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Debate Over Evolution Will Soon Be History, Says Leakey
Hugh Pickens writes "According to noted paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, sometime in the next 15 to 30 years scientific discoveries about evolution will have accelerated to the point that 'even the skeptics can accept it.' 'If you don't like the word evolution, I don't care what you call it, but life has changed. You can lay out all the fossils that have been collected and establish lineages that even a fool could work up. So the question is why, how does this happen? It's not covered by Genesis. There's no explanation for this change going back 500 million years in any book I've read from the lips of any God.' Leakey began his work searching for fossils in the mid-1960s and his team unearthed a nearly complete 1.6-million-year-old skeleton in 1984 that became known as 'Turkana Boy,' the first known early human with long legs, short arms and a tall stature. At 67, Leakey conducts research with his wife, Meave, and daughter, Louise, and the family claims to have unearthed 'much of the existing fossil evidence for human evolution.' Leakey, an atheist, insists he has no animosity toward religion."
Never underestimate the stubbornness of sheer ignorance.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Why on earth would anything think that more/better science will help convince people who don't understand science?
If what he suggests is possible, it would have already happened.
Some people still believe that humans rode dinosaurs to work. No amount of fossil evidence can change that kind of stupid.
Captcha: detest
His fatal mistake is to assume that creationists care about evidence.
Gamertag: WyleType
The debate on evolution is evolving. *snickers*
Mr. America walk on by your schools that do not teach Mr. America walk on by the minds that won't be reached
There is a group of people who do not care about the evidence - the Bible says so, so there it is. That's not going to change just because you amass more evidence.
On the other hand, there are a group of people who believe in God who also believe evolution was the method God used to create all of the different kinds of life we see. That is not something you can prove or disprove, therefore it's not in the realm of science. In other words, you want people to keep their religions hands off science, great. Keep your scientific hands off God. They don't have to be mortal enemies.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Personally, I think that the process of Evolution is just as good a way for God to create us and everything else as any.
Saying that God must create living things one particular way ("poof") is just a tad presumptuous.
Meh, God just plaed all that there to test our faith... The denial will continue.
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Where some people still believe in the literal truth of Genesis
if all it took to make people accept evolution was a convincing case then this "debate" would have ended decades ago.
Logic and faith don't really co-mingle well.
The majority of arguments against evolution are about faith. No amount of facts will convince a person with their eyes shut and fingers in their ears. They will keep believing in what they believe in despite the facts. That's kind of the definition of faith.
The debate over evolution should've been history a century ago.
When a segment of the population refuses to accept scientific evidence, how is more of such evidence going to convince them?
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
Perfect science is in harmony with perfect religion. Problems arise when religious texts are misunderstood. For example, anyone that thinks the Earth was created in six 24-hour periods is simply wrong. Yes, there is a God and He created the earth. He created the evolutionary process, and He described that process in Genesis in, unfortunately for of us, very little detail. But evolution is actually described in Genesis - read it again if you need to. First, land and water, then lower life forms, plants, etc. Then aquatic life, then land animals, then humans.
Let's be honest here. Even if we got our hands on Rick Berman's time machine and collected video evidence of every stage of human evolution from single-celled sludge to the "Alien Nation Reject" John Crichton, you'd STILL have the noisy nutcases "debating" it, because some 400-year-old book says it was a magic man in the sky.
If the massive load of evidence collected since Darwin wasn't enough (with ERVs being the clincher, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxLR9hdorI), it will never be enough because people just shut it out.
Religion is there because it makes you feel good (if you have the ability to fall for it). However baseless, that is a tremendously powerful force in a shitty world. So, as long as people don't want to have their illusion challenged, they'll oppose it with all the denial they can muster.
Bert
As some guy said once: You can have your own opinion, but you can't have your own facts
The debate won't disappear until Religion either disappear or correct itself. And I don't see that happen in the 15 to 30 years. I'm a Scandinavian living in a Southern American state, and kids are spoon fed the Bible from early age and not getting much chance of being a free thinker. A few seems to be able to break out of it, but just look at the election and see how much backwardness that is thrown at people, and quite a bit believes it.
I'm not against faith, but please don't let it hinder your or your kids mind.
I am not a religious person nor an evolution denier. I agree evolution happens and causes species to change over time. However, it cannot be the whole picture. The basic tenet behind evolution is that a mutation helps an organism survive better and thus is kept. How does this explain the reproductive system? Without pretty much every part of the male and female anatomy working perfectly, none of it would help an organism survive, and in fact some argument can be made that requiring a baby to be carried around and live birth to happen hurts survivability. The argument always goes along the lines of "well you're talking billions of years". So what, the length of time doesn't change the problem. Likewise I've heard descriptions of how eyes formed from light sensitive cells. If those light sensitive cells were not hooked to anything that caused the organism to survive better why would they be selected for?
Darwin was brilliant, evolution happens, but it is FAR from the whole picture.
There is a group of people who do not care about the evidence - the Bible says so, so there it is.
But what the Bible teaches is not at all inconsistent with a multibillion-year-old universe. God created the universe in six ages, figuratively called "days" in Genesis 1. Notice that nowhere does the story of creation in Genesis mention an "evening and morning" for the seventh "day", which makes the 24-hour interpretation less likely. This and other mentions of God's rest (e.g. in Hebrews) indicate that the seventh age is ongoing.
... "I hope you're right. I really do." But we know how that worked out.
Leakey is being wildly optimistic. The evidence for evolution is already overwhelming (and no, "intelligent design" is not required.) There is a large and noisy group of people who have made it very plain that they will not accept this evidence. It's an ideological issue for them, not a scientific one. And they will continue to maintain this position in the face of any new evidence that is presented to them. There's no way to win them over with appeals to logic. The only solution, AFAICT, is to continue to shower them with the mockery they so richly deserve, and hope that they're driven back to the lunatic fringe where they belong.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The problem is that "evolution" isn't one clearly defined topic but a bunch of closely related ones. There will be unanswered questions no matter how much we uncover and there will be (and should be) skeptics asking what those missing bits mean.
I am a Christian. However, the overwhelming evidence is that the Earth is 4.6 Billion years old, life on Earth is Billions of years old and yes, my great^50000 grandfather was an ape. Yet, not matter what the evidence, there is a contigent who will ignore it. It is human nature to look at facts through the lens you wish to view it. One intelligent person I was disucssing fusion with denies that fusion was the power of the stars, saying instead that it is gravity that produces the energy of the Sun. I was dumbfounded. Even after asking why we see millions of stars with different colors and asked him how his model accounted for this, he could not answer. After asking why the Sun isn't shrinking rapidly as the equations would indicate they would have to to produce the amount of energy output of the Sun, he couldn't answer. Did his opinion change? Nope. Facts don't often change opinions.
So, no, new evidence won't change anything. From my perspective, the debate was over about 150 years ago. Now we just have yelling.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The terms used in the religious books of ancient times were written for a simpler people... So the terms used were of course simplistic.
7 days? would people have understood eons or thousands of days/years or millions or even billions of years? no - so 7 days was good enough.
Created man from the earth (soil as in carbon - we are carbon based - so why not?) - created woman from a rib borrowed from Adam? - How about taking genetic material from adam to go from XY+a little leg off to the right of Y (think hermaphrodite) - to modify Adam to be XY and Eve to be XX - actually makes sense if you think of genetic material transfer instead of just a rib.
Anyway - I believe that both sides are true and neither side precludes the other. But that's just my opinion..
Nope!
Cue Einstein quote on the infinity of human stupidity ....
