How Have You resolved the Creationism vs Evolution Debate?

[Freedom63]

Yikes. Reading comprehension anyone?

Of course, freedom, I gave you no reason whatsoever to assume that I called all evolutionist' atheists by the simple fact that...watch for it...I said " Evolutions AND atheists. Simple enough right?

The level of arrogance you display is very typical for the closed minded and uneducated.

 

[Freedom63]

Gee, Well, first i'll start with Scripture teaches Creationism not evolution. Maybe we can start there instead. Do you believe any of the Bible is true or just some of it? Did God think his creation was very good due to the process of evolution and natural selection? Also, why would there be a need for natural selection before the fall of Adam and even in the garden?

It just a very flawed argument to make that there is any support whatsoever for evolution from a Biblical view. The Bible doesn;t support it and Science doesn't either.

Changes in finch beaks is variation within a species, not the TOE.

Actually scripture teaches creation...the actual method is left to God. Evolution fits the creation account in Genesis quite nicely when one loses the belligerent dogma.

Creation Science

The bible makes it clear that the heavens declare the glory of God. They are His work, His other revelation. He did not deliberately place false information in them or in the earth in order to deceive us.

The bible supports evolution quite nicely. And OF COURSE science does as virtually EVERY scientist in the field will and do affirm.

Empty rhetoric from the willfully ignorant will never change reality.

 

[Greg1234]

Actually scripture teaches creation...the actual method is left to God.

Did rocks evolve into loaves and fishes?

The bible makes it clear that the heavens declare the glory of God. They are His work, His other revelation. He did not deliberately place false information in them or in the earth in order to deceive us.

We deny an incapable mechanism? Which scientific community are you talking about? Methodological naturalism?

Empty rhetoric from the willfully ignorant will never change reality.

We're not the ones denying the mechanism.

 

[Greg1234]

You make God into an object, not unlike a table. One doesn't worship tables.

Well....we are asked to do so. Tables, computers, internets, cars, and other material things, you name it.

 

[Freedom63]

Did rocks evolve into loaves and fishes?



We deny an incapable mechanism? Which scientific community are you talking about? Methodological naturalism?



We're not the ones denying the mechanism.

I am at a loss for what you are trying to accomplish with these silly straw man statements.

 

[artybloke]

Well....we are asked to do so. Tables, computers, internets, cars, and other material things, you name it.

When you make God into a supernatural being, like other gods, like angels, or fairies? you make God into another idol.

 

[Greg1234]

Lucky to have any? So, if we are so lucky to have any fossils (which you are right) then tell me how in the world out of all of the millions upon million of fossils that should be scattered all over the entire globe that the very very very few we do have, just happen to line up perfectly for a few transitional sequences as the Scientists say they have? The whale being one.

Talk about luck!! Finding a needle blah blah...just because someone SAYS it's intermediate doesn't make it so. They have no idea at all just like in 1000 years when someone finds a Penguin fossil they will say it's a seal to bird or bird to seal intermediate. All quesses. That's what the TOE is, one big quess.

You ask a man why he thinks a car can turn into submarine and he digs up "volumes and volumes" of scrap heap remnants.

 

[Greg1234]

When you make God into a supernatural being, like other gods, like angels, or fairies? you make God into another idol.

As i said, materialists ask us on a daily basis to exalt computers and other material things.

And no, a supernatural entity is not an idol, a physical object as a physical object is

 

[artybloke]

As i said, materialists ask us on a daily basis to exalt computers and other material things.

No they don't.

And no, a supernatural entity is not an idol, a physical object as a physical object is

so it's Ok to worship angels is it?

God is not a supernatural entity. God is the creator of all being, natural or supernatural.

 

[gluadys]

They tend to stay away from the mechanism and we have to debate "volumes and volumes" of irrelevance.

My experience is that it is anti-evolutionists who avoid the issue of mechanism with a ten-foot pole.

 

[gluadys]

I call the theory naturalistic for the very reason that it takes the naturalistic view of nature. It isn't redundant,it's true.

