No, I am not an animal. Why? Because I am made in the image of God. How so? I have self-consciousness; I am capable of thought processes far exceeding anything even the "smartest" monkey, dog, or dolphin might achieve; I can understand concepts like beauty, integrity, eternity, logic, love, loyalty, etc, etc; I have the capacity to live above my physical drives, to control them and even deny them when it serves a higher purpose to do so; I can appreciate and involve myself in artistic pursuits, in philosophical rumination, and supererogative acts. No animal has any of these things in common with a human being.
I made a thread to cover this so I won’t go in to it here. But just to comment, primates are self-aware, you are more intelligent in the same way a cheetah is the fastest. We have increased intelligence but we are extremely fragile, we cannot compete with any wild predator. Also are you not just assuming an animal cannot be loyal, love or think logically? Many are anthropomorphic about it but even scientifically there are many examples of each in the animal world. There is nothing truly exclusive about humans that I can think of. Everything you mention has been shown in the animal world but often to a lesser extent.
I think God has set in place certain biological processes (natural selection, adaptation and mutation) that do not require His direct, active participation in guiding.
Your monkeys forced by dry temperatures from the trees to walk the African plain is, I hope you understand, what is known as a "just so" story. It is quite unproveable. I would be very careful about taking such stories as fact.
I don’t want to sound rude, but don’t you see the irony in someone who believes that Jesus was a God telling an atheist to be careful about taking stories as fact? The process of natural selection is fact, the exact way some species evolve and what the factors were are often theories based on the little evidence available and speculation. So I cannot be tested as it happened so long ago, maybe apes started walking upright for a different reason but it doesn’t mean that they didn’t as we have proof they did.
There hasn't been a distinct, observable evolvement of the human species in all of recorded human history. Our technology has advanced, as has our understanding of ourselves, our world and the universe, but we are, biologically speaking, fundamentally the same as those who lived thousands of years ago.
How long is recorded human history? Around 5000 years or so? Let’s be generous and say 20,000 years for the sake of argument. How much do you expect a creature to change in this time? The shark hasn’t changed in hundreds of millions of years. Humans are evolving as we have skulls from tens of thousands of years ago which shows the change in the size of the brain, jaw etc. If the history of Earth was shown as a clock, human history would be about a hairs width at the end. Our entire civilisation has developed in a small period of good climate between ice ages and other disasters. I just don’t think you understand how long 3 billion years is in comparison to a human lifetime.
Selective breeding is not a process of improvement that evolution is proposed to be. A Boston Terrier does not represent an improvement of the dog species and it most certainly isn't an improvement biologically on the wolf. Selective breeding has, in fact, had the effect of biologically weakening the various breeds of dogs.
You have made a fundamental mistake. Evolution is not the improvement of a species, it is merely replicating DNA where perhaps 1 in 1 million cells is replicated with a variation. Maybe this variation made the animal grow thicker fur, which isn’t an improvement in itself. However if the climate became cooler like an ice age this creature would have an advantage so more of its genes survive. Likewise would it be seen as an advantage to spend more energy growing fur if the climate became warmer? They would be at a disadvantage and fewer would breed and eventually be bred out. It is suggestive to say what is an improvement, after all bacteria are still going strong.
Selective breeding just allows you to speed up the process where the influencing factor isn’t left to nature. So since the dog doesn’t need to compete, we can breed a dog that like the bulldog that cant’t even give birth naturally.
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Because humans are severely encroaching upon their habitat, because humans often make easy prey, nad because humans interact foolishly with them.
From a natural point of view, fine. But I thought God controlled the animals? Also that he designed everything for humans to be created, so why allow animals which he casually wipes out throughout history interfere with the finished product? If an animal is a mindless, soulless creature with no will of its own why does he give it the will to kill humans?
But why do you assume God thinks rapid evolution of humanity is "productive"?
I am just saying that if he wanted to create a human, he found the most ridiculously complicated and inefficient way to do so. Also probably one of the harshest and for whatever reason decided billions must die for the cause.
There is no direct line from the first life to humans as ID would imply, life branches in different directions and becomes extinct. The environment can change resulting in mass-extinctions etc so the infinite factors that resulted in us is purely chance.
This seems rather muddled and vague. Can you expand on what you've written here?
Well if you wanted to create a human from a single cell via evolution, how would you do so? Each replication would lead closer and closer to a human I would imagine, each step an improvement following a defined path. But this isn’t what we see at all, we go through long periods of stagnation and varying extinctions. Evolution follows a path through varying species which turns out to be a dead end and entire phylum’s are wiped out. So in other words, evolution looks like a natural process from every angle, in every study, whereas if it had a chosen path it could have been very efficient. Evolution is blind as in no point in evolutionary history in our own or any other species does a creature evolve something it doesn’t have a use for. It is always built up in stages, ie a birds wing allowed it to glide further and further so larger wings had an advantage. To the point where a bird could fly, it’s always in stages. If a creature suddenly grew wings then that would suggest evolution is not blind and there could be a guiding factor like God. But there never has been anything to suggest this.
Well, evolutionists tell us that evolution does have at least one specific path it follows: improvement of the species. Insofar as this is so, evolution cannot be said to be truly "blind" in its processes.