DNA evidence of related genetic lines and ancestral splits that independently verify the fossil record is all that is needed. A far greater answer to any criticisms than whatever further fossil gaps may be filled in.
The debate about evolution was history a century ago. I'm sure you've heard of the Scopes trial, but the public opinion shifted away from creationism towards science, and went even further with the national focus on and trust in science after Sputnik.
We've regressed. That's all there is to it.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Once there is a remotely plausible naturalistic Origin of Life scenario that actually has details and lots of steps that can be shown to be true, then the tide would turn.
If you are a naturalist, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Creationists are old hands at doing all of the above but the technique is common to denialists of all shades - moon hoaxers, 9/11 truthers, anti-vaxxers, global warming deniers. The same tactics every time.
Growing up very religious in a small town, I really thought that I knew what evolution was, and why it was wrong. It seemed so silly to me that 'scientists' could believe in this conjecture,er 'theory' full of 'missing links'. Clearly it was a conspiracy by godless atheists (where I now seem to comfortably fit in) to drown out the 'Truth'.
Then at age 18 I got the internet and began to discover that I never, in fact, had ever been taught what Evolution really was. I had been taught a fantasy, an imaginary concoction that nobody actually believed in. As we all have seen, Creationists create a straw man simplification of evolutionary theory and then attack the straw man, rather than attacking the real thing.
So I set out with my newly acquired knowledge. Surely, I though, now that I know that we've only been taught a mistaken notion of what evolutionary theory is, I can convince some people. Boy oh boy was I ever wrong. The first responses I got was, quite literally, "how dare you accuse our religion of LYING to us. They wouldn't lie to us". And so forth. I learned a lot about logical fallacies. The straw man. The fallacious appeal to false authority (look, this 'scientist' says evolution is fake, therefore it is). The argument from ridicule ("Man was made from monkeys, what kind of nitwit believes that"). It was a fascinating and revealing time in my life, and the clear intellectual dishonesty I saw compelled me to change my life. Within a couple years I went from being a homophobic creationist to going out to queer parties, not because I was gay, but because I discovered many of my friends were queer, and hadn't told me for obvious reasons.
I am reminded of this Salon article talking about how social conservatives basically assign a lot of emotion and identity to their belief. They think it is rude if others challenge their beliefs, yet they desire to push their beliefs on everyone else. http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/the_ugly_delusions_of_the_educated_conservative/
In the end, you cannot convince people who do not want to challenge their presuppositions and assertions. What will happen in the future, is that we will continue to move on and embrace exciting new advances, technologies, medicines that stem from biology, while those who do not understand it will simply be left behind.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Why does this happen? We will never know. Science cannot answer that question. Science can answer how it happens and what happens, but as for why, other than the mechanism involved, which is really the how, that answer is outside the realm of science and is left to philosophers and theologians. That it happens is a given. How it happens will be come more and more clear as time goes on. Why it happens. Nobody knows and it is unprovable regardless of one's position.
This is all God's will. He is so caring that he even made sure all the future paleoanthropologist would have something do. So he took the time to create and bury old stuff everywhere. Of course there's no mention of this anywhere because that would be handing out the location of the treasure in a treasure hunt.
There you have it, no need for logic when you have faith :)
This universe is God's experiment in free will. Some people will show that they give a smurf about overcoming temptation to break from God's purpose. Those who do will be rewarded when the earth is rebuilt; those who do not will be destroyed.
It will be a long process, as it was for other theories. The Earth moves, life moves. It's no big thing from a scientific point of view. Ideas can change. It's different when people invest heavily in a simple and static model and build their whole religion around it. In those circumstances it takes especially long for people to accept the profound surprises that the universe throws at us. Oh, you thought all life was created at about the same time in its present form, because that's what (your literal interpretation of) a religious book says? Surprise!
If I was religious, I'd say it's God using the ample surprises in His creation (the ones that seemingly defy the literal doctrine of the day) to remind us to be humble about our interpretations rather than thinking we're infallible.
Everyone knows the so-called "Fossils" are actually fakes put in by the creator(s) of Earth when the planet was made.
The debate of evolutionism vs. creationism will probably never end due, in a large part, to the human adversity to change. Humans have a tendency to hold on to what is familiar or what they think they can grasp and understand. Humans are a bit change adverse. The very religious and the fundamentalists will never disavow the bible, torah, koran, etc. As others have noted, new evidence will change nothing. In the end, those that produce the new evidence will be lambasted by the creationists. This is an argument that will probably never disappear, as much as we wish it would.
FTFY. No need to thank me.
HAND.
I have all the evidence you need: just check with me later. Like next month, or the month after...
This must have been written by someone who is surrounded by like minded people and out of touch with Joe Sixpack. People watch ghost hunting shows thinking that finally this one will have some solid evidence. Gamblers laugh in the face of math and talk about patterns with zero statistical backing (I usually win on rainy days).
We have spent a long time evolving into superstitious creatures so anyone who genuinely believes in evolution should understand that unless, in the next 15 to 30 years, there is massive selective pressure against superstitious people that we will be lucky to be much more than a step or two forward. Maybe education might evolve into something better but keep in mind it is the same dolts shaping education that watch the ghost shows.
The bible was written by the men with a (limited) understanding of the known science 2000 years ago. If someone saw dinosaur bones it was a demon, and demon's are from Hell, and the bible describes demons from hell for bones of creatures not understood to have come from a lineage of millions of years of evolution that eventually became a mouse, deer or rabbit.
I think the biggest arrogance of men is in assuming they are worthy and clairvoyant enough that they could fully interpret and understand the voice of God to accurately describe it in written word. I believe that if God could actually talk to a person then I would imagine the event to be so incredibly awesome and overwhelming that our feeble brains could only absorb and understand a small fraction of his/her/it's words. The sooner people accept that the bible could never be a direct, accurate and literal transcription of God's word, and is only some feeble account of some schmuck's encounter with some heavenly force, then we could end these "debates". The bible is a moral compass, at best, and should not be interpreted as a scientific account of the history of mankind.
I like to think God made us in a way we could discover, rationalize and understand the natural world instead of holding a book in front of our faces and regurgitating verbatim the scientific ignorance from 2000 years ago.
Dismissing science and only accepting the "Written Word" as truth is an insult to the idea that God gave us a brain and didn't just make us a race of mindless zombies.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Or, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman were right, and it's just a sign that God has a sense of humor:
The whole first chapter* of Good Omens is on the Harper Collins website: http://www.harpercollins.com/features/pratchettBooks/excerpt.aspx?isbn=9780060853969
* I *think* that it's the intro + first chapter, as I believe the first chapter started 'It wasn't a dark and stormy night.'
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
It is flawed to believe that MORE evidence will bring about change in a group that is ignoring evidence.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
There's already enough evidence that earth is >6,000 years and yet some people don't believe it. There's also enough evidence for evolution today, so I doubt the situation will change in 30 years. Perhaps things will change when we're able to create life from scratch (go Venter!) or simulate consciousness in a computer.
FIRST?
Having started involvement with FIRST over a decade ago, I would like to thank you for the OT advertising.
...and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof." - John Kenneth Galbraith
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Very few (and let's face it, wacky) sects out there actually refuse to accept Darwin's theories of evolution these days, so I'm not really seeing the story here.
Let me make that clearer still: Most Christian sects have no problems with Darwin or evolution, and the largest/original sect has never formally condemned it, even back when it was new and untested. That link also is an example of it being embraced by Christianity.
