did not. We refined it, we built upon it, we recognized, "hey, this models reality pretty well, but we have to adjust this calculation by such and such to make it model reality better in the light of the new evidence".

See, this is what most people miss when it comes to science. It's like if one little thing in any given theory is wrong, it has to be completely thrown out. But that's just not how it works, unless this contradictory piece of evidence completely undermines the basis for the theory. So the CMBR is different. We still need a model that accounts for both it and the expansion of the universe. As Martymer81 said in his video, and I will keep quoting this,

"Any model of cosmology that could ever replace the big bang theory still has to have an expanding universe that started out in a hot, dense state and which is still expanding today at an accelerating rate. Those are the facts, and a model which is in conflict with the facts obviously cannot explain the facts. What that means is that a model that replaces the currently accepted big bang model would simply be a modified version of it. And guess what: the current big bang theory is not the same one that was proposed all those years ago."​

The problem here is that Mike Riddle knows nothing about either science or cosmology. And then he tries to debunk star formation, literally claiming that we never observed... well, this. He's just downright wrong. Star formation is entirely observable.

See, kids, this is why you don't get your science from an organization with a statement of faith which claims the bible as an absolute authority. These people aren't interested in furthering scientific discovery. They have their answers, and anything that goes against those answers will be denied, and most likely lied about.

Then he goes on to make some completely unfounded claims about early life and oxygen, and I'm honestly bored enough to go do the dishes now. Seriously, this video is complete garbage. Virtually nothing this guy says is true. He combines the ridiculous "historic vs. observational science" lie of Answers in Genesis with a big fat healthy heap of lies about what "historic science" has discovered. He knows nothing about the scientific method or the fields he's ineptly trying to critique.

Going to creationists for science information is like going to Taco Bell for haute cuisine.

This is all nit-picking really. Mike makes some perfectly valid points. The star formation example is a red herring as no-one has stated that stars can't form once stars are there in the first place. The issue as I understand it is that no-one has any idea how the first stars could have formed, just as no-one has any idea as to where the so-called singularity came from or even if it existed at all. Then there's dark matter and dark energy, which are just fancy names for fudge factors dreamed up to rescue the failing and nonsensical Big Bang idea.

 

[HitchSlap]

It's just a belief system - a religion if you like.

Then you have no idea what science is or how hypotheses become theories.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

Hmmmmmm...who to trust?

Thousands of scientists who use these ideas successfully in their everyday work or a guy posting a video on the internet? Gosh, that's a thinker.

Creation scientists also use their ideas successfully in their everyday work. This is another red herring.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

Then you have no idea what science is or how hypotheses become theories.

It all depends on your world view. Creation scientists are just as sincere and probably just as intelligent, but come to totally different conclusions.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

No they don't - quite the opposite in fact. The creationists have nothing against honest science and have nothing to fear since such science must by definition, always be in agreement with God's laws, since He created them in the first place. What the creationists object to is unproven ideas being presented as fact or only half-truths being told - in other words, exactly what evolutionists accuse them of doing.

Yet science makes no presuppositions regarding evidence, as conclusions are based on data.
Cdesign proponentsists, on the other hand, start with the answer, then cherry pick data to support their position. This is the exact opposite of science.[/QUOTE]
But secular scientists do exactly the same thing. They rule out any possibility of God being involved and even if the evidence points the other way, it cannot be taken into consideration as one famous evolutionist once quipped.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

The Big Bang model doesn't even claim that there was a singularity. It only claims that the visible universe was in a hot, dense state (cue the theme song from "The Big Bang Theory") and expanding. If you extrapolate backwards from there, the known laws of physics say that at some point you'd reach a singularity, but that just means the known laws break down there. Which we already knew, since gravity has to be combined with particle physics to handle that state, and we don't know how to do that.

God does!

 

[HitchSlap]

It all depends on your world view. Creation scientists are just as sincere and probably just as intelligent, but come to totally different conclusions.

No, it doesn't. It depends on the best explanation of objective, multiple, independent, lines of evidence (aka MILE). Creationists are not qualified as experts, don't have relevant degrees in topics they discuss, are misinformed, and some are just flat out dishonest. Creationists have never been part of original research projects, and the DI has never "discovered" anything. And frankly, universities and science labs the world over conduct daily experiments and research using ToE and current cosmology, all blithely unaware of what goofballs like Hovind are spouting.

 

[HitchSlap]

Please learn to use the "Reply" function correctly, it's a little confusing to other posters to have to parse out who said what.

NBC said:
[/QUOTE]But secular scientists do exactly the same thing. They rule out any possibility of God being involved and even if the evidence points the other way, it cannot be taken into consideration as one famous evolutionist once quipped.[/QUOTE]

Incorrect. Scientists study the natural world. God/s are a supernatural claim, and as such, cannot be proven or disproven. It's cdesign proponentsists who claim that "goddidit," which puts the burden of proof on "you guys." If you want to believe in a god/s, fine. If you want to assert god's did it, then you need to demonstrate it's existence.

 

[sfs]

Creation scientists also use their ideas successfully in their everyday work. This is another red herring.

Really? Which creationists use creationism in their work? Geneticists use evolution all the time in order to understand biology better. Where is the work from these creationists?

 

[Loudmouth]

They go away when new information show they are not facts.

Examples?

 

[Loudmouth]

No they don't - quite the opposite in fact. The creationists have nothing against honest science and have nothing to fear since such science must by definition, always be in agreement with God's laws, since He created them in the first place. What the creationists object to is unproven ideas being presented as fact or only half-truths being told - in other words, exactly what evolutionists accuse them of doing.

What are the half-truths you are referring to?