Slashdot Mirror
Christian Churches Celebrate Darwin's Birthday
kthejoker writes "Today is the 197th anniversary of the great biologist Charles Darwin's birth. In response, some 450 Christian churches are celebrating Darwin's birth, saying, 'Darwin`s theory of biological evolution is compatible with faith and that Christians have no need to choose between religion and science.' There's also an interesting perspective on Darwinism and Christianity in the San Jose Mercury News."
I still have a Flying Spaghetti Monster badge on my car though...
Evolution leading to complex organisms is at least tricky to understand . How about the idiots who, for example, think Bush is comparable to Hitler? That's just as stupid as not believing in evolution, or believing the earth is flat, or whatever. We're surrounded every day by idiots who believe in bizarre things.
What I find amusing about that article I liked above, though, is the guy is teaching kids to doubt evolution on the basis that they weren't there to see it. Is that what he really wants to be teaching the kids? To doubt what they can't see for themselves? :D
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Blind Faith standing over Skepticism and to save face as the outline of the body of Truth lies floating in the Bay the reponse can only be...
This somehow reminds me of a man going to the Doctor's office:
Doc: Well, I'm afraid you have tuberculosis. I need to know, are you a creationist?
Patient: What does that have to do with anything?
D: Well, I could give you the drugs that would cure Tuberculosis as it was discovered in 1937, or the modern drugs that treat the disease as it has evolved into today.
P: What's so great about the modern drugs?
D: They're intelligently designed...
Christian theistic evolutionists have got some very hairy questions to answer....
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i3/q
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2004/0112reje
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i4/t
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v20/i1/t
One could always believe that evolution is just a tool in God's hands. That way it's possible to believe in intelligent design without denying facts, that Earth is older than a few thousands years, etc.
Religion is about believing, science is about knowing. They are not mutually exclusive.
Christian (and Islamic and Judaeic) dogma inevitably and logically results in fundamentalism and rejection of all secular (ie, rational) thought and belief. To think otherwise is to ignore the very scripture one claims to believe in.
(Long Now has a great talk given by Harris available for free download in Ogg Vorbis or MP3)
I'm glad to see there's some people out there that don't think religion and science are mutually exclusive ways of looking at the world. To each his own, but IHMO, both religion and science have productive places in society.
After all, a true person of faith would encourage science because it will only prove what he/she already believes to be true, right?
This sig rocks the casbah.
Many people don't really know anything about who he was or what he thought or how it applies to modern biology.
The guy was:
1) A careful and thoughtful scientist who spent countless hours studying tihngs most people would find incrediby boring. Darwin spent EIGHT YEARS studying BARNACLES.
2) Fairly shy.
3) A Christian for most of his life, and only an agnostic in later life (which had more to do historically with death in the family than with evolution, just ike Lincoln's rediscovering of Christianity)
The guy is/was NOT:
1) a guy who's ideas are a dogma. What Darwin thought is historically important in the development of evolution, but has no bearing on what and where that theory will lead.
2) 100% right about a LOT of things. He not only got the patterns of heredity completely wrong (he thought it was analog: by trait blending, when it was really digital), but was embarassingly forced to admit it when people with better arguments pointed out that blending was in contradiction with the evidence.
3) Someone that thought fossils had proved his case. To Darwin, fossils showed mainly the fact that past life was very different from present life: hence that most of species that existed in the past no longer existed in his day. This was one of the chief inspirations for his idea. The current creationist obsession with fossils overlooks the fact that Darwin put forward his theory, and was considered to be correct, long before we had anything like the fantastically rich fossil record of today. Darwin predicted that future fossils would all confirm his theory, but he NEVER expected that we'd find anywhere as many as we have, or that an entirely unimaginable field (genetics) would someday come to exist and provide an indepedent second check on the fossil record, allowing us to figure out actual lineages.
Darwin also didn't propose that the origins of life were part of evolution. The most he ever said on the subject was that maybe life had started in some warm little pool somewhere... in a private letter. He didn't publish this idea as scientific work.
There are so many misconceptions about the man that this otherwise fairly reserved guy is just buried under layers of legend. He was neither an exceptional genius and phropet, nor was he arrogant, careless about jumping to conclusions, or an atheist. He was a bright, studious man who worked hard, amassed tons of evidence, and hit upon a stunningly innovative realization about how evolution could have occured (one which was as much due to the new discoveries in geology and biology of his time as to his own thinking: as is obvious from the fact that no one in the history of earth had thought of it before... and then suddenly two guys did indepedently around the same time). He's worth remembering and learning about, not worshiping or demonizing.
The Catholic Church will likely exercise the extend and embrace strategy it has in the past and canonize Darwin. St. Charles will have spoken the word of God and Darwin's works will find their way into the Bible.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I am a christian and a scientist, one who does not find the belief in a cunctipotent deity incompatible with understanding and accepting scientific discoveries, To tell the truth more I learn about cosmology (singularities, string theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal, and other crazy ideas) and evolution the more my belief in God is reinforced. To me the individuals who hinder scientific progress in the name of God are reserving a place for themselves in the afterlife (by which I mean, a not very nice one! or maybe they will come back as a worm in the next life!)
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
I see this as an attempt to prevent religion from becomming irrelevant. Smart christians know they can't force people to pick religion over science because science will always win in the long run. So instead they've twisted their views so that religion can encompass science. Pretty smart move for them but it will only slow the inevitable death of religion.
It would be so nice if we could just be good to each other without fear of reprisal from some imaginary father-figure. Being a good person by your own decision is much more noble than doing it because you were told to.
I'm not a christian, but I'm glad there's some active stance among religious people against the fundamentalists who seem to have taken over any kind of discussion of religion in this country.
I'm not religious, and I find, on the whole, that fundamentalists hijacking a religion can be a good thing in the long run. Probably nothing else could turn as many people away from the whole idea of religion so much as a generation of frothing-at-the-mouth zealots fighting each other and anyone disagreeing with their inflexible, warped view of the world.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
"Christians have no need to choose between religion and science."
I beg to differ. The premise of religion is to accept that certain things are mysterious and cannot be investigated, or that certain things are true whether there is evidence for them or not.
The premise of science is that everything should be investigated, and that things are accepted as generally true only after evidence emerges for them, and that new evidence can change our perceptions of what is true.
Agreed, and well put. In the same way, people will be put off Islam by the fundamentalists burning embassies because someone dared mock their religion.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
So that takes covers my little town, now what about the other 200,000 churches?
Stephan
As a Christian, and someone who's interested in science, how things work, biology and the like, I've never really had a problem with evolution and religion conflicting with each other. Equally, almost all other Christians I've met - and a lot of them are scientists or engineers, people that deal with fact - have likeminded views. In a lot of cases, many of us are baffled as to how this viewpoint that evolution is just 'wrong' came about.
It's nice to see people giving the issue some thought and prving that we're not all religious crackpots. I certainly don't believe the Bible to be 100% literal in its explanation of things to us. While my faith tells me that my God is a powerful force, I'm pretty sure that using the notion of 7 days of creation was a mechanism to get the idea across to people of that time. Do you really think people thousands of years ago would be able to grasp the notion of evolution? The book of Genesis would certainly be a few chapters longer...
The important point here though is that evolution is not creation. Both can co-exist quite happily.
This whole "it's only a few thousand rioting" business doesn't hold much water. Hamas, ie. a bunch of terrorists, have just been voted in democratically in Palestine. Ahmadinejad was voted in democratically in Iran. Extremist Islamic view represent popular opinion across the Middle East and are not solely the beliefs of a minority.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
Because in order to discredit evolutionary theory, those who oppose it attempt to undermine science, reason, and even empirical observation as bases of belief. The heliocentric model of the solar system isn't all of science, either, but no one who honestly believes in science disbelieves it.
English is easier said than done.
Why is it that if you are against Darwin you are against science?
Well, of course in principle it doesn't automatically mean that.