Certainly, again, there are nuts who take the Bible waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too literally. But really... how many of them actually read Slashdot again? I mean, it's cool that Leakey is thinking that things will be easier to understand for the kids and all, but it's not like there's nothing really new you will ever dig up in the lineage of Homo Sapiens Sapiens that going to convince anyone not otherwise convinced by now.
So, err, what was the point of this again? Outside of allowing posters to post various bigotries in a socially acceptable manner, I'm not seeing why the story should be given anything more than just a 'oh, okay - cool.' attitude. Mod me down all you like, because I know it'll come, but seriously - Evolution is a non-issue these days.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The Bible (the Hebrew version) basically says that the Tree was the Tree of Knowledge: all knowledge other than basic gardening was a falling away from perfection. It's part of a quite general myth that everything was better in the past when things were simpler. But if the people who pursue knowledge are damned, God has a very funny way of showing it. To the pursuers of knowledge (S)he gives long life, worldly goods, a pleasant environment and an interesting existence. To the ones who claim to be obedient to her purpose she gives funny robes and membership in the Hassidic Jewish movement, the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Taliban. The day to day evidence is that Blake was right, and the God they claim to be obeying is actually Satan.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
There was this angel who was following this man named Ben Franklin. After a long time Ben Franklin went out with a Kite and discovered Electricity. The angel was so astonished he went to God and said "God, See this man Ben Franklin Discovered Electricity" and God said "Its about time".
The Bible never preaches blind devotion, in fact if you find the greatest of those in the bible were also the most learned. Moses (court learning), Jesus (was in the temple lecturing the teachers at 12), and many others, Paul, Matthew, etc. God wants you to worship him with your mind, not just your heart and body. Those that INSIST on blind devotion are the same people that are told "Hey, I will take your money and give it to someone else and its good for you" and they believe it.
Remember: Bible is Why, Science is How.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
I never heard anyone in my country dismiss evolution against anything else. Where I live (3rd world country, predominantly roman catholic apostolic population), everyone accepts evolution as any other thing. I cannot understand why you have such a struggle with something so obvious.
I am a devout agnostic ;)
I suspect that if there was indeed a God that spoke to men in biblical days, man's primitive culture and language would over simplify the statements. Purhaps the universe up to the point of the bible was created in 6 units of time measurement that were beyond the scope of man at that time. A perfect example that is testable today is '40 days and 40 nights'. We know that this was a common statement in biblical times to say 'a long time'. You may or may not believe the literal 40 days and 40 nights, but there is good supporting, believable evidence that the language frequently used idioms to describe time.
Very sophisticated thoughts can be described in English that simply cannot be described in Piraha for instance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language). Purhaps the language spoken by 'God' or 'gods' or whatever is beyond our ancestors language skills, and possibly beyond our language skills.
I do tend to be on the athiest side because I haven't seen evidence of 'God' etc etc, though I don't crusade that there can't be a God.
There needs to be debate, otherwise it's not science. Anytime someone says "settled science" they're now talking about dogma.
We need to educate the public that there is actually debate about evolution. Not that it exists, it's really the only answer we've got that fits the evidence, but about the mechanisms. It's not like paleontologists just go around saying "this fossil is newer so it must have been more fit, the great deity Darwin says so." Today's evolution theories are themselves evolving from Darwin's simplistic assumptions to something much more complex. That's where the anti-evolution movement gets power - the incorrect belief that Darwin was actually right instead of just giving us an outline that we needed to use to fill in the gaps.
And the use of the term "theory"? That happened when Newton's immutable laws of motion were proven to be incorrect thanks to relativity. We don't do laws in modern science, because we know that no matter how sure we are of something there could be something else that makes a law nothing more than a rough approximation.
It's not covered by Genesis. There's no explanation for this change going back 500 million years in any book I've read from the lips of any God.
[6.6] Do they not consider how many a generation We have destroyed before them, whom We had established in the earth as We have not established you, and We sent the clouds pouring rain on them in abundance, and We made the rivers to flow beneath them, then We destroyed them on account of their faults and raised up after them another generation.
Guess he was reading the wrong books. And BTW God doesn't have lips, He is the Creator of lips.
The further collecting of evidence will only solidify evolution in those with open minds, not those who BELIEVE evolution is trickery, which craft or a test by their god. Remember when God had to blind Abraham, just to stop one of His vain, egotistical tests that nearly lead to the death of an innocent person? Even God couldn't reason with a scared, intellectually primitive follower; too bad so many remain and propagate their ignorance.
For the record, nowhere does the bible (yes, I've read it) implicitly deny the idea of evolution, God simply doesn't bother to explain the laws of nature (to include math) to a bunch of sheep herders; like make sure your pork is cooked well done to kill the harmful stuff. If you can't accept evolution, then tell me how rain is made using only the word of God to refute science.
Wow could God have created anything when God was created by humans. Actually humans have created several.
They really really really don't like being directly contradicted.
I know a lot of people are contemptuous of religions or the concept of religion. They think the right idea is to spurn these people and just force them to accept the facts or be ostracized. Unfortunately that isn't possible and that isn't a very wise solution. Religions are powerful, common throughout the world, and very capable of controlling human belief. Going into direct conflict with them isn't in our interest since it mostly wastes time and doesn't accomplish much.
Bare with me here. An alternate solution would be offering the religions a loophole. Some ideological wiggle room that lets them keep beliefs they'd literally die to protect and allow them hold scientifically accurate positions.
What the quote said about "if you don't want to call it evolution"... that is actually a very important concession. It sounds stupid that a name would matter, but to the religions it matters a lot.
Consider the difference between a civil union and a marriage. They're literally the same thing in almost every respect but the religions organizations have a special problem with homosexual marriage. Why is that?
The word marriage means something to the religions organizations that it does not mean to other people. In some senses we're not speaking the same language.
In most cases, we could probably compromise by giving everyone a comparable third option that uses a different term.
For example, call evolution something else but have it represent all the same scientific concepts. And this time be very careful about massaging the religious groups into seeing that it isn't a threat to their world view. It's not that hard. They don't want to fight. They just don't want to give ground. Tell them how they can hold their positions without conflicting with science and they'll accept it.
That goes for all the other stuff as well. The religious groups in general don't have a problem with people getting civil unions. So what if everyone got civil unions and we left "marriage" up to private organizations to handle. Marriage would then have no legal meaning where as the civil union would stand in for all the same legal institutions. The religious groups could decide who they think is married or not and none of that would matter to the law.
We either try to find compromises or we're just going to keep peeing into each other's drinking water.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I've noticed that no one here actually discusses this alleged evidence for universal common descent.
I used to debate evolution for quite some time on forums and I can say with confidence that there is absolutely no evidence for universal common descent. The fossil record certainly doesn't support it and, aside from the fossil record, Darwin made plenty of false predictions.
For instance, even Darwin noted that the fossil record does not show smooth transitions from one type of organism to the next. No, it shows many gaps, which is not what we would expect if universal common descent is true. So Darwin attributed this to the incomplete nature of the fossil record. How convenient. But, even so, the problems with evolution in terms of the fossil record go further than that. If evolution were true and the shortcomings were a result of the incomplete nature of the fossil record and we were to take various fossil samples of differing geological time periods we should expect a gradual, consistent, change of organisms over time. We don't even see that. What we see is that fossils remain mostly the same for a long period of time and then, suddenly, after various sudden explosions, change all at once. That's why they invented punctuated equilibrium.
