I haven’t read up on the justification for concluding that they are separate species so for sake of argument I can agree to disregard those two.
What about the rest of them? How are they explained by creationism?
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Hello Jimmy.
I looked up two of the so called, 'templates', you provided as links above.
If you check the underlined phrase in two of these templates provided below, we seem to be extrapolating to the extreme.
Kenyanthropus platyops (Fossils)
This species was named in 2001 from a partial skull found in Kenya with an unusual mixture of features (Leakey et al. 2001). It is aged about 3.5 million years old. The size of the skull is similar to A. afarensis and A. africanus, and has a large, flat face and small teeth.
Australopithecus garhi (Fossils)
This species was named in April 1999 (Asfaw et al. 1999). It is known from a partial skull. The skull differs from previous australopithecine species in the combination of its features, notably the extremely large size of its teeth, especially the rear ones, and a primitive skull morphology. Some nearby skeletal remains may belong to the same species. They show a humanlike ratio of the humerus and femur, but an apelike ratio of the lower and upper arm. (Groves 1999; Culotta 1999)
I would not speculate on the basis of a partial skull.
Human beings are not just more developed. Our brains are better organised, have new areas, denser numbers of neurons and work in ways we cannot yet quantify to give unparalleled intelligence, Self, Other Nature and God consciousness and spirituality unique to us
Creation was an unanalogous supernatural event. If there is a process here it occurred over a single day. We now view the history of that event through the mutated DNA of distant descendants whose story is disrupted by fall and flood. Unless you can claim to have Adams DNA that is.
To claim any degree of certainty here is a kind of arrogance and especially when it is an explanation that cannot duplicate and which therefore does not really understand what happened.
The only honest model is an open ended set of questions and observations. Certainty is dishonest.
As far as I know all world religions have some kind of creation story, usually involving some transition from chaos to order. For those that originated in the Ancient Near East there seems to be a correlation between the development of urban civilisation and (later) a priest class and (later still) ruling class, and the notion of moving from chaos to order.
There are similarities and differences between them - to put some of it very basically Sumerians, as builders of cities and industrial agricultural systems, had it that the Gods built the first cities and irrigation canals and then created man to do all the work. Then followed a process whereby the Sumerian gods jostled for position and power and various different gods came into being that represented different trades and physical things. David Rosenberg has some interesting ideas about the development of religion and religious theatre in Sumerian culture that fills some of it out a bit. In Egypt questions of creation tended to reinforce religious and royal hierarchies, e.g there’s a foundational text that asks the question ‘who (when there was only chaos) performed the rituals? There was no-one to perform the rituals’ and so on, with the idea that creation (as order) came into being with/through the performance of ritual and the establishing of ‘proper’ social hierarchies.
Obviously there’s more to it but that’s a general theme.
Where I think Judaism differs and is distinct is in the relational nature of the stories and teachings. It’s all about relationships. Not that other religions don’t address that, but none do so as deeply as Judaism/Christianity. The continual failures of Israel/Christians are transgressions of relationship.
Most directly relevant is John H Walton’s ‘The Lost World of Genesis 1’. Eliade’s tome ‘a history of religion’ is relevant in a more general and speculative sense, speculative in that he went back beyond writing systems to earlier foundational beliefs there’s not much data about. As above David Rosenberg’s Abraham - the first historical biography, also the relevant sections of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis - on Abraham in particular. These 2 don’t address the creation account as such but do provide well researched approaches to the text. Jordan Peterson seems to have a lot to say on meaning in the OT stories also, but I’ve only just started reading his stuff.
I suppose. The study of science seems to lead some people to faith, and others away from it. I think maybe it’s more about perception than proof. I don’t know. My grandad was a scientist who believed in God, that’s my only personal link. The idea of taking ‘is god necessary for the universe to exist’ as the or a reason for faith is probably a modern one that we’ve read into ancient texts.
Yes although that’s a tricky one to argue. On the face of it for example the Sumerian religions with their gods for everything approach and explanations sort of like Aesop’s fables about how this or that thing came to be, seem to be about explaining the world. Put in their original context however from the point of view of a Sumerian those tales may have been perceived more as a way of defining his or her role and place in the world, rather than as an explanation of how the world works. JH Walton argues pretty convincingly I think that in the ANE material creation was not something people were concerned with, that it was perhaps just an unconscious backdrop to their preoccupation with significance, order and relationship. Balanced with that though is the whole ‘the gods are angry’ bit, e.g there’s plenty of evidence that the Sumerians, like other cultures, saw the gods as being capricious and behind natural or personal disasters etc. It’s not a straightforward picture of God’s being thought up to provide explanations. It’s ages since I waded through most of Eliade’s work but I think he tends towards that view, but Rosenberg, who is a poet and writer as well as a translator of ancient Hebrew, compares existing religious texts with literature from the same period and comes out with what I think is a broader and more credible view.