However, evolution is one of the most well-established theories that science has to offer. It is supported by evidence extremely well and is validated by hundreds of new observations every day. And if you publicly come out against it and in favor of some alternative theory for which the only evidence is a religious text, chances are pretty damn good that you are incapable of holding a logical thought in your head to begin with.
Now maybe that's an unfair assessment to make about you, but to make a more accurate one requires too much time and energy to expend on every evolution-basher out there. Life is too short, and there are too many of them (especially in the United States of America) to interview every single one as to his feelings about science in general. And it's a simple fact that people who publicly oppose evolution tend to be quite vocal in not only bashing scientists as a group, but bashing science in general as an inferior source of knowledge as compared to religion- an apples to oranges comparison if there ever was one.
If I were some omniscient being with all the time and resources in the world to examine the innermost thoughts of every creationist and intelligent designer, perhaps I'd be able to develop a more accurate opinion. As a human being with limited years on this earth, please forgive me if I take a short cut and make what is a pretty accurate generalization to save time. If you are against Darwin, you are probably against science. You may think you're pro-science, but usually what that means is that you're pro-technology and view your toys as validation of the superiority of your culture and by extension the correctness of its religious views. Individuals opposed to Darwinism on the merits of the theory itself (and who may offer alternative theories equally unpalatable from religious viewpoints) are actually quite rare.
Can a man live inside of a fish for three days? Was Eve fashioned out of Adam's rib?
If you say something to yourself similar to, "Obviously that part was allegory," then you have no leg to stand on. Either every single thing in it is literal (and the earth has four corners) or everything must be interpreted. Once everything must be interpreted, you cannot claim any sort of non-relativism.
Now, ask yourself these questions: Which bible do you read, and why? Do you think the Romans (who cannonized the Bible with their selected bishops in 313) were answering the call of God or politics? Why do you go to church on Sunday instead of the Sabbath, or Saturday? Why do most of the Christian holidays coincide exactly with pagan holidays that are centuries older?
If you're a Trinitarian, are non-trinitarians going to hell? What if you aren't baptised? Why do you think there are so many sects of Christianity if the bible is so crystal clear?
I believe that the fraction of churches that are opposed to Darwinian evolution (and, eg, the big bang, etc) is in fact extremely small. At one point, Max Tegmark was going to do the statistics; he told me that he was finding that the number of believers represented by anti-Darwin churches is small.
David W. Hogg -- assoc prof, NYU Physics
Agreed, but it's important to shine a good bright light on the 'few thousand who are rioting' for several reasons:
1. They are the equivalent of the Jim Swaggart nutcase christians in this country.
2. The most 'explosive' cartoons in the collection they are distributing all over the Muslim world to inflame people are the most blasphemous, but were never distributed and probably not even produced by any European cartoonists.
So if a bright enough light is shined on these creeps, the mainstream followers of Islam should see them as blasphemers who actually were the originators and distributors of the worse cartoons and put them to death. Or turn away from them in distaste, which is a form of hell the nutcases REALLY won't be able to deal with.
There's nothing that will drive a bunch of zealots to fury more than a majority populace who doesn't take them seriously. That's true all over the world.
As a minister formally of the Southern Baptist convention, I can tell you that there are a lot of Christians standing up to fundamentalism. The problem is that they don't tend to get the press. Instead, the press latches on to controversy (e.g. Pat Robertson's all-too-regular hoof-in-mouth disease) and, due to their largely secular bias, have created a caricature of American religion in the form of the religious right.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Can a man live inside of a fish for three days? Was Eve fashioned out of Adam's rib?
Those sound like the kinds of questions that Adam and Jamie, the Mythbusters, need to be called in to answer!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
You have to realize that there is a large percentage of christians who are unwittingly pushing towards another dark age.
Those christians (and radical muslims etc) will be in their own dark age. The rest of us will do alright.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
When evolutionary theory was first published, it caused an immense reaction in religious circles. The reason for this was that evolution was the first explanation of a way life may have come about without resorting to a divine being. It gave all those people who didn't want to believe in God a logical alternative.
Since then, people have come to say that evolution has "killed" God, or "disproved" Christianity. These comments fail to understand exactly why science tends not to like religion. One of the basic tenets of science is that for something to be scientific, it has to be falsifiable. Because religion's basic premise is the existence of an omnipotent force not governed by physical laws, it is by definition unfalsifiable. That does not mean it is scientifically false, or scientifically true, it means that science cannot be applied to religion. Religion cannot be scientifically proven or disproven. Every objection a scientist raises to religion could be countered by "But God could temporarily suspend that natural law, and act in violation of it".
Creationism is logical, in that it is internally consistent. If you accept the basic premise of a divine being, then it follows on logically that that being could then create life. Evolution was radical, not because it contradicted this, but because it created a logical alternative that did not involve God. It's not a replacement for creationism, it's a scientific explanation, much as creationism is a religious explanation.
Saying that, the very notion of evolution changes over time. Darwin originally didn't comment on abiogensis - his theory was about environmental conditions causing changes in organisms in such a way that diversity was created. His theory took as a premise the existance of life before the evolutionary process begins.
Even now, there are various components to evolution that some people believe and some don't. Some believe in the "punctuated equilibrium" model. Some don't. Some believe in "macro" evolution, some don't. Some believe in abiogenesis. Some don't. Some theists argue for "directed" evolution. Some argue that animal diversity evolved from a few common ancestors, as per Darwin, but that man was created directly by God, outside of evolutionary forces.
Saying "I believe in evolution" is almost as meaningless these days as saying "I believe in Christianity". There are so many different theories, sub-theories, movements, interpretations and denominations that just saying "evolution" doesn't actually describe much.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
If anything, Christianity is more like Linux:
1. It has a kernel (belief in Jesus and God) and you can put different forms on top of that (barring a few that go against the license), leading to different branches and forks.
2. Most of its followers are friendly, though there are a few loud zealots who give the rest a bad name.
3. It sprouted from an older, less "open", religion, many of the followers of which are still around today.
They probably have never seen *god* either; a rational response to this argument would be to disbelieve both evolution and creationism and all religion, to go live in a cave and eat berries and reject the notion of all civilization, including its mythology.
The logical outcome of his argument doesn't matter though. This stuff works on children only because children haven't been taught critical thinking; they've been taught to listen to authority. (Then it continues to work because adults haven't been taught critical thinking either.) And that's exactly what this guy wants. The specific argument doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is that someone in a position of authority said it, and the people who believe it don't have the tools to defend themselves from authoritative statements.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
1) If God knows all causality, then he could have brought about everything into being originally AND have it, from science's view BE random and undetermined. The two are not mutally exclusive when God is the best pool player of all time, setting up the most elaborate shot of all time.
God as a conman. Good one.
You can't take the sky from me...
True enough, but it is obvious that science has limitations.
1. Science can only be reasonably applied the things that can be observed.
2. Science can only be meaningfully applied to things that can be measured and repeated.
3. Science can only be absolutely applied to things that can be understood by humans.
To presume that all knowledge and all truth must necessarily be confined by the above set of restrictions is ludicrous. And, of course, completely unprovable. If you honestly believe that science and humanity are capable of understanding and knowing everything, then you have trapped yourself by faith in science. That is, welcome to your pseudoreligion.
Ultimately, science is all about answers. Religion is all about questions.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
"There's no need for scientific evidence to know, for example, that you're in love or feeling depressed."
But these are feelings. "Feeling" that you are in love is automatically true, becaues feeling is just an expression of an experience. But "feeling" that a truth claim is accurate is not the same thing as it being true.
The premise of science is that everything should be investigated
And therefore, we have the science called Theology, whose subject of study is God.
I would just like to remind those out there who still believe in an Abrahamic faith that having your church/synagogue/mosque celebrate the birthday of a human being not associated in any way with God is idolatry. Darwin is not a religious figure, he is a scientific one. You can believe in evolution and be religious, however.
I would also like to remind the people who wrote my Biology textbook, a Miller and Levine of Prentice Hall, that their treatment of Darwin and evolution is rather idolotrous. Details of earlier theories (inheritance of learned traits, geological theories that led to "Earth is billions of years old" in the first place, Darwin's actual evidence) are left out, and the authors practically declare Undying Love for Charles Darwin. Declaring Undying Love for anything is unscientific.