The evidence doesn't look like evolution. In fact, the evidence looks as unlike evolution as it possibly can (and not just the fossil record). The evidence couldn't get worse for evolution than what we have now, the evidence looks like it's intentionally designed to resist evolutionary explanation and it does a very good job. and the more evidence that pops up, the worse this poor hypothesis looks. Sure, predetermined atheists will insist on interpreting all of the evidence within the framework of evolution a-priori, but they consistently make wrong predictions over and over.
This blog in the past has spent some time discussing some of the evidence.
http://jackhudson.wordpress.com/
By and large, evolutionists absolutely refuse to discuss the evidence (and by evolutionists I mean those who believe in universal common descent, abbreviated UCD). They avoid the topic. We know what we are talking about and intelligent design advocates, ones who follow the subject, can humiliate any evolutionists in a debate. Everyone here on Slashdot, for instance, never discusses details, you only insist that evolution must be true on its surface. But when digging into the details, when discussing the matter carefully, the hypothesis falls apart easily. It's absolutely and obviously indefensible intellectually. Maybe that's why no one here actually discusses it but you avoid the subject. You avoid the science. I'm willing to engage with anyone wanting to.
I think we can safely say that a probability so low that it's below one divided by the sum over the quantum descriptions of all the particles in the Universe is indistinguishable from zero. And that anybody who predicated their beliefs and behaviour on the idea that that probability should be taken into account in determining anything useful - is indeed a crackpot.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Actually, it was my understanding that the Hebrew word that is translated into English as "day" in Genesis 1 is
...the word yôm (Strong's H3117).
the same word that is used to refer to the period of time from sunset until the following sunset.
Among other meanings. It can also refer to an indefinite period, much as English day can. Compare English "one of these days", "back in the day", etc. It has similar metaphorical meaning in Hebrew, and what is described as happening on some creative "days" cannot happen in 24 hours. See also Genesis 2:4, where Moses refers to the six creative "days" as one "day", and 2 Peter 3:8, where Peter compares God's concept of a "day" to a millennium to indicate that God operates on a different timescale from humans.
It's not skepticism that holds people away from accepting evolution. It makes life easier to just set a point somewhere and don't think further. It's essential to all of us in some way. And it is a business to make people feel comfortable. Why should everybody abandon that market place?
Until there s a day where both sides can agree that science and theology meet, the debate between creationism and evolution will continue. The problem is,, even with evidence, both are technically theories to have faith in.
For those creationist about to argue my point: Can you prove, with col hard evidence, anything outside of the book, in terms of creationism? Of course not: No one can time travel - yet - and no mortal has God's power. For all the evidence you collect, in the end it is based on faith - you believe in the book of Genesis or you don't, according to many of your attitudes.
Likewise, the same time-travelling theory applies to the evolutionists: for all of the evidence and arguments you bring up, there is very little evidence that proves 1005 that evolution was the way things happened. (At best, you may have 25% - and I'm being generous at this.) There isn't a smoking Gun to prove, one way or another, that God didn't have his hand in it.
While I have faith in both and view evolution as an explanation of what God did, I have a faith in something that, sad to say, is far worse: the ignorance and stupidity of man. It is in our nature to argue, to stand true to our beliefs even when all other evidence points to those beliefs being wrong, and to fight those who oppose those beliefs. Even the most open-minded of individuals still closes their mind off to some aspect of life, whether or not they choose to admit this. We argue and fight, and sometimes we fail to reach a compromise. It usually takes cold, hard evidence to disprove a belief or ideal, and even then some conspiracy theorists will argue that the world is still flat.
In the end, you can't change human nature.
(And before anyone else says it: I'm wrong. :P There, first to say it!)
is a top-ranking Christian university which promotes a correct scientific understanding of evolution. They recently opened an Evolution Education Research Center in conjunction with Harvard and McGill.
Pepperdine University and Wheaton College are two other prominent Christian colleges which teach evolution.
Sites such as http://truecreation.info/ http://theistic-evolution.org/ and http://biologos.org/ illustrate that there are Christians out there who have reconciled faith and science.
Sounds good, right?
That said, I still believe that the problem won't go away any time soon. Why? Power and money. The organizations behind the modern-day creationism movement (Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis, Creation Science Evangelism, and The Discovery Institute) are multimillion-dollar Christian textbook publishing houses -- or they supply the "science" for other homeschool textbook publishing houses.
Even when it lands them in jail for tax evasion, they have a cult-like following:
http://freehovind.com/
As much as it seems like they're a united front, they love to criticize and sue each other:
http://www.icr.org/article/intelligent-design-or-scientific-creationism/
Legal controversy between AiG and CMI
It's not about the individual believer anymore. It's not about worldviews. It's not even about the churches! It's about the money-driven organizations that are feeding them. They've sucked people in using slick propaganda, books and Web sites, and encourage people to not just teach this stuff, but to teach other people to teach this stuff.
In short, it's not any different from any modern political movement.
When you stop taking obvious metaphorical/mythological content litterally, a lot of problems vanish.
https://xkcd.com/258/
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I love how my shift key is iffy - 1005 should be 100%. Sorry.
This isn't just a Christian-head-in-the-sand issue. There are an embarrassing number of people who share my faith that think that the Sun revolves around the Earth just because Maimonides said something to that effect over 800 years ago. On top of that, you have: Birther, Bigfoot, ghosts, the Loc Ness monster, the connection between autism and vaccination. The list goes on and on. Faith is a powerful thing.
This has been debated for over one hundred years. No amount of discoveries will resolve it because evidence is sort of tangential to the argument anyway. It's a bit like the joke that 2012 will be the year of the Linux desktop. Will 2030 be the year of Evolution?
It's actually pretty inconvenient for observant Jews living in Northern Europe or Canada because the sun sets so early in winter.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
When the chance occurance of a working protein just coming together in the primordial soup takes longer that the supposed age of the universe, and you still have faith in abiogeneisis. Who's faith is more believable. Admit it yours is a religion too.
And then the Christians burned all the pagans and scientists.
If there is truly a fossil record that supports the idea of gradual macro-evolution from cell to a complex human being great!! Go find it! I welcome it!
BUT true evidence for evolution won't be a single skeleton. By definition, if evolution IS true the fossil record should be FLOODED with fossil variations. We've been digging for a LONG time and such massive fossil variation has not been found.
Not sure what another 15 years will add to our already massive fossil record findings. BUT if you want to prove your property has a wealth of oil, finding a cup of sludge is not proof of mineral wealth. Prove you are right with a wealth of fossil evidence.
And if after digging for a long-long time you don't find oil consider that the evidence for evolution is simply not there. I think even Darwin assumed to have found such massive clear evidence by now. But if you find it great!!
Incidentally the Wikipedia article amused me. While superficially even handed it contains this line:
The problem, of course, only exists in the minds of people who want it to be God-inspired. To anybody else there is no problem: there isn't one.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Wow! Amazing! They discovered a disfigured human being!
Until we find large numbers of these things that we've also found for other animals (like dinosaurs), I will find it extremely hard to believe in evolution. I'm not claiming to know how the earth came into being or how old it is, but God created this planet and everything in it...nothing evolved on its own.
Leakey you are the man dude, shove it down their throats and let them choke on it. No heaven to wait for I can see all those virgin just devolving away or maybe not.
Not everybody calling himself a Christian is actually following Christ. (Matthew 7:21) Jesus never told anybody to spread the message of the Kingdom of God by the sword, to my knowledge. The first-century church didn't use force either.