The problem here is that the sub-text of "naturalistic" is "without God". That is an atheist sub-text which Christians need to disown. There is nothing inherently godless about a naturalistic view of nature.

No,it cannot be verified. The theory is a narrative of the history of life on earth,which is not something that can be repeated by experiment.

This is a misunderstanding of what the theory of evolution is. (We still see some people who don't understand that evolution is both a fact and a theory which explains that fact.) It is time we also began to distinguish between theory of evolution and history of evolution. The theory of evolution is not the narrative of evolutionary history. It is the explanation of the process of evolution which produced that history. So, in a broad sense evolution is not just two things, but three things: a fact, a process (described in the theory of evolution) and a history (the consequence of the process as described in the theory.)

One can indeed confirm experimentally what the process of evolution is, because the process is repeated and repeatable. One can also predict (or more precisely retrodict) what sort of history that process must have produced and test out that prediction via observation.

Order is that which is arranged by intelligence. Functioning order is purposeful,as with organisms. It is not just patterns and sequences that passively occur.

Patterns and sequences are ordered. I don't understand your point.

Natural selection is just the dying off of creatures with certain traits that are thought to be unfavorable to survival and reproductive success,leaving creatures with traits that are thought to be favorable.

Basically you are saying natural selection doesn't do anything important. But it does. New variation can arise through the constant changes that crop up in alleles generated through mutation and recombination. But only selection can favor one variant over another and so create species change (evolution).

It is a process of elimination. Darwin thought that it produced the existing variety of species,but it does not produce anything. Creatures that are better suited to their environment can continue to reproduce without the less suited dying off.

Absolutely. That is why it is not correct to depict natural selection as eliminating only the unfit. It does do that, of course, but it also eliminates the fit when the fitter appear. If the average surviving litter of a species is 10 and the average surviving litter of a new variant is 11, then the day will come when all individuals (or at least all but a very few) in the species express the new variation. That doesn't mean the unchanged individuals were any less fit than their parents or even that their rate of mortality increased.

Theistic evolution is usually just an acceptance of the theory of evolution as it is commonly taught with the claim that God moves the processes of evolution. But the theory itself does not allow for God to be doing anything because it is naturalistic.

Here again we see the sub-text that pits "natural" against God and sees nature as devoid of God unless God intervenes with a non-natural miracle. In the grand tradition of Christian theology it is ridiculous to say that a naturalistic process does not allow for God to be doing anything. That naturalistic process is itself what God is doing. That is why we have summer and winter, seedtime and harvest in due order. That is why we have seeds turning into plants and eggs turning into butterflies or baby chicks. Just because we now have scientific (naturalistic) descriptions of these processes doesn't mean we can send God packing and say "sorry we have automated nature and don't need your help anymore."

And it ignores the fact that species exist as individual creatures (individual creations) that come into being immediately through the means of conception or reproduction

No, it doesn't, That view of the origin of individual creatures is entirely consistent with evolutionary changes in species. Indeed, the theory of evolution insists on the individuality of creatures and there is no reason a Christian cannot understand each conception as a special creation. Species change only because individuals differ from each other and those differences are differently impacted by the world they live in.

(Typically, I find anti-evolutionists speaking as if a species is not a unit decomposable into individuals and speaking of species change as something that must happen to a whole species as a unit all at once. That is an incorrect view of the reality of nature.)

...and instead views species as developing gradually into existence from and into other species,without any specific beginnings.

Generally speaking new species do develop gradually, because a few individual differences are not sufficient to exclude an individual from the species it is born into. No child is a different species than its parent even if it displays some distinct new variation. No new variant in a species is immediately barred from procreation with its fellow members of the same species. In fact, the gradualness of species differentiation is a direct consequence of the fact that species change depends on differences in individuals spreading gradually and preferentially through a species over generations. Individuals have distinct starting points in conception and birth. New species don't.

 

[gluadys]

Gee, Well, first i'll start with Scripture teaches Creationism not evolution. Maybe we can start there instead.