This has been a public service announcement because idolizing people causes problems, such as reading the National Enquirer, stupidity and electing the stupid "National Enquirer" readers you idolize to high political office.
Churches...churches where a Bible is actually *used* will not take this position.
:)
I think you misspelled "abused".
There are plenty observations made "each day" that contradict evolutionary theories.
Name some. Before you post, please check talk.origins and the NCSE website to see debunkings of your claims; I can almost guarantee that any of the observations you're thinking of do not contradict evolution in the slightest, and have already been explained in short, simple sentences and words of few syllables so that even creationists can understand them.
There are also many established scientists who don't support it too.
No, there aren't. There are very, very few, and almost none of them are biologists. And their arguments are the same easily debunked nonsense, repeated over and over in increasingly obfuscatory language; they haven't brought anything new to the table in decades.
The theory of evolution is an attempt to find an absolute in a relativistic universe, it doesn't exist. It is based off age-old beliefs in simple cause and effect, and projecting those flawed beliefs over the span of millions of years. The universe does not operate this way. With our modern knowledge of relativism and quantum mechanics, evolution should be debunked.
Congratulations, you've managed to combine two of the most common types pseudo-scientific quackery (creationism and profound misinterpretation of quantum physics) into a single post! I suggest you stick to fare like "What the Bleep Do We Know?" -- it should be more at your level.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
However, evolution is one of the most well-established theories that science has to offer. It is supported by evidence extremely well and is validated by hundreds of new observations every day. And if you publicly come out against it and in favor of some alternative theory for which the only evidence is a religious text, chances are pretty damn good that you are incapable of holding a logical thought in your head to begin with.
FYI science is made on testable hypothesis. One of the reasons that evolution does not make good science is that it is not testable. It is not testable is that it is based on many one-time events, for starters:
Experiments have shown that after a few decades of natural selection some species can adapt by changing color, for example. This does nothing to elucidate how, after any number of generations, a salamander could become a rhinocerus.
Furthermore, many characteristics of living organisms, such as the shape of protein and enzymes, are not the type of problem that are suitable for solving with so-called genetic algorithms, which would be required by the evolution theory. For an problem to be solvable by a genetic algorithm, it needs to for a smooth curve, that allows approximation to occur. Many structures present within plants and animals are either completly wrong or completly right; there is no approximating.
In short, evolution is a flawed, untestable theory. Why do peole back it? Fear of religion? Fear of the unknown? Feel free to confess.
Well, at a certain point you have to start addressing the problem. I think we're at that point.
Well put.
The notion that you can just ignore these nutjobs can lead to even bigger problems down the road. It is when average, everyday people fail allow spurious debates to take hold that the majority becomes hostage to a dimwitted but aggressive minority. Hostility to intellectualism has been with America since its founding, but when it becomes so pervasive that the nonsensical hurling of insults becomes a substitute for debate, the reasonable majority loses its ability to influence politics. I think we've already entered a very dangerous era, where style (angry rhetoric, appeals to symbology, character assassination) has far outstripped substance in the arena of public debate.
When is the last time you saw two people on television actually debate an idea for a full 40 minutes? I'm talking about locking intellectual horns and attempting to prove the merits of an idea to an audience through skillfully argued logic. No dodging the question, no shoehorning a question into a pre-generated answer. I think such debates are non-existent now because we have allowed them to become extinct. We allow the issues to be turned into lowest common denominator mudwrestling that shows how little we respect ourselves as citizens. We have not demanded a better process, one that pushes better ideas to the fore. So we wind up with a process that is driven by one liners and photos of politicians going duck hunting.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
What most people fail to realize is that Darwin supported the idea of Microevolution, not Macroevolution. The idea that creatures could just suddenly change from one specia to the next is laughable. Christianity, in general, supports the idea of microevolution. On top of this, I would like to ask that people start clarifying what they mean when they say Evolution, becuase it is becoming rather bothersome, seeing all this talk of how evolution can be proven and is a fact, and not clarifying of which you are speaking. In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms. -Stephen Jay Gould
If anything, Christianity is more like Linux:
So when will it be ready for the desktop?
The best arguments for against darwin don't primarily argue against science, but against scientists. While upholding scientific principals, they basically say that somewhere along the line scientists started testing whether their results were valid based on darwinism instead of considering whether darwinism was valid in light of those experiments. They basically pick out every counter-example to everything scientists use to support Darwin, look at how the counter-examples were explained away, and explain them away in the opposite direction. And when you look at those arguments in their entirety, their alternate is prety feasable, decently supported (especially relative to the small number of people who came up with it), and compatible with itself.
That said, I personally think most of it is junk. We're never going to have empirical proof, and the only way this could ever be resolved would be to find a way to get a bunch of unbiased observers and start the process over putting both explainations up for debate at the same time, which isn't going to happen. Otherwise, nobody's going to be able to reconstruct what was based on what, and it'll probably be a bunch of bickering until the world ends. And I don't see what the point of that is either when there are explanations that reconcile religion and science. If scientists didn't go out of their way to exclude creationists and acknowledged that everyone has some ammount of bias, analyzing things experiment by experiment, they could both wax and wane as evidence was discovered, not as courts were involved. Religion and science would both survive either way.
And now students who take the innitiative to learn about science, religion, or current events are much more likely to learn about it than if there were three sentences in a textbook that everybody ignored.
Define Christian. If you mean "Protestant Radical" (many non-Catholics), you are right. However, if you include Catholics, then I must say you're wrong.
I am a Catholic. My church believes that the Bible is not a historical record. We believe that the Bible teaches lessons; it does not detail history accurately. In fact, the New Testament is just a PR job for Jesus. Unfortunately, those who say Christian and mean Protestants are giving Christianity a bad name. In fact, I believe that God set the rules for the universe and then performed the "Big Bang" (or something like that). The creation story makes no sense to most other Catholics I've met.
Yes, I am a real Catholic, and this is what my religious ed ("Sunday school") teachers and clergy believe. Science does not undermine God.
Microsoft-free since March 28, 2004
You seem to confuse testability with repeatability. Testability here is the ability for observation to support or refute a theory, not the ability to reproduce experiments in a laboratory. That is to say, a proper scientific hypothesis must be answerable to the facts. Repeatability is not, however, a requirement of all the sciences.
By your argument, astronomy and the rest of biology are not science either. And yet patently they are.
Darwin did not therorize about the origins of life, only the origin of species. The origins of life is not normally considered part of evolutionary theory.
Regarding the other two examples, evolutionly theory does not claim to be able to explain how every evolutionary occurence throughout time took place in minute detail. You state that it is nonscientific because we have an incomplete understanding of what happened two billion years ago? Ridiculous.
If you want to read Darwin's ideas about Human Evolution then you should read "The Descent of Man" where he demonstrates that sexual selectiona nd the competition that entials are sufficient to account for Human diversity as observed 2 centuries ago.
I have to stress that at no pont in Darwin's writings did he address the question of the Origin of Life. 1. Everywhere in nature, the double helix DNA works the same way. To mate, animals must have the same number of 'rungs'. But man has 46, and ape has 48; humans have #2 & #3 bonded together. Nowhere else in nature are rungs "bonded" like this. We're just not the same, but we appear similar, visually.
No, there is no such requirement in order to mate. There are any number of websites that demonstrate mating between different species. To mate and have functional and fertile progeny, that's another thing however. I'd like to point out that as you said, Humans have 2 chromosomes from apes bonded together, which is simply a transcription modification.... I assume that God can allow the telomeres to unfold differently if He wishes?
And regarding your points about ID, well, in the opinion of myself, and many of the memebrs of our Church, ID is one of the greatest threats to Christianity in many many years. ID requires that God be an imperfect being, that creation be imperfect and that he makes mistakes. My God does not make mistakes, therefore ID did not happen.
Finally I'd like to refer you to St Augustine, who made the point that when experience and scripture seem to be in conflict, it's always that we have mis-interpreted scripture.