The people who interpret the books literally and ignore reason, they look at the world as simply about being a good believer. They're extreme and can be usually ignored. They're also who people tend to think of when they think of "creationists". Let me ignore them here for now, as I don't live in USA so don't have them making laws and stuff. Sorry USA, that's your problem, sorta like Iran.
Then there's the people who within reason, wonder, gee, the universe is "creating" all this new stuff, how does that work?
And here you have two sorts of "answers".
First there's the idea that pure randomness combined with having to survive in the environment, has generated life.
Then there's the idea that, um, no, pure randomness alone is not enough, even with natural selection weeding out the failures. Within reason, some people wonder that, somehow, there's additional physical mechanisms going on that we haven't detected, which are somehow generating better solutions.
Both sides would agree that evolution has happened. But whether randomness+selection is enough all on its own to account for all the life that's appeared, is a question, and it is here that it becomes more controversial, because many maintain that randomness+selection is enough, even though they can't actually prove that by running a universe forward on this principle. It sorta just becomes an opinion that's strongly held.
Part of the reason that it becomes such a strong opinion is that many reasonably feel that if you let in the idea that randomness+selection on its own isn't enough, then you open the door to the fundamentalist extremist irrational people who simply believe books literally. Well that is a problem. But so is figuring out how life works. And if there are additional mechanisms going on –– mutations are not random -- and after all, a ball doesn't bounce randomly, it obeys physical laws -- maybe there are laws governing what's created that somehow make it already predisposed to be adapted to the environment. Whatever. IANAB but as I say, who can prove it has to be random?
Any evidence that there is a "why"?
Bert
Why would a "God" need to perform an experiment, when He already knows the outcome?
For the same reason a freshman chemistry lab instructor does. God knows that Satan is wrong, but Satan is being given a chance to have it his way so that people can ultimately realize just how wrong Satan is.
As a Christian, I don't believe evolution because it doesn't line up with God's character. God created and said "It is good". Death is a result of fallen man (sin). Therefore to say God used evolution would be the equivalent of saying the result of sin (death) was the creation of man. That's illogical.
Evolution always has been and always will be at odds with God. For all the evolutionary evidence you find, there will be a Christian scientist saying "Hold it, that's not the case". Evolution is the science of proving God doesn't exist and always will be. The Christians that believe in evolution are simply misguided.
I understand and believe there is micro-evolution (skin color changing, etc), I don't believe in new species coming about (macro-evolution).
"There's no explanation for this change going back 500 million years in any book I've read from the lips of any God."
Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are pleased. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die not become manifest, how much you will have to bear!"
Jesus said, "Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man."
--Gospel of Thomas
There you go.
The metaphor-challenged may not "see it", and if not, that's how it should be, and Darwin will take care of you just fine.
Once again, though, the majority of theistic stances have no problem with "evolution occurs", and this False Dichotomy is getting old.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
We should all take a look at how estimates of the earth's age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth and go from there. Notice how scientists started with estimates of up to 100's of millions of years without a shred of evidence? They were based on "models" and current estimates are also based on assumptions and models. They are based on meteorite samples which were being bombarded with a lot more cosmic radiation than what we would see on earth which would throw off any estimates based on radioactive decay significantly. There is also the concern about how most models assume that the moon and earth formed around the same time and yet the moon appears to be much younger than previously thought.
Most people don't have a problem with classical science and the scientific method but they do have a problem with the apparent "moving of goal posts" that seems to be happening with regularity in modern science.
There is nothing wrong with adjusting your view point but fudging the numbers by adding new variables such as "dark matter" and "dark energy" should not be allowed. You should be forced to create a new model if they existing one does not work. In any other field, you are forced to go back to the drawing board. A lot of people see "dark matter" and "dark energy" as nothing more than a more scientific for names for invisible pink unicorns and fairy dust.
Why do people on the internet believe scientist without question? They are human beings first and scientists second which means that they can lie and cheat like anyone else. They are not beyond reproach.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
God wants all people to come to him, but he also knows that some people will choose Satan no matter what. God is fair to all, even to Satan. Converting people by force wouldn't give Satan a fair chance to have things his way. God is also fair to humans caught in the crossfire, which is why he sent his perfect son to be executed as a payment for our resurrection.
the "debate" has been over for at least 70 years. The US is really a crass outlier and only comparable to Islamic or strongly underdeveloped Christian countries in that regard.
I'm not saying that "gravity" is actually a series of elves pulling us down so we don't float out of the atmosphere, but there is a non-zero chance of it. I don't treat those who believe in that particular notion as crackpots.
Really? You should. Just because you can conceive of a notion does not automatically mean there is a even a tiny chance of it being real. To treat people with clearly absurd notions as anything other than crackpots is simply intellectual cowardice. For example I think the notion of Noah's Ark as outlined in the bible is utterly ridiculous. Anyone who treats it as an actual story that might have happened even remotely close to as-written is an idiot and deserves to be treated as such. I make no apologies for this stance. Anyone who actually believes every animal on earth lined up in pairs to get on a boat is an imbecile. (curious how the notion of how all the plants survived or how the animals ate is never addressed)
My my my, Another Hugh Pickens post...
don't count on it. Its a battle against a lifetime of religious indoctrination and a notion of creationism that has lasted for thousands of years.
Sometimes people cannot accept we don't live in a world of their design
And other people choose to accept the world that is fed to them by the mainstream media, the government, and popular opinion. It requires no effort, and does not upset their existence. Otherwise, of course, there'd be a responsibility to do something about it.
Whether they overcome the temptations of not is entirely dependent on the circumstances of the person's life, which is all planned by God.
God doesn't cause the evil even if he allows Satan to cause the evil. See the book of Job.
Evolution does not explain how life came into being.
Actually it might if you take into account the fact that all living things are simply a collection of chemicals. Living things are chemical reactions so it stands to reason that non-living things might evolve into living things. It's just chemistry. The distinction between living and non-living is a rather arbitrary one. Living things can become non-living. No reason to assume it can't work the other direction as well.
Why does this happen? We will never know.
Incorrect - evolution (or adaptation, as it is also commonly referred as) occurs because of changes in the biome in which an organism lives. As the number one goal of all life is to continue living (procreation being a close #2), it is not an unreasonable proposition that the genetics of living things are programmed to allow for changes and 'upgrades' to the design of said living things to account for alterations in biome conditions.
Put quite simply, the "why" of evolution is that living change to survive changes in the world around us. That by no means proves or disproves the existence of a higher power, but rather is a statement of fact.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Lets see if you can reply without bias, or better, just stop and think.
I'm not going to go on a pro-Religion campaign, since frankly I'm not fond of many Religions. With that said, Science can not answer the base question, and neither side can prove it. So you have speculation verses speculation. Atheists, just like named Religions, refuse to look any further than their own arguments which do nothing to answer the fundamental question.
Evolution does not disprove an intelligent design, and the big bang does not disprove a creator. What I think those arguments do is show that many Religions have some things incorrect. But the base argument of a creator can not be disproved, and logic always takes you to a creator.
Before you go there, remember that a multi-verse or parallel universes just confuse the base question. They don't answer it at all.
We look at how everything works in the Universe and we see that everything relates to cause and effect. Then when you say "What caused it all to start moving" the Atheists go in to a rage. At least the Religions just point to a book and say "that" instead of the Atheist's reaction of "it doesn't matter" or "la la la I'm not listening to you".
I'm not asking you to change your opinion, but rather pay attention to the bias. We live in a society brainwashed not to think about the question, and hate people that do think about it. That should frighten you!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Leakey, an atheist, insists he has no animosity toward religion.
But he is still an atheist.