Ok, but that is not a concern with the theory of evolution. That is a theological and hermeneutical question about scripture. And I will say right off the bat that scripture does not teach creationism. It teaches creation. And those words are not synonyms. "Creationism" makes many statements about the sense of scripture and events in natural history which the teaching of creation does not. I don't agree that those statements are taught in scripture. They are taught as part of a hermeneutical approach to scripture sometimes called "concordism". I don't agree with a hermeneutic of concordism.

Do you believe any of the Bible is true or just some of it?

All of it. But I don't think all Biblical truth is best viewed through a concordist lens.

Did God think his creation was very good due to the process of evolution and natural selection?

Yes.

Also, why would there be a need for natural selection before the fall of Adam and even in the garden?

Because life needs evolution. Without evolution all life would soon become extinct through an inability to cope with natural changes (such as a huge increase in the atmospheric level of oxygen due to photosynthesis.)

It just a very flawed argument to make that there is any support whatsoever for evolution from a Biblical view. The Bible doesn;t support it

I don't expect the bible to support evolution any more than it supports relativity or the existence of galaxies or bacteria or any other aspect of nature unknown to the human authors.

and Science doesn't either.

That is where I think you are mistaken. I think the scientific support for evolution is substantial.

Changes in finch beaks is variation within a species, not the TOE.

Typically, you aim to get rid of evolution by redefining it non-scientifically.

Peter and Rosemary Grant and their students who documented those changes consider them evolutionary changes and an excellent example of natural selection in action. Biologists in general would agree with the Grants. That is evolutionary change and it is accounted for by evolutionary theory.

 

[gluadys]

Lucky to have any? So, if we are so lucky to have any fossils (which you are right) then tell me how in the world out of all of the millions upon million of fossils that should be scattered all over the entire globe that the very very very few we do have, just happen to line up perfectly for a few transitional sequences as the Scientists say they have?

Probably because those transitions are real.

Talk about luck!! Finding a needle blah blah...just because someone SAYS it's intermediate doesn't make it so. They have no idea at all just like in 1000 years when someone finds a Penguin fossil they will say it's a seal to bird or bird to seal intermediate. All quesses. That's what the TOE is, one big quess.

Would any penguin fossil not have a beak? Would it have teeth? If it had teeth would they be mammalian teeth or reptilian teeth (such as Archeopteryx had)? Would a penguin fossil have webbed feet or distinct toe bones (such as seals have hidden under their filippers)? Would it have light, hollow pneumatic bones or sturdy, marrow-filled bones (or at least bones that would have been filled with marrow, not air sacs).

If you really think anatomists would take a penguin fossil as a bird-mammal transitional fossil, you really don't know the first principles of anatomical analysis.

Think about this. A hundred years before a single fossil in the proto-whale sequence was discovered, using only comparative anatomy of living whales and terrestrial mammals, scientists hypothesized that the nearest land-based relatives of whales were not walruses or seals but hooved-herbivores, specifically bovines and their near cousins. When fossil whales and proto-whales were discovered, they were of hooved animals and specifically hooved animals with an even number of toes (like cows and in contrast to horses). Still more recently, genetic analysis has narrowed the focus to the hippopotamus as the nearest four-footed cousin of a whale. The hippopotamus is an even-toed hooved herbivore. That gives us three independent lines of evidence of the evolution of the whale from a terrestrial mammal among the arteriodactyls (even-toed hooved animals). Anatomical, fossil and genetic. And the anatomical analysis preceeded the other two discoveries by a full century. One could certainly have said then that it was wishful thinking. (In fact, I heard Duane Gish say that in 1982.) By 1995 the fossils had been found and by 2000 the genetic data had been discovered. It is hard with physical evidence in front of you to say it is still wishful thinking. Something has to account for this new data.


If not evolution, what?

 

[SonOfTheWest]

Lucky to have any? So, if we are so lucky to have any fossils (which you are right) then tell me how in the world out of all of the millions upon million of fossils that should be scattered all over the entire globe that the very very very few we do have, just happen to line up perfectly for a few transitional sequences as the Scientists say they have? The whale being one.