Let me remind you that as widely-known and understood as evolution is, even Darwin himself admitted that the theory could be debunked if it could be proven that a system could not exist in an "intermediate" state such as that which evolution requires:
And thus far no such system has been observed. All theories are potentially falsifiable -- an explanation that has no falsification criteria is not scientific. Evolution stands strong for many reasons, including the total failure of any potential falsifying observations to come about despite ample opportunity.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Can I propose that natural selection (as a subset of evolutionary theory) has some pretty monstrous holes in it, without being labelled an anti-intellectual zealot?
That depends. What are the holes?
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Scientists don't support Darwin; they support evolutionary theory. In fact, Darwin's idea that evolution is gradual has been largely replaced by punctuated equilibria based on evidence. Scientists don't simply look for things to reinforce existing theory, but instead they seek to expand and revise it constantly. This is the sort of thing creationists don't want; they start from a given premise and discard all evidence that doesn't agree with it. You basically took an argument against creationism, replaced the word "creationist" with "scientist", and expect people to lend credence to your nonsense because you admit to uncertainty.
English is easier said than done.
Nowhere else in nature are rungs [chromosomes] "bonded" like this.
I'd like to see a reference for this assertion, if you don't mind.
The whole point here is that everyone doesn't have the 'same amount of bias'. You cant fake a line on a chart, you cant fake a regression, and you cant fake fossil records (at least not without getting caught eventually).
Scientists go out of thier way to ensure that Creationists are not considered scientists because they are not scientists. You say most of what creationists say is junk, I would go a step further, I would say almost all of it is junk. You claim creationists explanation is feasible, and self-consistent. Of course it is, it is untestable. You say it is supported by evidence. There is no such evidence. At least no evidence that could distinguish creationism from a real scientific theory.
You mention it is decently supported. I'm afraid that is simply a work of fiction. Almost every trained biologist supports the theory of evolution. For the most part it is engineers, computer scientists, and the like (people who make little contact the emperical biological science at a research level) who are creationists. These people are not qualified on the subject, and even if they were, an overwhelming majority still support evolution as the best theory we have to explain the origin of the species.
I'm afraid your position, though moderate, is still wrong. The overwhelming evidence is that evolution is the correct theory to explain the origin of life back to the first replicator. It is incomplete, but any explanation which replaces it will contain most of the current theory of evolution as a subset of itself. In fact it will probably contain so much of the current theory it will be called evolution on account of it being based on identicle or near identicle premises.
I appreciate that you are trying hard to be a moderator, a go between between scientists and the antiscientists, but the bottom line is that science cannot negotiate, because it is a method not a people. And the cold hard facts are that the method supports evolution, not creationism, and unless creationists come up with some real evidence supporting creationism, instead of simply pointing out the gaps that are not yet filled in in evolution, evolution will remain one of the key theories underpinning the biological sciences. It is not a choice to be more diplomatic, there is nothing to be more diplomatic about.
I'd like an answer to such things as to how inorganic matter became living or even how matter came to exist in the first place. I'm pretty sure evolution can't answer these questions. And if it can't, it really is not a general theory of the origins of life but just a way to explain specific biological processes.
This is absolutely correct. Evolution is a theory of speciation (the emergence of species from other species), not of origins.
Theories of Abiogenesis (life emerging from non-life) I've heard are within a decade or two of being experimentally tested. I'm a physicist by training and don't know the details, but from what I've read in popular science magazines, biologists are optimistic.
Those christians (and radical muslims etc) will be in their own dark age. The rest of us will do alright.
Unless they manage to take the rest of us out with them in their infighting.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
3) Evolution itself has plenty of room for a valid new theology based on the idea that God would WANT life to be free of God's direct design. This is known as "liberation theology" and though many Catholics disdain it, it's perfectly plausible.
This has nothing to do with liberation theology. Liberation theology is a mixture of Christian doctrine with Marxist doctrine, implying that Christians should get involved in Marxist revolutions, particularly in Latin America. Since Marxism includes atheism, the Catholic Church sees an inherent contradiction in liberation theology.
How design supporters insult God's intelligence
and the following documentary about some priests who are also hard core scientists:
Galileo's Sons
A few days ago the Pope came out and reinforced the Catholic Church's view that Science and religion are compatible. In other words even the Pope thinks evolution is valid. Here is the original speech in Italian.
All in all the proponents of intelligent design are looking more and more like the snake oil salesmen they are.
I hear that these days, engineers assume that gravity exists when they design bridges without even testing it for themselves. It's shocking, especially when you consider that lives are at stake, yet they still allow their biases to color their work.
English is easier said than done.
Last week's Washington Post had a very interesting aticle about this Eden and Evolution . It didn't try to verify or dispute the fact of evolution, but instead showed why fundamentlist religious folks have a big problem with evolution. And like many debates in society, it takes more than 10 seconds to get the point, so we end up just yelling past each other.
The religious right's big beef is that the theory of evolution really takes away man's special place in the universe. Evolution opens up the possibility that sentient life is something that just happened here on earth with no divine intervention. Evolution demonstrates that life could pop up in many places in the universe; given a stew of the right elements and physical conditions and enough time, life is inevitable.
Most non-religious or religious liberals (I'm a Unitarian Universalist, a denomination as theologically liberal as you could possibly imagine) think the fundamentalist's big problem is that evolution contradicts the first myth in the Bible (or whatever creation myth your religion professes). But religious folks have been very quick to switch from a literal translation to a more metaphorical one when the science demonstrates the facts. "The Earth does not move" (repeated a dozen times in the Bible) may have put Galileo under house arrest, but I doubt any Christian would fight the teaching of the heliocentric model of the solar system. What made that shift possible was the telescope; it not only easily showed other small systems at work that showed how the earth and the sun dance, but more recently (the last 50 years) has served as a time machine in astrophysics. Even most religious do not really believe all creation popped up ex nihilo in 144 hours (well, that's the first creation story; the one starting at Gen 2:4 isn't as time specific). In biology, there are dozens of well-documented recent observations that show speciation and other long-duration actions that are predicted by evolutionary theory--this is why "micro-eveolution" has been given as a reasonable possibility by some fundamentalists.
The key is to realize that people who truely believe in revealed knowledge aren't swayed by arguments from fact; they've been told that the scientific establishment is another source of revealed knowledge and the scientists really have no greater basis to really explain what's going on. At times scientific experts haven't been helpful to the novice public (too much cable news, which pits one crazed extreme opinion yeller with another extreme yeller, doesn't help). And some things, like string theory, really are mostly conjecture, and perhaps using a term like "string framework" may clear the air a bit. (And no, I'm not ready to debate string theory! It does explain many things, but one can fiddle the math to make it explain things way out of it's scope also.)
Two rebuttals:
bacterial flagellum
blood clotting
However, rebutting each claim of irreducible complexity is rather pointless since irreducible complexity can arise from evolution!
From your comments, it's clear that you have little to no formal background in biology. For your first point, I expect you were referring to chromosomes when you said "rungs." I'm not sure what you mean when you say no other creature is like us, while I can't think of any offhand, I'm sure there is probably an animal out there that also has 46 chromosomes, although it's quite likely the genes on those chromosomes are ordered completely differently. The number of chromosomes an organism contains has nothing, repeat nothing to do with the level of complexity of the organism. For example a guinea pig has 64, a dog has 78, and there's a type of fern with 1260. Considering that your DNA only spends a relatively small portion of its time condensed as chromosomes anyway (it's a convenient way to manage and store the doubled DNA right before the cell divides), I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make here.
As for your second point about the physiological structure of the heart...you're completely wrong. ALL mammals share a very similar heart structure, four chambers, two atria, two ventricles. The left ventricle pumps deoxygenated blood to the lungs, the right ventricle pumps oxygenated blood to the body. The valves are very similar, the shape is nearly identical, and even the innervation of the cardiac muscle is similar. Guess what the first heart transplant was? It was a human receiving a chimpanzee heart (due to a lack of rejection treatment and tissue typing knowledge the recipient soon died but thats not the point). You're just totally off base with that.