And atheists use evolution to push atheism.
The God deniers use it to push their agenda.
It would be good if the God deniers, Holocaust deniers and tax deniers would all become gravity deniers and jump off a cliff - they'd see where denial leads.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
If you want to understand the mindset of people who don't understand evolution, look no further than the anti global warming crowd, which makes up a surprisingly large subset of the Slashdot community.
You might even be one of them.
It's exactly the same kind of mentality. People really don't want to believe in global warming, because they know full well that if it's true, then they are a) fucked, and if they are American, then b) it's probably mostly their fault. It's so much easier to just latch onto some soundbite from a shill on TV paid by an energy company than to... urgh... study the science. It's a choice between an unpleasant effort to find out something negative about themselves, versus zero effort to stay blissfully ignorant. You can tell that some less-bright people actually love it. They can smugly throw memorized quotes at their better educated peers like "It's just a sun cycle, didn't you know!". For once in their lives, they feel superior, like they know something those geeky eggheads don't. It's a good feeling, and the man in the expensive suit on TV agrees!
Religion and evolution is the same type of thinking. They don't want to know anything about evolution, because it directly discredits their holy book, starting with page one of chapter one! This is a book that gives them the same comfortable feeling of smug superiority over those "blasphemers" that unfortunately can no longer be stoned to death legally. Theists believe that they're the chosen people: the blessed ones that will get to go to heaven. Why on earth would they ever go out of their way and learn something about the science of evolution, when the only two possible results of that are that: a) they were right all along and now they've just wasted a bunch of their time learning about this filthy secular science stuff they hated so much when they were in school, or b) they were wrong all along and their entire life was based on a bunch of bullshit, and hence they aren't the special chosen people, and won't get to go to heaven.
This isn't a question of fossils, or DNA, or charts of CO2 absorption spectra. The same people will believe scientific evidence on other topics just fine. The problem is that to trying to convince these people of global warming or evolution is also in effect an attempt to convince them that they're bad people. This is an entirely different ball game, and is essentially insurmountable until their belief in the scientific truth will no longer have this effect on their self-perception.
Global warming will be popularly accepted after fossils fuels run out -- nobody will have a vested interest either way at that point, and the evidence will be lapping at their ankles. I suspect that even if several American cities are reclaimed by the rising waters, that still won't be enough to convince some people if fossil fuels are available and cheap at the time.
Evolution will be accepted after Abrahamic religions die out, or adapt and change to the point of unrecognizability -- we've had overwhelming evidence for evolution for what, 150 years? Has that been enough? Not even close. We've had germ theory for less than that, and everybody believes it. The atomic theory of matter is even more recent, but good luck finding an educated disbeliever. No, you'll find that evolution is special, because it contradicts the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur'an. It won't be commonly believed until the common people no longer have faith in something that contradicts it.
You know, I've heard that argument before. The premise being that god placed all this evidence here to test our faith. And you know what? It's a load of crap.
I agree with you. I agree with you that a loving God would not plant a false fossil record to test us. In fact, the fossil record is entirely consistent with a day-age interpretation of Genesis 1. I was referring to temptation in the sense of the opportunity to choose to sin, that is, to choose to be inconsiderate to each other.
Why would he build this entire universe just for us when we probably have no hope of ever reaching even the nearest star? It makes no sense!
Yeah, it would be an awful waste of space, like in the film Contact. I haven't seen anything in the Bible that rules out God creating man on multiple class M planets but spacing them far enough apart that they couldn't reach another civilization's space. I wrote more about that hypothesis here.
Why would he need to constantly test our faith?
Why would automated test suites need to constantly test code that we know works?
I find it funny how ignorant evolutionists are when talking about creationists.
Whatever you are accusing creationists of, you are doing the same thing - being absolutely ignorant of the beliefs of the other side.
There's only a minority of creationists who believe that the earth/universe is only 6,000 yrs old. But it's much more convenient to lump all into one, and use the overused, tired, and just bland attack of 6-day 24-hr creation of the earth (a theory that has been injected by various overzealous evangelical groups, which doens't even have a biblical basis)
Creationism is about acknowledging the existence of design in all things (molecular, atomic, sub-atomic), and believing it to have been purposed, instead of having come to be by pure chance. That's the bottom line.
There are so many straw men in these comments it's a fire hazard.
It probably doesn't help evolution's case that many of the beliefs about it (at least only a couple of decades ago) were based on a couple of bones and someone's imagination. And that much of the time table is based on circular reasoning. eg - the rocks date the fossils and the fossils date the rocks. ...and this is called science?
You can also say "back in my father's day, things were so and so". Day indicates a period of 24 hours (modern), or from sunset to the next sunset, or whatever other 24 hr mark you choose. But it can also be used to signify an era.
The parent poster is correct, "day" as used in Genesis signifies a period of time, but not a specific period of time (such as 24 hours, or 1000 years) - it could be any length of time.
There is already so much evidence that the people who don't accept evolution should not be called skeptics. They are deniers.
While some believe the good book is 100% accurate and contains no flaws from copying, translating and retelling the stories for countless years and generations, I believe that some error is in there.
If you simply move the creation of birds to after calling for the animals to land, you've pretty much got the evolutionary chain:
1. Sealife
2. Makes its way to land
3. Takes flight
4. Mankind appears
So we mess up the order and all of a sudden fundies can't accept evolution. Right that wrong and it's really not that hard to imagine that evolution is a divine and guided process. Of course, it's not that hard to imagine it isn't :)
Get real !!! What kind of tom-foolery is it to post a story about scientific evidence that will happen in the future?
Why don't I just post a story that:
We can now see that the theory of evolution is completely wrong. All we have to do is wait for 16 to 31 years, and we will all see the evidence beyond all doubt. Even the dolphins will be able to tell that the new evidence shown then will completely support a creation story.
Oh, and I will also post a story that suggests that in 20 - 40 years, we will be able to see that Elvis didn't actually die.
While we are at it, lets talk about how in 25 - 39.5 years from now, the evidence will have escalated such that we will be able to tell that the big bang didn't happen at all, it was actually a bang-bing!
Yes, we should post more articles for people to debate that speculate about how debate will end in the future on debatable topics.
At one time all of mankind put all of their knowledge together and came up with the theory that the world was flat. Now we have proof that the theory was wrong. How are we going to feel when someone finds proof that evolution is wrong. Humans are fallible. And, so long as that it true human theories will also be fallible.
Evolution is a topic of interest mainly to people who would like to promote bigotry against religious people. How often does it get brought up in any other context?
Religious folks rarely (if ever) bring it up. There are widely varying opinions on the topic among religious folks, but few consider it imminently important to their day to day lives.
I generally tow the Slashdot line, but this is one of the topics where I definitely disagree with the Slashdot norm. Since those siding with Leakey are well represented, I thought I would provide some perspective from the other side: those who believe in a literal seven day creation account. I'll also preface this by saying that I do not, of course, speak for anyone but myself.
I agree that there is mounting evidence in favor of evolution. And I know faith is not popular around here, but I maintain a faith that there is an alternative explanation for why this evidence seems to be pointing towards evolution (I won't bore you with repeating ideas you've surely heard before). I strongly believe that science can account for everything natural in the world, but I also believe that any attempts to explain things in a manner contrary to the Bible will eventually be demonstrated to be incorrect. In the case of evolution, I believe that science itself will eventually provide an alternative explanation. It's a simple faith in that idea, nothing more, nothing less.