The Biblical account might seem to be an attempt to explain the physical universe, but only if interpreted through the lens of our modern preoccupation with material creation. I don’t think that was the original intent.
Yes I suppose I should learn more about evolution, if only for the sake of these discussions. I’m not attempting to argue against evolution, as far as I know it is an accurate explanation of the data. I’ll check any comments I make on it. What I was vaguely referring to there is the idea of separating belief from established fact, i.e. I believe that in some sense life and the universe is sustained and driven by God, although I have no idea what the mechanism for that is, and that could be described as a kind of teleological belief. The opposite of that would be the ‘dis-teleological’ idea that, whatever the mechanisms are, they have their origin in some kind of completely material event in which no creator or initiator played any part. The other option is of course ‘I don’t know’ but I just find holding that view as a practical position difficult to get my head around.
Well, of course I don’t ‘know’ that in the sense of being able to prove it empirically. I believe it to be the case, for other reasons (bear with me). Overall I think that the scientific method is perhaps the least useful way of trying to evaluate anything about the bible. I’ve read some articles in the past that indicate that some of the dietary regulations in the OT have sound nutritional principles behind them (I don’t know if that’s true or not), but, apart from that I’m not aware of anything that is in any way intentionally scientific in the bible.
The physical universe is simply a backdrop to what the bible is concerned with, which is relationships. That is what the bible is all about.
And not in any woolly sense, but in a real, visceral, everyday fashion. I think the latter chapters of Job put this really clearly. Putting aside the very personally/emotionally challenging nature of the material, these passages show man looking up and trying to impose his understanding on God, who then goes from the general to the specific to starkly put man in his place, finishing with a return to what is essential - relationship. There are other approaches such as establishing what might constitute proof in a legal setting etc that some authors have used well I think when examining some aspects of faith, but I think that ultimately the proof is in the living of it. Academic studies like those I’ve cited above are invaluable in understanding the how and why of it, but the bible is a book for living, and it’s only in the living of it that it can be properly understood I think. There’s a lot to that idea though I think, I mean in terms of trying to explain it, there are so many possible tangents and related ideas.
are you talking now about "bad design"? the original claim was about common similarity. so i showed that a common similarity can point to a common designer. if you want to move to a "bad design" argument thats fine. so first we both agree that a common similarity isnt evidence for evolution.
How exactly to mutations ‘prove’ evolution to be false?Creationism is not bad logic , evolution is disproven by mutations simple as that .
Because Jesus would vanish in a puff of smoke.I am curious - why are creationists so terrified of the prospect that they might not be "special creations"?
How exactly to mutations ‘prove’ evolution to be false?
No they don’t.Because most of mutations replace cytosyne / guanine into thymine
Because most of mutations replace cytosyne / guanine into thymine and if we are thousands of years old our DNA would be containing mostly thymine . Also there are spots which try to back off the mutation in our genes which means it was better before mutation occured that's impossible according to theory of evolution .
It took me a while but I realized long ago that creationists have their own “theory “ of evolution. Theory is in quotes since it isn’t fact based. I call it the creationist versions of the TOE. Aka CVTOE
Too right! The bits you can prove we accept. The bits where you are only guessing, or explaining on the basis of reductionist or merely naturalistic assumptions, we reject or qualify based on our own eyewitness testimony of the events you are guessing about.
The creationist versions of evolution outright lie about what we actually know . It’s designed deliberately to confuse laymen about science facts so that they’ll accept the Bible ( or other holy book) version of creation stories. None of them explain science accurately.
Surely the lie is to start with Nature rather than with God. Who after all is the basis of all reality.
Creationists have no issue with useful science. Macroevolutionary theory and Abiogenetic theory are deceptions in the hands of many evolutionists because they imply to these theories a certainty that does not exist for them and label scientific what cannot be demonstrated with the scientific method in repeatable peer reviewed experiments.
Also Evolutionary theory is pretty much irrelevant to the useful work done by science over the last few centuries in the areas of industrial production and product development, in medicine, in construction, communications, space flight and indeed military technologies.
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