Depends what you mean by evolutionary theory. Creatures evolve, sure, you won't find many science "believers" disagreeing with you there. What's a lot less obvious is that evolution occurs solely due to natural selection/sexual selection, crossover and mutation or any other explanation that "evolutionary theory" has so far come up with.
I used to think natural selection was a sufficient explanation for life. What cured me was I worked fulltime for two years using genetic algorithms to solve a hard problem [it was about efficiently scheduling orders through a large metal rolling factory to optimize throughput]. I had several previous years experience in all kinds of optimization problems - [I had used GA's before in toy situations, but also had extensive experience with simulated annealing and numerous types of numerical optimization problems].
I was successful in this project, ie I eventually produced a program that produced better schedules than the (intelligent) fulltime, experienced humans who used to produce the weeks schedule using their own knowledge and experience along with various supporting computer tools. The heart of the solution was a GA coupled with various tricks used whereever beneficial. It helped that I had an Origin 2000 at my disposal. GAs really do work, and not wishing to sound arrogant, I understand that process and what they're capable of (from a computational potential perspective) better than all but a handful of people on this planet.
But... as a result of all this, I don't understand evolution anymore. It doesn't add up. From an optimization perspective, the problems I was solving where something like 10^100 times less difficult than the problems solved by evolution. Genetic algorithms run into a bit of a wall beyond a certain point.
Now, I'll grant you that I didnt have several hundred million years to work on the problem. However, I did experiment with population sizes in the 100'000s and I did evolve them for 10,000s of generations. Those are small numbers when considering evolution of bacteria, but they're pretty realistic numbers when considering evolution from an Ape to a human (or some equally fit alternative). Remember, according to evolutionary theory, the life events of an individual are irrelevent.All that matters is whether it produces offspring (also some evolutionary advantage to protecting close relatives, but even that can be simulated quite easily), and supposedly the mechanism is crossover and mutation, ie in a GA, life experience is equivalent to the evaluation function.
Based on my experience, I dont believe you could solve a problem such as the development of an equivalent to an F16 starting with a sopwith camel using GAs unless you used [at least] tens of millions of individuals over millions of generations. It seems to me that evolutionary problems are solved *much* faster than one has any right to expect. Apes evolved into modern humans with populations in the hundred thousands over tens of thousands of generations. I know that humans were just the design we ended up with, not the goal,
but.. think in terms of the creation of a creature as much more "fit" [from evolutionary perspsective] as a human to an ape.
So, anyway.. I dont believe in "evolutionary theory" as a sufficent explanation anymore. I don't believe in intelligent design either, but I dont blame people who do
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
For larger bridges, at least, the engineers go out and measure gravity at several points along the length of the proposed bridge, so that it isn't weakened by overlooking a gravity anomaly. They will also do stuff like put up weather stations, looking for anomalies and microweather patterns that ordinary weather reporting misses.
This is the difference between engineers and scientists. If an engineer screws up, people die (and often on the spot). You can go out and knock on most of the stuff an engineer does. Engineers believe in working with error bars and well-defined uncertainties. Scientists often have no such assurance, and surprisingly few scientific disciplines treat uncertainties as rigorously as engineers routinely do.
The canonical scientific reaction to uncertainty is either rejection of the whole concept ("burn the heretics!"), or to ride roughshod over the uncertainty because certain key items look to be in about the right places ("only an heretic would question that!", in this case evolution). Neither approach is particularly rational.
The creation scientists might well be totally wrong (although it's likely that even if the majority of their ideas are wrong, a few will be pure gold), but so far they have typically been more rational in their approach than elephant-hurlers like the parent poster.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
He didn't tell him off. He let him touch the hole in his side, and the scars on his hands and feet. He did tell the disciples "You have believed because you have seen. Blessed are those that believe but have not seen". I'm not sure if that counts as a telling off or not. I imagine Jesus was a bit disappointed with Thomas - I mean, Thomas had spent years following Jesus around, watching Jesus' mircales. Jesus even told his disciples that he would die and rise again. If anyone had had faith in Jesus it should have been his disciples. But the story in scripture doesn't really show much of that, if there was any. All it shows is Jesus walking into a locked room (scaring the hell out of people in the process) and giving Thomas the proof he wanted. Granted, Thomas is generally remembered as "Doubting Thomas", and probably is less respected than the other disciples, but that is generally due more to human retellings and moralising than the scriptural story.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
This matters? Talking about religion is like talking about Star Wars vs. Star Trek - it's completely detached from reality, and only done by pedantic nerds.
Then it is news for nerds.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Something to keep in mind is that each "generation" can be as short as the single division of a cell. In addition, don't underestimate the power of individual cells/organisms/creatures/animals to act in a parallel manner. There are insects (termites) that lay 7000 eggs a day, providing 7000 opportunities for some sort of evolutionary event. Looking at the aphid, in a single season, if all offspring lived to reproduce, there would be 1,560,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1.56x10^24) offspring. Reference here.
Multiply that by the total number of insects (including different species) and this is a lot of opportunities for mutations and evolutionary activity. Also, keep in mind things like viruses and bacteria that reproduce in even greater numbers.
I don't claim that this makes evolution any less amazing, but a billion+ years and all the parallelization possible from all types of life makes for an incredible amount of computation. Enough, perhaps to even determine the question to life, the universe and everything.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I would just like to point out that just because somebody coined your technique as "genetic" does not mean it closely emulates biological genetics per se. That is like calling "artificial intelligence," such as the techniques used today, the same as human intelligence.
There are countless factors in reality that are all interrelated and reflecting on each other's properties. Your simplistic computer simulation exists in an artificial abstract environment with rules that are infintesimally incomplete if not outright incorrect.
So I would point out you shouldn't put much faith in those numbers to correlate with meat space evolution. Real evolution probably does not even behave exactly like your simulated evolution.
I know that humans were just the design we ended up with, not the goal,
but.. think in terms of the creation of a creature as much more "fit" [from evolutionary perspsective] as a human to an ape.
I think the real question is "more 'fit' for what?", and until we have some semblance of an answer to that I think your concerns are awfully speculative. We really have no idea of what pressures or constraints led to humans developing. In contrast your example of and F16 from a Sopwith Camel there are some very well defined implicit constraints and specifications as to purpose and what constitutes "fitness" in this case. What led to humans may have been some fairly loose and easily satsified constraints with some of the particulars that we take for "fitness" simply being aberrations where the process spun on in an unconstrained direction.
Could evolutionary algorithms solve the Sopwith Camel to F16 problem in the required time? Maybe not. Evolution/Life doesn't always manage to solve the problems with which it is presented, particularly when the constraints are excessive. History is littered with examples of evolution failing to develop a satisfactory solution in time: it's called extinction. So even if humans are a remarkable solution to an incredibly difficult problem it may well be that we are just one of those few cases where an answer did turn up in the requisite time out of millions more cases where it didn't.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
There are a couple of things that you are either skipping for brevity or ignoring. In case you are ignoring them:
There are what, ~25,000 genes in the Human genome, made up of about 3 billion base pairs(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome).
I'm no expert on genetic algorithms, but I am willing to guess that you weren't working with anywhere near 25,000 variables per individual or that you did silly things like generate non working solutions(radical mutations) and the like. Did your system include a mechanism that coding for an individuals dna to control how genes were combined with each other, some of which might be intermixed with genes? How sophisticated was your recombination?
The evaluation for fitness in nature(natural selection) is an incredible process. It basically awards efficiency in energy gathering and conversion(survival and propogation depend directly on this). The interesting part is that bad genes can survive for much longer than would seem reasonable. See sickle-cell anemia. It's caused by a bad gene, but the mutation makes recessive carrier more resistant to malaria. How is a G-A method going to account for a situation like that?
Much of the cellular machinery in higher order mammals is also present in bacteria. The mammals get all the evolution that the bacteria did for free. Evolution is a continual struggle for resources. Multicellular organisms evolved because they are able to take advantage of certain resources more efficiently than a single cell, things like eating single cells and whatnot.