Talk about luck!! Finding a needle blah blah...just because someone SAYS it's intermediate doesn't make it so. They have no idea at all just like in 1000 years when someone finds a Penguin fossil they will say it's a seal to bird or bird to seal intermediate. All quesses. That's what the TOE is, one big quess.

Yes, it's luck. You might not like it but them's the breaks. Your second paragraph is just antiscience drivel. Read up on the work. No, it's not "all guesses".

 

[ViaCrucis]

Gee, Well, first i'll start with Scripture teaches Creationism not evolution.

I agree. But then again I'm an evolutionary creationist. Also, since evolutionary theory is the product of science in the last couple of hundred years there's no reason why the Bible would mention it anymore than it should mention Einstein's theory of general relativity or germ theory.

Maybe we can start there instead. Do you believe any of the Bible is true or just some of it?

Did anyone here say the Bible wasn't true? Speaking for myself--and I think I can speak for others here as well--we believe that the Bible is quite true. You seem to be making the mistake in assuming that "true" has to always mean literally/scientifically/historically true. I believe the Psalms which speak of God as our rock and fortress are true, but I don't believe God is literally these things. I believe Jesus' parables are true, but I don't believe the Prodigal Son was an historic individual. I believe the book of Job is true, even though I don't believe it's history (it's Wisdom Literature, not history). I believe the Revelation of St. John is a true book, even though I don't believe in human-faced locusts with breastplates flying out of a bottomless hole or that a prostitute is going to go around riding a purple hydra.

That's where using hermeneutics and taking context into consideration comes into play.

Did God think his creation was very good due to the process of evolution and natural selection? Also, why would there be a need for natural selection before the fall of Adam and even in the garden?

God called it very good because He made it. The mechanism of how everything came to be how it is now is irrelevant--that God made it and that He pronounces it very good is what makes it very good.

It just a very flawed argument to make that there is any support whatsoever for evolution from a Biblical view. The Bible doesn;t support it and Science doesn't either.

I would argue the same about Young Earth Creationism. There is no science to back it up and from a purely biblical perspective it doesn't make that much sense of the biblical texts, requiring very selective reading.

Changes in finch beaks is variation within a species, not the TOE.

That is evolution. There is no biological boundary lines which evolution doesn't cross. If an organism has varied enough that it no longer can successfully reproduce (i.e. produce viable fertile offspring) with the original population we generally regard that organism to be a new species.

The domestic dog is a variation of the wolf which is a variation of basal canines, which were a variation of a basal animal that produced both bears and canids, and so on and so forth.

If you separate two populations of the same animal, with different environmental stresses and time, chances are we'll have two populations of two very different organisms. Mutations favorable to survival in an environment mean a better opportunity for mating and passing on those genes to the next generation. The same process that makes a poodle different from the common wolf is the same process that makes human beings different from australopithecus.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[philadiddle]

They think Creationisits are stupid and uneducated

That's what the TOE is, one big guess.

 

[DamonWV]

I feel it will always be an ongoing debate. There are so many points of views, and so many evidences that are showed by scientists who are creationists, and those who are not. It can get overwhelming, and you can get lost in it all easy.

To me its a secondary issue, and isnt the focus for me. I like to get into some debates, but they always seem to turn sour lol

 

[artybloke]

scientists who are creationists

No such thing.

 

[Greg1234]

germ theory.

Shown to be erroneous. Primary cause lies in the finer aspect of man, not matter.

Louis Pasteur Vs Antoine Béchamp and The Germ Theory of Disease Causation - 1 - La Leva di Archimede (ENG)

The German New Medicine a new Natural Science" by Professor Dr. Hans Ulrich Niemitz

 

[philadiddle]

I feel it will always be an ongoing debate.

I think that it will always be an ongoing debate in forums such as this one. In the scientific community however, it is over. Evolution is the only useful paradigm for studying the life sciences and an old earth is the only useful way to interpret what we see in the earth. There is no debate for scientists working in the field.

I highly recommend reading the following story:
Glenn Morton's story