QuantumFlux said:
It most certainly is since God's word has a very descriptive 6 day creation, Jesus seemse to believe that humans have been around since the beginning.
Yes, it is a nice descriptive poetic story which we know to be a story because God's general revelation contradicts it. And if Jesus says the beginning of creation includes human creation, then the beginning includes everything from the last 13.7 billion years up to the last 2 million years. We've just left the beginning behind us and are starting on the middle---which could keep going on for a 1,000 billion years for all we know.
At that point, its evolution vs. God's word.
Only in your imagination.
Keep bringing up that culture that understood it to be a myth and I'll keep ignoring it, because they obviously took it as it was read and you have no evidence to prove otherwise besides a very few christian theologians that dont appear until after the 5th century.
I think people who have taken the time to study ancient cultures, including ancient Hebrew culture, probably know a bit more about it than you do. Unless you want to present evidence to the contrary.
Apparently we have very diffent ideas of macroevolution.
Macroevolution is speciation and has been observed. You probably have a good many more criteria for macroevolution that, if they existed in real life, would falsify evolution, not support it.
All that you spoke of that was observed falls into microevolution or more accurately called adaptation.
Adaptation is the consequence of evolution. If there were no evolution, there would be no adaptation. I wrote an essay on the language games creationists play to avoid the "E" word. You might like to read it.
http://christianforums.com/t736563
Cross species as you called it is pretty much what macroevolution is.
I don't understand what you mean by either term. So you will have to be more explicit. Are you using "cross species" as a noun or a verb? IOW is a "cross species" a kind of species? How do you tell if a species is a cross species or an ordinary species? Or do you mean that "cross species" is an action. In that case , how do species cross?
I never heard this term applied to evolution before and I am having trouble making sense of it.
If one species did not come from another species then evolution is not even worth paying attention to.
Well, that is an observed fact. We have seen one species become another in nature and scientists have also replicated the process in laboratory conditions. But it seems to me that you are mistaking the part for the whole. Speciation is an outcome of evolution in some circumstances. Evolution is much more about natural selection leading to adaptation, than about speciation. Speciation is the end game of evolution. Most evolution occurs within species.
Of course, the aspect of evolution most people are interested in is speciation, because it is at that point we get into common descent and the history of how species are related to each other and to their common ancestors. But that doesn't make speciation and common descent synonyms for evolution. Evolution is a process; speciation is a possible outcome of the process.
The origin of the species most certainly does fall into the evolutionary theory since the theory is that all life has evolved from a common ancestor.
No. You are mistaking "common ancestor" for "first living thing". The first living thing is not necessarily identical to the last common ancestor. Life could have been around for quite a while before the species which was the last universal common ancestor appeared.
What we have not observed is one species (such as reptiles) evolving into another species (such as a bird or mammal). Birds have always been birds, mammals have always been mammals.
What is your definition of "species"? You are talking about huge classifications of vertebrate animals here. No one expects an instantaneous transition (or even one that only took a few million years) when dealing with diversity of this scale.
You have to remember that every step in such transitions was a speciation, just like the speciations in fruit flies that have been the object of so much scientific research. Mammals did arise from reptiles, and this is one of the best attested transitions in nature, but there is no point at which you can draw a line and say "on this side you have reptiles and on the other you have mammals". Well, you can, but any such line would be arbitrary.
Today, after many millions of years of separate existence and many extinctions among both reptiles and mammals, the distinction seems obvious. But when you look at the actual fossils, and see all the intermediate characteristics, it is a very fuzzy distinction.
Are we really going to get back on this? I mean if you want to i guess, but man our points were beat to death.
You haven't made any points yet. And I have this thing about facing facts. I don't like to leave people in a state of confused misinformation. Once you have looked at the facts, you may still choose to live in virtual reality instead of in God's creation, but at least I will have done my part to make sure you have that choice and don't have it forced on you by ignorance of the actual state of things.
I don't think so, if that were so, I guess the earth was flat until a couple hundred years ago.
Nope. The fact that people don't know the truth doesn't make the truth false. And it was about 2500 years ago that scholars such as the Greek natural philosophers figured out the earth is a sphere. I think you will agree that the earth did not change its shape from a circle to a sphere, but rather that people who took time to study the evidence learned that it is a sphere.
btw, if 100% agreement is required before a scientific consensus is established, then we still don't have that regarding the shape of the earth, because there are several dozen people who are still convinced the earth is flat.
And it is probably not as small of a group as you think it is.
Creationists are a small minority among Christians. The US is the only place where they number more than a third of the Christian population. In most places, creationists count for less than 5% of Christians. Creationists (or anti-evolutionists) count for even a smaller % of scientists, especially in fields relevant to evolution. Most lists of scientists who disagree with evolution are top-heavy with scientists who died before Darwin published and with physicists, mathematicians and engineers who never studied biology, much less evolution. Discovery Institute has only managed to get 500 names out of a global population of hundreds of thousands of scientists endorsing a wimpy statement carefully worded to make it possible to accept evolution as long as one is ready to express concern about natural selection being the sole explanation for bio-diversity---something the theory of evolution doesn't actually claim anyway.
All the evidence says there is no disagreement among scientists about evolution on scientific grounds, only a few holdouts who do not accept it for religious reasons, or out of ignorance.
There is no such thing as a non-biased ground in evolutionary science.
There is no more bias in evolutionary science than in chemistry.
Evolutionists assume evolution is true and will fight to the death for it. Keep telling yourself its non-bias, but I'm not buying it.
Evolution is not and never was assumed. It is an observed fact. And the theory of evolution is a conclusion based on observed facts.