This leads to the sopwith camel->F16, how many parameters are you going to use and what mechanism is going to evaluate fitness? Those factors are going to be at least as important as the number of individuals and generations. If your fitness algorith doesn't say 'I want an F16', it isn't going to get one.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
My point is simply that evolution does not cover all of the bases, and if this was not a forum where religion was essentially banned from discussion, I would use it to fill in the missing gaps. As I said before, I do not disagree with evolution, and in fact, I think it goes hand-in-hand with scripture. One of the problems with many (not all, but many) scientists' thinking is that they believe everything will eventually be understood by science and science alone. Can I say that it won't? No! But can you say that it will?
Sometimes you just need to take a few steps out of faith and see where they lead. You might just learn a lot more than you were expecting.
With that, I've made my point. Flame all you want, but from this point on I won't respond unless it's particularly thought-provoking.
Just because it can't be explained doesn't mean it isn't true. Science fits into reality... not the other way around.
So that alone is not reason to discredit you. However, astrological dating is flawed; and the proofs used to validate it are too. We're just getting in data now showing that things aren't like we thought they were out in space, and the model's don't add up to what we thought either.
Not true. They wouldn't have it the way it is now - being so religiously intent on proving evolution true as to ignore the truth. (That doesn't mean I agree with ID. I may be a creationist, but I don't agree with ID.)
What's to say that we aren't already in one? A "dark age" only exists because of a lack of knowledge or a lack of accepting knowledge. Either one could be argued from any stand point on this issue today. Evolutionists refuse to accept that a God could have created; while Creationists refuse to accept that God did not create and it all came about by chance. Well...I guess in many respects that fact that we are having the debate shows that we're not in one; but if either party were to win outright without the community showing it by evidence, then yes, we would enter a dark age. Just remember, there are a lot of "scientists" out there that are purporting evolution that would like it to, though they don't exactly realize it.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
My point is simply that evolution does not cover all of the bases
What bases? Evolution covers a specific phenomenon in biology. Scientific theories are like that -- they keep their scope limited to a set of events. Abiogenesis is not a part of evolution because how the first life came to exist has no bearing on the evolution of that life after it exists.
and if this was not a forum where religion was essentially banned from discussion, I would use it to fill in the missing gaps.
The lack of explanation for life origins is not a "gap" in evolution, it's simply a matter outside of the scope of the theory. Evolution also does not address the ultimate origin of matter, the formation of planets or stars or how a manual transmission operates. Those aren't "gaps" in the theory, those are issues that the theory does not try to address.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Nobody should be allowed to comment on religion and science without first reading and understanding the late Stephen Jay Gould's essay, Nonoverlapping Magisteria (aka, NOMA).
It's very clear that when religion goes head to head with science, religion loses - because science is defined by what works . NOMA articulates the boundaries that intelligent, thoughtful people can use, between the realms where science is valid and where religion is valid.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Two words: learned behaviors.
You mentioned evolutionary advantage to protecting close relatives, but learned/taught/imitated behaviors go far beyond that. Food-gathering and nest-building techniques can be learned. And in more advanced species, tool making.
Even things which would eventually evolve in the form of instinct (cats burying their feces) can come about more quickly through learned behavior.
Where would H. Sapien be without this simple form of communication?
Genetics are not the only factor which contributes to evolution.
If it ain't broke, it needs more features!
Is there really a well-defined line between living and non-living things?
Not really. Viruses are borderline, but to those who study them, that distinction is rather academic. Anyway, I guess it depends on whether you consider a molecule that catalyzes the formation of other molecules like it to be alive.
Evolution also explains the creation of "life" from "non-life".
No, it doesn't. Abiogenesis seeks to explain the emergence of life from non-life and is still largely hypothetical in its details, though experiments are forthcoming to test these hypotheses.
even evolutionists kind of hold back when they argue with creationists because they know that getting the general public to go with the idea of there being no "soul" is impossible.
Only an ignorant asshole would say that science "proves" that there is no such thing as a soul. The concept of a soul is as much outside the purview of science as economics is outside the scope of evolution. In fact, creationists try to make this same link in order to scare Christians into believing that evolution contradicts God. I think the people who wrote this letter and the 10,000 undersigned clergy would agree with me.
Nothing but FUD and I'm getting sick of it.
There is plenty of stuff on the web, but to get you started, here are some things to get you thinking about how abiogenesis may have occurred, or at least suggest the workings of some steps along the way.
1) In 1953, Stanley Miller, working under Harold Urey, showed that amino acids are able to form spontaneously in the conditions which may have existed in earth's primordial atmosphere. In three months, his experiment produced at least 7 amino acids, which included 3 of the 20 found in modern (and probably ancient) organisms. (Amino acids are the 'building blocks' of all proteins).
2) Certain lipid molecules, including phospholipids (the main type of molecule that makes up cell membranes), will spontaneously form a number of structures when placed in water, eg "micelles" and "bi-layers".
Micelles are tiny spherical structures made of relatively few molecules, and can 'carry' other molecules inside them, although I'm am not aware of the significance of this.
Bi-layers are often much larger structures capable of forming large sheets, or "membranes" which can be quite bendy and stretchy. They can even bend around on themselves to form massive. spherical "containers" which separate their contents from the outside world and thus allows the contents to become significantly chemically different. This is exactly the structure used by all living cells to contain the vast array of chemical reactions that need to be carried out under special chemical conditions.
The significance of spontaneous organisation of certain lipids is that it is thermodynamically favourable for these structures to occur and therefore plausible that they played an important part in containing the first biochemical interactions that occurred during abiogenesis.
3) It has also been suggested that certain clay substrates may have formed a biochemical "staging ground" for collecting and organising biologically significant molecules. I remember reading (possibly in a Richard Dawkins book) about one theory which suggested the idea that the clay substrates themselves could have been self-reproducing. The premise of this particular theory is that imperfections in some crystal structures are often repeated throughout the crystal as it grows. Therefore crystal structures with certain imperfections may have encouraged more of themselves to exist. Furthermore, the theory says, if particular "self-replicating" crystal structures gave rise to large scale properties that further encouraged the production of these crystals, then they would become even more prolific. For example, if a certain "self-replicating" crystal was usually generated in still water, but also had the property that, when washed into slow-moving water, sediments of the crystal caused that slow-moving water to "dam up", then the water would become still again, thus creating an environment suitable for creating more of the crystal.
Far-fetched? Perhaps, But I am always wary of criticising a theory simply because of my own incredulity.
Anyway. The upshot is that we are a number of theories of abiogenesis out there, none of them at all complete. I guess that any theories will remain speculative until we are able to satisfactorily string together a series of observeda and reproducible reactions and interactions that would be able to explain abiogenesis.
Believing in intelligent design (small i. small d.) is a given for Christians, because we believe in an Intelligent Designer (capital I. capital D.), which is just a fancy way of saying Creator God. The Creator God is essential Christian doctrine; someone who doesn't believe in a Creator God but calls himself a Christian is giving himself a title without knowing its meaning. In fact, believing in a Creator God is a given for all people as far as Judaism/Christianity is concerned - even non-Christians are presumed to believe in a Creator God. "The fool says in his heart 'there is no God'" (Psalm 14:1) -- "You believe there is one God... even the demons believe that" (James 2:19) -- "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse..." (Romans 1:20)
I don't believe that i am quoting anything out of context, and i'm not saying that non-Christians will accept these things as true, only that the Creator God is believed by Christians to be universally evident.
I don't hitch my star to a bunch of scientists trying to prove Intelligent Design (as in, i do not identify myself as an IDer). However, i (and Christians in general) believe that there is blatant overwhelming evidence for a Creator, whether the Creator used mainly natural or supernatural processes in creation. So all Christians believe in intelligent design, even if they aren't hung up on teaching theories and such, because without the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Creator God, it makes no sense whatsoever to be a Christian. Christianity presumes this Creator God.