To draw a quick comparison, I find this topic rather similar to when historians doubted the existence or scale of the Hittites. While frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, no archaeological evidence for their allegedly vast empire seemed to exist. It wasn't until the late 19th century that a series of discoveries eventually demonstrated that their empire did in fact cover most of Asia Minor at one time. While evolution is the prevailing belief today, I have faith that it will be disproved in time, just as the skeptical historians were disproved.
I also agree with those of you saying that the evidence will do little to convince people such as myself. There will certainly be many who are persuaded. As you may have seen in some of the comments here, there are a growing number of people who believe that the Genesis account of creation can be reconciled with evolution (typically this involves accepting that each of the seven "days" actually meant something longer than a 24 hour day). I cordially disagree with them, but I cannot deny that the idea is gaining traction in many circles. For those such as myself, while I rely on science regularly and enjoy it immensely, there are certain areas where I simply take it on faith that the current prevailing ideas incorrect. There aren't many of those areas, but evolution as the origin of life is one of them.
Anyway, all I sought to do here was represent the other side so you could see how someone who likes to think of themselves as rational can possibly disagree. I'm not interested in getting drawn into a debate or lengthy discussion, and I fully anticipate either being downmodded as a troll or else swamped with more comments in disagreement with me than I can manage. That said, I will take the time to read through any responses, whether critical or not.
Natural Selection is a mechanism that results in Evolution. Though they are related, the debate over Evolution is very different from the debate over Natural Selection in a religion vs. science context. I think that both sides tend to forget this in their enthusiasm.
www.DIYTVAntennas.com
Too bad 90% of the criticism expressed here in these comments are all fluff and biased anger. When you say evolution is already proven please give a reference to such evidence. I'm ready and willing to listen. If you don't have undeniable scientific proof of evolution then stop putting down those who scientifically doubt your claims. I don't believe what I believe because I refuse to see any evidence. I believe what I do about evolution because I see EVIDENCE that no evolution-supporting fossil record exists.
Ironically, Occam's Razor is basically rejected by today's "bible-believing" Christians (this is ironic because the man after whom Occam's Razor is named was a bible believer himself). They will jump through as many hoops as necessary to justify their belief. A typical example is the approach to the issue of why the bible describes a circular object that is 30 units around and 10 units across; all sorts of convoluted answers are given, ranging from "well the 10 units were for the inside, and the 30 units were for the outside" to claims that by analyzing the letters in the original Hebrew passage, you can find hundreds of digits of Pi. At no point are they willing to accept the simplest answer: the authors of that passage were not mathematicians.
Palm trees and 8
"...the family claims to have unearthed 'much of the existing fossil evidence for human evolution.'"
Really? A couple hundred years of careful, tedious work, by thousands of researchers, constituting millions of man-hours... but all that was piss in the wind comparatively?
Leakey's logic flows like this:
Bible doesn't mention evolution, so the Bible and God are flawed creations of man - not credible resources.
Well, the book "iText in Action" by Bruno Lowagie doesn't talk about Perl programming, so is it flawed too? No, because Perl programming wasn't "in-scope" for the book. And the author didn't need to mention all the things that weren't in scope - it was a focused-topic book.
Likewise, consider the likelihood that the Bible is a focused-topic book, dealing with the creation account, history, and salvation of Man. The Bible gives some information about other creations of God, such as Angels, and other creatures in the throne room accounts, but the Bible isn't really about them and their history or creation.
The question we might ask as we read Genesis, is whether the Bible gives room for the earth having already existed for a period of time (more than several days) before Adam and Eve were created. If the earth was already "formless and void" when the 6-day creation event began, then the earth has some history unaccounted for in Genesis.
Like ancient astronomers, many Christians think God revolves around us. It's humbling to consider that perhaps Mankind is one of several creation events that God has initiated on this earth, and that we are simply one in a series of creations that have happened over time. We creations revolve around Him.
Is a time machine. If people could go back and look at the past (and not just the distant past, but anytime between 20 minutes ago to millions of years ago), then disbelieving in evolution would be as silly as believing that the earth is flat (and too a lesser extent the moon landing) today. You have to see it too believe it, and it has to
That being said, I still know people who think that sperm come from the back side between the hip and the ribs (as is written in the Koran).
You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.
But read .:
http://www.icr.org/article/journal-censors-second-law-paper-refuting/
And why is God good?
"and the people on their freely chosen sides will tip the scales and decide the end result"
Of what? What's good? What's evil? Or just whether God screwed up?
Your naive trust in the power of the human mind to overcome ignorance with nothing but evidence is rather cute.
Wrong. But cute.
The evidence of history does not support your conclusion.
At no point are they willing to accept the simplest answer: the authors of that passage were not mathematicians.
That's because they know full well that if they ever hint that the Bible (and other religious texts) are not the "literal word of God" but were in fact written by an assortment of priests and clerics of varying knowledge and ability, some almost certainly with self-serving agendas to boot ... then the whole house of cards collapses around them.
Don't you wish you hadn't wasted 3 seconds of your life reading this sig?
Actually, the agreement between our current scientific understanding of evolution of life and the Book of Genesis is pretty good considering that Genesis was written 4,000 years ago by several uneducated authors who had likely never traveled more than a few miles from their home village and were relying on even earlier oral traditions. The creation sequence described in Genesis is 1) light, 2) Earth's rotation to provide day and night, 3) dry land on the Earth, 4) plants and vegetation, 5) moon and sun to mark night and day, 6) fishes and birds, 7) mammals and all kinds of terrestial creatures, 8) Man. Our current scientific understanding of the evolution of life is 1) big bang to create all space, time, and mass, 2) stars form, 3) pre-earth forms, 4) moon forms from impact of planet with pre-earth, 5) oceans condense, 6) early life, both photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic, arrives in ocean and on whatever 'land' exists in warm earth with no polar ice, 7) life evolves in oceans to more complex multi-cellular forms, invertebrates, and then vertebrates (fishes), 8) More dry land forms and life forms colonize it, 9) mammals, 10) man. The key thing is that both creation accounts rely on a sequence of events arising from creation out of nothing at all which is counter-intuitive to our imagination working alone. If you put most of us down in a little village 4,000 years ago and asked us to describe creation, we would likely either say 'it's always been this way,' or 'the gods formed everything from the raw materials at hand.'
What's so bad about describing an object as roughly 10 units across and 30 units around? It certainly isn't exact but it's not too bad if you're just approximating for story telling purposes.
There's already overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution. The people who don't believe in evolution will not believe in evolution no matter what evidence you show them. They're either idiots, religious fundamentalists or those who stand to gain by deceiving the latter two groups. Move along.
http://www.icr.org/article/richard-leakeys-skull-1470/
There isn't any evidence (I'm not just talking about "what we see *now*") which suggests evolution is how life came into being. Evolution explains how different species come into being, where the existence of life is its premise; it doesn't explain or even attempt to explain how life came into being. Nobody has yet set forth any theories for how life came into being, though there are some not-too-wacky hypotheses out there.
If you think there's evidence that shows evolution created life, then you either don't know what evolution is, or don't know what evidence is. Or maybe you're just believing what some priest told you.
You're talking about a different subject than evolution. No time machines were needed to confirm evolution.
We have no reason to think that may have happened, but ok, let's hypothesize it happened. Let's say we suddenly found credible evidence that the world popped into existence like that. What would it mean for evolution?
If you set the time it happened at 6000 years ago (all evidence older than 6000 years is fake) evolution is still as confirmed as gravity, because so many experiments which confirmed it, were done more recently than 6000 years ago. Molecular biology, as we currently know it, (which has tested evolution harder than anything Darwin could have dreamt of) is only about 50 years old!
