Evolution

BabylonWeary said:

So you say, but, as long as the evolutionary biologists insist they're somehow the official representatives of the original primordial ooze and therefore everyone in the world is obliged to conform to their beliefs or else be ostracized in some way or another, you'll see this debate will never end.

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You are mixing up evolution with abiogenesis.

That said, I do think those who decide that they are going to ignore scientific fact are the same as those who denied (or still deny) that the Earth orbits the Sun.

fatboys said:

So how does someone that does not believe in God feel life begin

Do you believe life exist else where? Do you believe that this process is continuing today on this planet? Can man in our limited knowledge produce a living cell?

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I have no idea how it began at this point in time, I thinks it's a very real possibility that life exists elsewhere. Abiogenisis occurring today? Well it might and we might not notice it I'd imagine the new life would be eaten up by bacteria rather quickly and we just might be able to someday.

fatboys said:

Do you believe life exist else where?

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Yes. Odds are, it's happened in more than one place in the universe.

LoAmmi said:

Well, it's quite possible to believe that He had a hand in the direction evolution took. We believe He is in control of everything.

About whether Jews did it or not. The Torah (Leviticus included) is not binding upon Gentiles at all.

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IMO intelligent design is equivalent to abiogenesis and evolution. Intelligent design imagines that things happened for a reason, but it doesn't claim that anything happened that could not be explained as dumb luck. Still, I think religious people should believe in intelligent design, because it is more consistent with believing that God cares about and guides them personally.

cloudyday2 said:

IMO intelligent design is equivalent to abiogenesis and evolution. Intelligent design imagines that things happened for a reason, but it doesn't claim that anything happened that could not be explained as dumb luck. Still, I think religious people should believe in intelligent design, because it is more consistent with believing that God cares about and guides them personally.

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Intelligent design is the thing that people try to force in schools, to me. I wouldn't want that as it isn't science. I cannot prove, or even make any sort of reasoned argument, the the universe and life is intelligently designed. I'd be better making a case that we aren't intelligently designed, to be honest. I want evolution taught in science. Abiogenesis should be touched on, but there aren't enough answers to call it fact.

LoAmmi said:

I'm not a fan of the G-d of the gaps idea. If we create a cell, does your worldview fall apart? It shouldn't. But it seems like it could.

If the gaps get smaller, the idea of G-d gets smaller too when you subscribe to it.

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What God do we actually have in a religion that "predicts nothing to actually be true?" --no god at all? the same as the atheists?

Wouldn't you agree?

The god that does not make a difference... does not matter.

God makes everything - But Christ raised Lazarus from the dead - not because "Lazarus was about to wake up anyway on his own" as I am sure you would agree.

Nobody is amazed when an acid and a base combine to make salt. But when Lazarus is raised from the dead - well that gets noticed.

Satan in Matt 4 tempts Christ to turn the stone into bread -- to prove the claim that He is in fact the Son of God. "AS if" Satan thinks that this is not a trick someone else can do.

LoAmmi said:

Abiogenesis should be touched on, but there aren't enough answers to call it fact.

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Which is funny, because my Catholic high school taught it as fact.

BobRyan said:

God makes everything - But Christ raised Lazarus from the dead - not because "Lazarus was about to wake up anyway on his own" as I am sure you would agree.

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I'm not a Christian. I don't think Jesus raised anything from the dead.

Cearbhall said:

Which is funny, because my Catholic high school taught it as fact.

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Well, I see that the concept from a scientific point of view is fact, the mechanics of how it happened is not.

LoAmmi said:

Intelligent design is the thing that people try to force in schools, to me. I wouldn't want that as it isn't science. I cannot prove, or even make any sort of reasoned argument, the the universe and life is intelligently designed. .

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Well thankfully even the atheist scientists like Leonard Susskind and Martin Rees can make that case for us all. And they do it so well that the only way out of it is to imagine a bazillion other fake universes in your mind to try and escape the conclusion for intelligent design.


Secret to promoting intelligent design - is better science education I always say.

in Christ,

Bob

LoAmmi said:

I'm not a Christian. I don't think Jesus raised anything from the dead.

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And you are free to do that - we all have free will.

cloudyday2 said:

I think it would be interesting to ask religious people how they could NOT believe in intelligent design.