It is not enough for people to call themselves Christian. Calling myself a Christian doesn't make me one, because that is meaningless if i don't believe essential Christian doctrine (faith in Jesus Christ as the propitiation for my sin). If i call myself a Muslim but don't believe in Mohammed's prophetic revelation, am i a Muslim? Calling myself a Christian and believing in ID doesn't make me a Christian. The thing that makes me a Christian is belief that Jesus Christ died on a cross to bear the sins of the world, and nothing i do, only what Christ has done, can ever gain me acceptance before God. It's not about trying to be a good person, or believing in scientific theories; non-Christians do those things as well as Christians.
So I would suggest that you ask a person claiming to be a Christian what it means to be a Christian. I would also ask a Christian who doesn't believe in intelligent design whether that person believes in a Creator God. If you get confusing or uncertain answers, then you're not talking to a Christian, but rather a fake or an ignoramus.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: That averages about 660,000,000 of each kind.
The major problem here is that you seem to overestimate how much "improved' humans are over apes. Our genomes are incredibly similar. When you look at the biological structures involved, humans are really just slight adjustments to what an ape already has DNA to encode -- Larger brains, less hair, different bone alignment.
Your analogy of sopwith camel to F16 is more like the evolution of an anphibian to a human -- many structures are completely revised and the overall complexity is much larger, though some fundamental principles remain the same.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
"Apes evolved into modern humans"
No, humans and the rest of the Homininae subfamily share a common ancestor. We didn't evolve from modern apes anymore than we evolved from a sitka spruce. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on apes for more information. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that a person who does not seem to understand this basic fact has expertise in the area of evolutionary theory.
Please don't take this as a personal attack; misunderstanding of the concept of common ancestors is just a pet pieve of mine.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
Even in the last decades we have nice things like the Irish civil war (or struggle for freedom or terrorism) and the Basque civil war (or struggle for freedom or terrorism). It the very recent past we do have:
- Hutu vs. Tutsi (Same language, same religion for both sides)
- Serbs vs. Croats (Christians between each other, mostly)
- Serbs vs. Bosnians (aggressors are Christian)
That seems to be clear evidence that it is not religion, but situation and circumstance that make people behave like idiots to each other.Stephan
As to whether I personally believe that God took chromosomes 2 and 3 from the pongoid apes and caused a "transcription error" to give rise to the human karotype is completely beside the point. The real question is whether an omnipotent God could do such a thing if he wished.
As an example of such an event actually occuring, in the early 1970's there was a sheep farm run by Richard and Beryl Lanyon about 12 miles north of the town of Boort in Central Victoria Australia. They had poll dorset sheep and a few goats, including one very smelly billy goat. This goat was quite odd, as he used to chase the ewes when they were in heat.
One morning Richard was feeling a bit crook, so Beryl went out to the fields to check on the lambing. She found a few very odd looking "lambs". Back at the house she discovered that Richard had been killing these every season for the last 2 or 3 years. Beryl however insisted that these creatures be allowed to survive.
Once they grew it was pretty obvious that they were some kind of goat/sheep hybrid. The very very unusual thing was that they bred true - they were fertile, and had baby fertile geeps for progeny, and not goats and sheep or mules.
Many geneticists declared this was of course impossible and was all some kind of wierd publicity stunt, as goats and sheep have different numbers of chromosomes. In 1973 or 1974 (It was a while back...) a New Zealand researcher found that the Billy goat was a mutant and had less than the usual 60 chromosomes, and one half of its' sperm had the right number of chromosomes to combine with the ewes.
Note that there's a terribly incorrect mention of this in the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheep#Hybrids_with_go ats . The fact is that for many years these creatures were kept in the local nature reserve which was a region between Lake Boort and Little Lake Boort, and contained by an irrigation channel from the Loddon Valley Irrigation Scheme. The animals were also shown at the Royal Melbourne Show in 1973 or 1974, along with the billy goat. The goat became somewhat famous as he had to be shampooed several times a day to try to contain his musk, which overpowered the already quite smelly goat shed.
I heard that Dick and Beryl eventually killed the goat and all the geeps when it was pointed out to them that they demonstrated the possibility for new species to arise via mutations. They were terribly devout and conservative baptists, although lovely people. I spent quite a lot of time living on their farm with them whilst my Mum was in hospital in 1973.
They are rightly concerned that this is the thin edge of the wedge: already god's role in cosmology is very distant, so much so that his involvement in it appears as implausible as humankind's presence in the cosmos is insignificant.
If they were to grant the truth of evolution, god is displaced of most his role in Life too, and suffers another large demotion in the scope of things he can reasonably be seen to be in charge of.
Furthermore, the ascent of science is a problem for all religions that require one to go on faith (which is nothing be belief in the incredible, in the absence of any substantiating evidence). This is because the advancing armies of science, with its seemingly pig-headed insistence on evidence, have beat the cr*p out of other belief systems that don't rest on evidence (astrology, faith healing, soothsaying etc. etc.), and they fear that religion, the granddaddy of unsubstantiated belief systems, will suffer the same fate.
The sad (from their perspective) truth is that they are right. The best they can do at the moment, as many on slashdot seem to do, is to tacitly concede the demotion in god's role that Darwin ushered in, issuing platitudes like "religion and science can learn from each other, and indeed, support each other." Which, of course, is rubbish -- science, in the main, has nothing to learn from religion.
For those of us who do believe in evolution, we know that we have a far stronger force than an imagined and imaginary god on our side: evidence. The only way we can win this one is if we keep insisting that only way to resolve conflicting belief systems is by evidence, and by educating the other side on the evidence well enough that they come to the same conclusions the rest of us have.
And as for the implication that this has on god's role in the scheme of thing, well, god help them.
Sagan's story shows that he should have stuck to cosmology, since he had no training in the philosophy of religion. The matter of God has little to do with the assertion that "there's something in my garage", and really starts from the idea "there's a universe, could there be a first cause?" Natural evidence leads many to believe in a creator. I should give you some citations, so let's refer to the work of Richard Swinburne (although others, such as Plantinga, have written extensively on this). Arguments for general theism can be found in his work The Coherence of Theism (Oxford University Press, 1993), but if you want a simpler explanation you could refer to his papers in Brody's Readings in the Philosophy of Religion (Prentice Hall, 1992).
If God exists, then he would decide ethical rules since he is by definition the perfect being. In a world where humans have acted in against these guidelines, what are the ramifications of such these guidelines? Swinburne's Responsibility and Atonement (Oxford University Press, 1989) contains the argument that if we assume the existence of God (a fait accompli for most philosophers), then the Christian doctrine of the saving death of Christ on the cross naturally follows.
If God exists and sets ethical rules, then he would naturally try to communicate these to us. There is no need to demand that he come down in a fiery flame and address the whole world at once. Rather, communication through prophets and the written word can be shown to be acceptable. See Swinburne's Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (Oxford University Press, 1992).
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity, three Persons in one God, can also be shown to follow from the existence of a single Creator. For these arguments, see Swinburne's The Christian God (Oxford University Press, 1994).
The concept of the saving death on the cross by the Son himself has already been argued by Swinburne in Responsibility and Atonement, but in The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford University Press, 2003) he shows that treating the evidence we have with the probability calculus (Bayesian theorem), we have yet another support.
So, as you can see, the existence of the Christian God can be deduced from natural evidence. In reality, the defence of the Christian faith has little to do with the strawman that Sagan builds up.
If anything, Christianity is more like Linux:
Except Christianity comes with a user guide, and my grandmother understands it.
But that's the point isn't it? If I die, and meet God face to face, and He tells me that he's sent even a single soul to eternal torment, no matter what the circumstances, then I'll deny Him. A guaranteed chance to escape an immoral punishment does not make the punishment any less immoral.
Those are where YOU believe the absolutes are. I'm just saying that the entire bible is subject to interpretation, so it is impossible for anyone to claim that the bible is 100% anything.
People who claim to be Christian like to pretend that they have "the truth" and everyone else has nothing, but it's easy for anyone outside of their psychosis to see that Christianity is just a guess, just as all other cults and religions are. This is perfectly illustrated by the wholesale plagiarism of pagan religions by Roman Christians to keep things a little more orderly.