There is no path, it is merely variations that allow the best adapted to be more successful. They have no ambition to ‘improve’ which like I stated, is really just suggestive. Is a bacteria somehow less adapted to life than a chimp? Who do you think will be on the planet longest? One is more complex, that is all.
Again, do you have any hard proof? Or do you depend entirely upon speculation in these things?
Proof that creatures respire oxygen? Do I need to provide evidence and sources to suggest oxygen is the by-product of photosynthesis or other forms of synthesis in early life? Or do you want proof they existed in the past?
The Origin of Oxygen in Earth's Atmosphere: Scientific American here is one source, does that help?
This is all a person who extracts God from the universe is left with: blind, impersonal, natural processes. Living things are simply machines "dancing to their DNA" as Dawkins has suggested. But one has to ask, if this is true, how are we to know that such naturalistic assertions aren't also merely the impulse of these blind, impersonal natural processes?
That is a good question I have been trying to answer, how do we know how in control of our own reactions we are? It isn’t something many like to come to terms with. But life without God doesn’t just leave you with impersonal experiences, the world doesn’t suddenly change. You can just spend your day fascinated with where we live and why if you want, or be kind to someone because you want to be. The only difference I see between Christians and Atheists on the way they live is that Atheists try and make the most of the lives we have, whereas religious people tend to think something better is waiting. Just a generalisation.
How do we know we are right in saying there are only these mindless material processes if we are fundamentally just dancing to their dictates? Maybe these processes don't enable us to correctly perceive reality. This seems very likely if they are truly mindless and mechanical.
That is a much more complex question, I really don’t know the answer. How do we know we are all even sharing the same reality? I try to keep an open mind and not assume I know what is right or wrong, which is why I am so fascinated with religion where people suggest they know all the reasons. Really though, how does anyone know the reason life exists or what happens after death? I have no idea, I don’t think anyone does. Yet billions claim they KNOW 100% about these things, it’s puzzling as they are always based on taking someone word for it. People want to believe there is a reason for life and don’t want to fear death, so most do not want to believe in anything else and will actively delude themselves.
But I don’t think you need to have such a pessimistic view, after all we the cleverest species the world has seen and we are capable of amazing thing. I do think that if people stop using excuses like God has a plan, or God will provide we could achieve a lot more though.
But chance doesn't do anything. The term "chance" describes an occurrence for which we have no explanation. Chance, though, is not itself a causal force.
You seem to be taking what I said in a literal, pedantic way. A ‘chance event’ might be an ice age for example. It is therefore nothing but chance/luck whether a creature will survive or go extinct. One creature like a reptile will die, although it was perfectly adapted to warmer climates. A mammal had adapted in a different way, but its warm fur and deep burrows may spare it. The mammal isn’t ‘better’ than the reptile, chance just happened to mean it was better suited to what happened in the future that it could never be aware of. After the extinction of the reptiles, the gap it left in the ecosystem would most likely be filled over time with new mammals which would now dominate.
Anyway, chance isn’t the force it is merely to describe an event as being luck or bad luck, but which one it is, is suggestive of the species you refer to.
I don't agree. Much of what science uncovers has been interpreted to fit a certain philosophical point of view. Sometimes the facts have either been suppressed or ignored when they confound the popular interpretations of secular scientists. Check out the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" or the work of the RATE group on the reliability of common scientific dating methods ( Raising the Bar on Creation Research - Answers in Genesis )
Why would any scientist have the motivation to go against God? Think about it logically, if I found evidence that God existed or that evolution was wrong I could be a millionaire, I would get the Nobel prize and be the most esteemed scientist for a hundred years. Not only that, but why would someone cover up evidence of a God they don’t believe in? They wouldn’t see it as evidence. However if they did see it as proof of God, would they really go against God? What would they have to gain by doing something so foolish?
I am just so sick of this ridiculous argument that scientists hide evidence, it makes absolutely no sense at all and is just a last-ditch attempt to cling on to false beliefs. Also the intense hypocrisy of bleeting on about scientists getting evidence wrong when the only basis for your belief is the creation story in the OT, which clearly states God created all in 7 days. Now you have interpreted this to be billions of years, with everything being created on day one except humans, which evolved slowly and erratically through time. So which one of us is interpreting evidence to fit what they want to believe? Honestly…?
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This is an opinion, not a fact. There are many who disagree and do so intelligently and rationally.
No, what I stated was fact. That evolution HAS stood up to intense scrutiny, or it wouldn’t have made it to being a theory. Neither would it be taught in schools, even in Bible belt America where court after court rules in evolutions favour.
[FONT="]If you have an argument that disproves evolution in any way I would love to hear it, if you have better evidence please provide it. Perhaps you have a reference to a creationist stating that God did it all, but that won’t hold any sway in a debate.[/FONT]
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As far as we were concerned just a few hundred years ago the earth was flat.. So you believe in under 50 years "man" has discovered and completely and accurately mapped the human genome? If so how is it possible we do not know the actual purpose of these genes? if not then how can you speak or ask questions based on incomplete data?[/FONT]