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What I believe in is a very creative universe that after billions upon billions of experiments, dead ends and changes, finally created life. The experiments will continue even to today and forever into the future as new life forms evolve into being. This is seen through the eyes of a non-religious Lover of God.

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fatboys said:

There are those that instead of intelligent design for how we came to be believe that all living things came from chemicals that accidentally came together and formed the basic structure for life. I cannot wrap my mind around it. How could something so that is in such chaos turn into something so complex?

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You are not talking about evolution.

LoAmmi said:

Intelligent design is the thing that people try to force in schools, to me. I wouldn't want that as it isn't science. I cannot prove, or even make any sort of reasoned argument, the the universe and life is intelligently designed. I'd be better making a case that we aren't intelligently designed, to be honest. I want evolution taught in science. Abiogenesis should be touched on, but there aren't enough answers to call it fact.

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I suppose there are different definitions of intelligent design. My understanding is that intelligent design is simply imagining that the processes of abiogenesis and evolution were "meant" to take the paths that they took. Of course that shouldn't be taught in school, but it should be taught in religions. How can a Jew think that God cares if he/she eats pork, but think that God doesn't care if Earth is inhabited by humans or slime molds?

cloudyday2 said:

How can a Jew think that God cares if he/she eats pork, but think that God doesn't care if Earth is inhabited by humans or slime molds?

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The Torah would say that He does care on both counts.

BobRyan said:

Still, I think religious people should believe in intelligent design, because it is more consistent with believing that God cares about and guides them personally.

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I don't see the relationship. But that could be because I have a different image of the Divine Creator than you do.

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LoAmmi said:

The Torah would say that He does care on both counts.

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o.k., now I'm confused. Care to explain?

cloudyday2 said:

I suppose there are different definitions of intelligent design. My understanding is that intelligent design is simply imagining that the processes of abiogenesis and evolution were "meant" to take the paths that they took.

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If that were the case I would have no problem with the notion of 'intelligent design" but in practice it has just been a way of trying to sneak creationism into the back door. The term began to be used after the Supreme Court prohibited the use of "creation science" as an alternative to evolution. I don't know of any ID person who accepts evolution or common descent.

cloudyday2 said:

I suppose there are different definitions of intelligent design. My understanding is that intelligent design is simply imagining that the processes of abiogenesis and evolution were "meant" to take the paths that they took. Of course that shouldn't be taught in school, but it should be taught in religions. How can a Jew think that God cares if he/she eats pork, but think that God doesn't care if Earth is inhabited by humans or slime molds?

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Intelligent design as we see in the video "what we still don't know" has even the atheist scientists stating "there is no way that happened by chance"
Today at 2:08 PM #50 --

Susskind makes an interesting observation that all the fine tuning arguments could be imagined to reduce down to a 1/100 chance of life happening as it did and many skeptics were willing to settle for that. But 1/10^120 is a bit much even by atheist standards according to Rees and Susskind.

in Christ,

Bob

On April 10, 1979, Patterson replied to the author (Sunderland) in a most candid letter as follows:

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April 10, 1979 Letter from Colin Patterson to Sunderland

“ I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them.

You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?

I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin’s authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it.

Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record.

You say that I should at least show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived. I will lay it on the line- there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.[The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. So, much as I should like to oblige you by jumping to the defence of gradualism, and fleshing out the transitions between the major types of animals and plants, I find myself a bit short of the intellectual justification necessary for the job “

[Ref: Patterson, personal communication. Documented in Darwin’s Enigma, Luther Sunderland, Master Books, El Cajon, CA, 1988, pp. 88-90.]
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Colin Patterson (Senior paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum and author of the Museum’s general text on evolution) in a talk given at the American Museum of Natural History 1981

---------------------diehard atheist evolutionist: Patterson said -

“Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing…that is true?

I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural history and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology seminar in the University of Chicago, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said “I know one thing – it ought not to be taught in high school”

"...I'm speaking on two subjects, evolutionism and creationism, and I believe it's true to say that I know nothing whatever about either...One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, well, let's call it non-evolutionary , was last year I had a sudden realization.

"For over twenty years I had thought that I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up, and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it. "That was quite a shock that one could be misled for so long...

It does seem that the level of knowledge about evolution is remarkably shallow. We know it ought not to be taught in high school, and perhaps that's all we know about it...

about eighteen months ago...I woke up and I realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way."

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The secret to promoting intelligent design - is better science education I always say.