You sound reasonable. Some of the others who "follow Christ" are far far worse than any terrorist, because they act like animals despite their good education and luxurious living conditions. The kill'em all, let God sort'em out mentality is the most ridiculous and horrifying thought since fascism.
Only an ignorant asshole would say that science "proves" that there is no such thing as a soul. The concept of a soul is as much outside the purview of science as economics is outside the scope of evolution.
I am not so sure about that. AFAIK, a "soul" is just the non-scientific explanation of how humans think. If somebody created a program that passed the Turing test, would you say that it had a soul ? Probably not. However you couldn't convincingly say that it didn't have a soul either. Most likely such a program, if ever created (and I am not saying it is possible) would be empiric proof that a "soul" doesn't really exist, except in the sense that a soul is just an abbreviation for "human behavior".
Lets talk science fiction for a minute. It would be very interesting if after hundreds of years of studying the brain, science determined that thinking just couldn't happen in it using the known physical processes. Perhaps thinking really happens in another dimension (since our reality with its physical laws cannot support such complex behavior) and our bodies are simply remotely controlled dummies. This is somewhat similar to the religious idea of a soul, but I wouldn't say it its outside of the purview of science.
Christianity is a mixing of early pagan religion (Mithras, Osiris, Zoroastrianism, Dionysus, etc) and hebrew theology. Therefore, any Christian cannot claim any absolute truth over any other religion, as all religions are by definition a non-falsifiable guess at the meaning and nature of the universe.
When I say non-relativism, I mean that you cannot claim the bible is 100% true, or false, or anything, because it's simply what the Roman authority in 313 believed should be a part of the bible. That is a very simple and straightforward fact, one of many you can find in the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia (which is the most honest work that organization has ever produced). The fact the literature contains hyperbole is quite beside the point. All literature is subject to interpretation, so anyone claims that they have divined the absolute truth from any written document is a liar.
My argument was probably far too lowbrow for your "Googling skills," so please forgive my obvious ignorance. I guess a more learned person would just consider the bible as fact before considering the source of it. Or would that just better suit your argument?
For instance, "We don't know why there is a lack of the transitional forms
WHAT lack of transitional forms? The entire fossil record is practically nothing BUT transistional forms.
It's like claiming organic chemistry is flawed because we don't know why there's a lack of hydrogen-bearing compounds. The entire realm of organical molecules it practically nothing BUT hydrogen bearing compounds.
Have you every looked at a science textbook? Have you ever been in a museum? (science museum, not art museum of course)
How can you possibly claim there is a lack of transitional forms?
[Punctuated Equlibrium] likely can't be proven either.
Again, just because you are not familiar with the field does not mean it does not exist. Not only has punctuated equlibrium been "prooven", I have personally experimented with the process of evolution and I have personally witnessed that PE is an inherent behavior exhibited in evolutionary systems. Over time a population builds up an increasing library of non-fatal mutations. The population as a whole may reamin fairly stable as this diversity accumulates. Then at some point - either by a change in envoirnmental pressures or due to some critical mutation breakthrough - the entire population undergoes a fairly rapid shift as the critical newly beneficial mitation(s) overtake the population, and apowerful combinatorical search goes on in that population searching for other mutations in that accumulated library of diversity, a search for other mutations that combine with or support or improve the critical mutations suddenly sweeping the population. In particular this is also a search for latent library mutations which can "repair" or compensate for any harmful side effects associated with the new critical development. Any new positive mutation is quite likely to be "crude" and to include problems or defects. A crab with a mutated claw may be able to use it to get at a new food source - but it is still likely misshapen disfunctional mutated claw. So a rapid search goes on through that accumulated library of variation to find other mutations that can combine with it - additional mutations that will (A) improve the new mutant ability to get that new food source even better and (B) repair the shape and function of that newly mishapen claw.
And during that rapid lurch to seize on that critical new mutation, and during that fairly rapid search for additional mutations to support and combine with and complment and repair that new critical mutation, there is a greatly increased extinction rate among the other individuals of the population, and a greatly increased extrinction rate for all of the other mutations and variations in that population. And the signifigance there is that the diversity gets depeleted. You get no evolution when there is no diversity. So the natural effect after such a shift is a depletion of diversity and a depletion of evolutionary fuel and a depletion of evolutionary change. You have a relatively rapid (punctuated) change in a cluster of several "micro mutations" and then you tend to get a "quiet period" (equlibrium) during which the population builds up a fresh library of diversity.
It is facinating to experiment with the evolution process and to watch how a population sometimes undergoes a fairly slow and steady change improving in some direction, and how sometimes a rare critical mutation will arise, or a combination of mutations will combine into some breakthrough development, and to see how the population will rapidly sieze on it and use the other mutations to further develop it. Facinating to measure the diversity levels and to watch how they rise during the "quite periods" and how the diversity gets depleted during the occational lurches.
Of course you're probably wondering how I could have done these experiments and how I could have personally measured and observed these things. Well of course it would take a Very Long Time to run experiments and observations across thousands or tens of thousa
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The majority of your post stands and falls on one single piont - the idea that information cannot be added/increase, or the lesser claim that information has not been proven to be added/increase.
Information addition/increase is a known fact:
Mathemeticians have proven through pure math theory that a replicating system (with inheritance and variation) will create or increase information when subject to any selection skew on that replication process. I know enough math to have read and understood papers and results in this area. I can point you so some interesting links in this area if you are a math geek.
Programers have proven and and actively demonstrated that a replicating system (with inheritance and variation) will create or increase information when subject to any selection skew on that replication process. I am a programmer and I have done signifigant exploration in this area. I have personally witnessed the creation/increase in information. I can point you to interesting links in this area if you are a programmer and are interested in testing and exploring this for yourself.
Biologists have observed many examples and thus proven that information creation/increase does in fact occurr in real species. Wild bacteria were discovered to have created entirely new genes for digesting nylon - an entirely synthetic substance that does not exist in nature. Nylon has an entirely novel chemical bond structure that appears in nowhere in the natural enviornment, and no species had any enzymes capable of touching it at all, much less digesting it. Yet some 30 years after we started making nylon, a bacteria was discovered in the wastewater output of a nylon manufacturing plant, and that bacteria had an entirely novel kind of gene for digesting it. In fact the evolution of that new ability to digest nylon was replicated in a laboratory. Ordinary bacteria with no genes for digesting nylon were placed in a growth culture with almost no food, but plenty of nylon and nylon fragments. Under near stravation pressure most of the bacteria died - but in a matter of days one of the bacteria developed a very crude ability to attack the smallest nylon fragments, and that individual multipled and took over the entire culture. Over the next days and weeks it impoved in a series of steps, gaining the ability to digest larget nulon fragments and complexes, and to digest it more efficiently. After a mere three months the bacteria developed the full ability to efficently digest raw bulk nylon. I can get you links for it if you like.
But even aside from mathemeticians and programmers and biologists, it is easy to give simple explanations that should make it blatantly obvious to anyone. One of the simplest and most powerful kinds of mutation is the simple duplication of a gene. That duplicate copy can get mutated without damaging the original gene and without harming the function of that gene and without losing any of the information and function of that gene. The mutated duplict copy can then vary and lock on to doing something different. One example - an example that not only *happens* but which is in fact the basis of an entire industry - is that a bacteria gene for digesting one kind of sugar can mutate and instead function to digest a different kind of sugar. The industry that tests chemicals for carcinogenic risk is based on this. They put bacteria with the gene for digesting one sugar onto a growth plate with only the wrong kind of sugar that it can't eat, along with the chemical they want to test. Most of the bacteria will starve and die, but a very very few will mutate their gene to target the new sugare and multiply. What they do is count the how many separate colonies appear, each independantly evolving the gene for the new sugar. Normally this would be a very low number. If the chemical they are testing is a mutagenic cancer causing chemical, it will increase the mutation rate in the bacteria. If it is a hazardous mutagenic chemical lots of the bacteria will mutate a lot more than n
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.