NinjaTurtles2 said:
1. According to evolutionists I have met everything has come from chance, just a random mix of chemicals to make life slowly changing to make all living things. Wouldn't it be more likely for a tornado to go through a junkyard and make a car ?
Or maybe tornadoes arent analogous to evolution at all. Small changes accumulate occur, and if those changes are beneficial to the survival of the organism the change propogates through the population, and if not the animal dies. What about that description makes you think of tornadoes whipping through a junkyard?
2. If evolution is scientific and true then how come there isn't some form of life on every point of the evolutionic scale?
I'm not sure what you mean.
3. Kind of seems off track but it supports the Bible which denies evolution. There is a flood story in nearly every religion and culture with a perfect man being told to get in an ark, raft, boat, log, etc. and then surviving and the world some from him. That couldn't of been made up for all those religions and cultures, it had to of happened.
It really wouldnt be surprising if there were one particular flood where only a few survivors were left, and then as that persons story was told over and over again parts became exaggerated, fabricated, and made into literature.
Of course, flood stories come and go at all different points in culture and history, they dont suddenly happen all over the world. That being said, the flood myth in the Bible isnt original, there have been flood myths for at least 1500 years before Noah's myth was ever written down - that makes the story of Noah only a Jewish reworking of myths that had already existed for quite some time.
Besides, flood myths being common isnt a measure of historical accuracy. If the flood myth had any merit, the evidence for it would be obvious, such as all fossils being found in a single enormous layer of sediment rather than appearing throughout hundreds of layers of sediment over what appear to be millions of years. In all liklihood, the story of a worldwide flood is so wildly fantastic and utterly unbelievable that its safe to say it never happened at all.
Science leaves many gaps. Theists fill in the gaps by attributing the unexplainable to some form of god. Atheists fill in the gaps by attributing the unexplainable to chance.
Betcha couldnt find a single atheist who has ever said the latter.
There's a difference between teaching the possibility of Inteligent Design in schools and teaching religion. Intel. Design should be taught and explained in the context of, "nothing is 100% proven, and this is the theory that many people believe." Natural Science should be taught in the same manner. A child's education is not well-rounded unless he/she has been taught BOTH sides of the debate.
There isnt two sides of the debate, because one side of the debate can be completely and totally wrong. We could always teach geocentricism along side heliocentric model, Intelligent Falling along side gravity, Holocaust revisionism along side WWII, and demon infestation along side germ theory, astrology along side astronomy, but no one would ever respect those positions because they pollute what should be scientific education.
Find a
scientific alternative to evolution, then we can discuss the merits of presenting both sides in class.
The Bible states that all life came from God and that he created everything and was done. No evolving. No new life. Nothing. Period.
The bible also says we should come to know God through his creation (Rom 1:20), but his creation seems to reveal change over time. Short of saying "the bible was totally wrong on that creation part", you can say that the story of creation is complementary to modern science, and adopt a theistic evolution point of view.
Also, gravity and evolution are entirely different so don't bring them up.
There are certainly different, but the implications are the same: no gods are required to explain why humans and chimpanzees share 95% of their DNA with ERVs located in the same places, and no gods are required to explain why things fall.
Of course, dont underestimate the analogy. A very long time ago, early people had a very poor idea of cosmology, and they could not understand what caused the stars and the planets to move. In the bible, the explanation is that the stars were fixed firmly to a solid firmament, and the movement of the stars was explained by angels pushing the stars across the firmament. Of course, that kind of godly explanation is no longer required, now we know that gravity accounts for the movement of the stars.
What surprises most people is that the theory of Intelligent Design was created by former evolutionary scientists, not a religious group.
Kind of a wonder then why all the arguments for Intelligent Design are identical to the ones for scientific creationism, the only difference being the terminology used.
Of Pandas and People sound familiar?
I've seen way too many arguments against evolution to believe it.
If the arguments you've seen are anything like the ones in your opening post, then everything you've seen is garbage, and your opposition to evolution is based entirely on ignorance of what evolution really is or actually entails.
Everytime someone says "where are the transitional fossils", I can only think of Dr GH, former curator of a natural history museum, and his comment that there are so many fossils that there is hardly enough room to store them. And of course, I like to point people to
this big list of transitional fossils, its only a partial list but it soundly collapses the claim that there are no transitional fossils.
And sometimes, like the claims that there are fish being found on the tops of mountains, it seems like creationists believe that the mountains today are the only ones that have ever existed, as if they are denying plate techtonics altogether.
Finally, on irreducible complexity, the question is not "can a part of the function be removed right now", the question is "can the parts come together in the first place". There are actually
several mundane ways that evolution accounts for irreducible complexity, and the reasons usually revolve around developing a system by evolution, then removing its redudant parts for efficiency, leaving only the critical components of the system left (for example, a venus fly trap used to catch bugs by secreting a sticky substance and closing its leaves around them, then it lost the ability to produce the sticky substance to conserve nitrogen, leaving only the leaves remaining). Otherwise, IC systems are based on poor methodology, such as Behe's flagella in which all the proteins that make up the flagella can be shown to have been used in other functions of the cell, they did not begin as a flagellum and they were not all put in place at once as a flagellum.