If you want popping-into-existence scenarios to fake out evolution, you need it to have happened much more recently than 6000 years ago. You need it to have happened a few months ago at the most (if you're a biologist, you might need for it to have happened just a day or two ago), so that all of people's memories of having performed experiments to falsify or once-again confirm evolution, were faked. If you hypothesize that, then you also will be casting plenty of doubt on whether or not gravity and optics experiments actually happened, rather than their experiments being fake memories. You've said you can measure gravity but how long has it been since you've actually done it? Have you done it since High School?
If think evolution is uncertain, then you might as well be in The Matrix, because you can't be sure about anything. There simply is no meaningful science. For that matter, every known religion was faked too (which isn't to say they're all wrong; one of the religions could still conceivably be the correct one, but despite its truth, its texts were faked; they are false books that popped into existence rather than being testimonies of what some real person actually saw, since of course they were fake-written long before the most recent biological experiments' fake memories.
When God says he's going to fuck with you, prepare to be fucked HARD.
Really. Where is this "delight in attacking religion" that you see? Ever considered that it only exists IN YOUR HEAD?
And what does this mean:
"Religion / spirituality doesn't speak to science. The set of questions that science can answer are not within the same realm"
?
Religion doesn't answer questions other than to say it IS answering them. Same with spirituality. What questions can religion or spirituality answer that science can't? And you have to show that religion CAN answer them, by the way.
Why can't people just accept that God really exists and Jesus really does live and reign with the Heavenly Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. We have *one* God who is responsible for the creation of EVERYTHING. It's possible for God's creations to change over time but living things have not been around (on Earth) for 500 million years!
In my opinion organized religions are not a good thing. They trap people into beliefs and seem to be largely intended to control the populace. The bible is an interesting cultural history written by people. It is no more the the WORD of god than any other writing. People accept it because it is comforting to believe that there is a god looking out for them and that they will get their reward after they die so it is okay if their life isn't so good. This is why I find religion to be harmful in general. I hear, quite often, from people that things are in god's hands so therefore they do not have to intervene or act for change. If there is a god I believe that it does not tolerate such a lack of compassion.
Spirituality, on the other hand, is about freedom. I am a spiritual being. I believe that there is more going on than meets the eye and that there could possible be other beings that do not have a physical form and that a part of me continues on after I die. However I also keep my mind open to the fact that it may just be that we have not learned how to comprehend and/or measure the things I consider spiritual.
Something to keep in mind is that evolution is not over. We are not the end product. I believe we have a choice as to whether the human species will continue on, but the way things are going it is not looking likely. Like most organisms in this world extinction looms ever closer. We are poisoning our environment with pesticides, cleaning chemicals, petroleum and electrical and radio waves, etc and our collective health is suffering from this. But looking at the history of evolution, it may be that we are laying the foundation for the next dominant life forms. After all the oxygen we need was a toxic byproduct that killed of the dominant life form that created it.
You can take any "why" answer and use it as a "how" answer. If you're going to do that to science then you have to do it with everything and there is no why.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Because there was a quantum fluctuation of the right size that kicked off the big bang, etc.
Because God wished there to be something and created the world.
But those are just the how! WHY was there a quantum fluctuation? WHY did God wish there to be something?
Did you never play the why game to irritate your parents?
In case you're too busy reading your bible I've mostly re-posted this just for you.
The fossil record can't show a smooth transition because not everything fossilizes (MOST don't) and very small fossils like mice etc. are very hard to find/identify, which is why the hunt continues. Do you really expect man to excavate the whole of earth and find most fossils?
Extinction events, by their nature, can wipe out even the most fit species, leaving a distinctly new evolutionary path for PREVIOUSLY less fit organisms on a global scale.
One of the marvels of science is the ability to fix mistakes and move on, instead of never eating bacon.
To see evolution in action read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_moth#Evolution/ [wikipedia.org]
Any other "creative" ideas you'd like to vomit my way?
What is this business of "despising" Creationists regarding their delight about the absence of transitional intermediates? If one is pursuing a scientific course, who cares what everyone ranging from Fundamentalist Christians to the Hare Krishnas believe or say on the subject? And yes, the Hare Krishna movement has its own religiously inspired spin on Evolution -- I came across a book once that had some kind of desire to prove the modern human race (not just earlier Homo and Australopithicans) to go back millions of years to fit in with Hindu scriptures regarding recurrent cycles.
Purely from a scientific standpoint, the Cambrian explosion, abiogenesis, even the transition from Procaryote to Eucaryote forms still require a lot of 'splainin, and there is probably more to the Cambrian explosion than some mystery process of why fossils don't last longer than 600 million years, and there are intriguing interpretation of the Edicaran fossils has being primitive forms or a dead end where things started from fresh in the Cambrian. These are all legitimate and open questions, and if some people are going "See, see you Evolutionists are all wrong!", I mean, like who cares?
The Bible is the world of god, spoken from his lips directly! ( Just not writen by him, not able to proven in anyway, not produced in it's native lanugage and globably accepted to be stories about how to live life ). But it's his word! how can you argue that? ( Minus all the clear proof of evolution ).
I suspect that this crowd makes up a not-insubstantial portion of the Creationist crowd.
Scientifically speaking, prove it or shut the hell up.
Leaky is right - evolution is a simple fact. Life changes over time. We see it all the time. But, what we don't know, and Leaky discloses some of that, is that we don't know HOW it happens and to what EXTENT.
Those questions can't be answered by a Paleoanthropologist. They need to be answered by a Microbiologist. And, what Microbiology has found over the past 50 years should be disconcerting for an avowed atheist (atheism is a belief system) like Leaky.
Since Leaky is speculating on what science *might* determine in the coming decades, here's what he is up against:
1. There is no known abiotic process that explains the origin of life, despite massive attempts to discover it.
2. Despite the fact that all life forms share many similarities, we don't know if there is a single tree of life (one common ancestor) or many trees.
3. The notion of "Junk DNA" has been quietly discredited. It now seems that DNA is more than just coding for proteins. And, any Slashdotter should realize that data is just a peice of a computational machine.
4. The way life works is (today) better explained by design than spontaneous natural origin.
5. The ideas of evolution and creation are not mutually exclusive. Evolution is about how life changes over time, not how life originated. Evolutionary mechanisms could have been designed into life, for example.
6. People like Leaky have been saying these things since Darwin. In fact, Darwin made similar statements.
7. Even if the Bible is wrong about creation, doesn't mean that life wasn't created. And, just like Leaky says that we know life has evolved, we just don't know HOW, it would be ok to say that life was created, we just don't know HOW.
The problem with people like Leaky (and there are creationists like him) is that they have an apriori commitment to a specific outcome, and are blind to alternative ideas. Instead of using science to bolster their position, they resort to insults.
To give credit so some of the religious, it is hard to take off the training wheels when science cannot prove there is a reason not to harm others in society without getting caught. A huge portion of society believes that, atheist and worshippers alike, that the key is not what you do but not getting caught. Evolution at this point seems to back them up, and that is why a lot of people are not willing to let go of a few thousand years of morality based on faith. Calling them stupid when we don't have a moral system capable of replacing it, or calling ourselves "more intelligent" than the avowed believers, or even more intelligent than the hypocrites, lacks any prima facia proof. I know plenty of smart religious people.
Gently reply
Evolution does not threaten religion in anyway. At least as myself being a Mormon it does not. If you ask me it just backs it up. Evolution is obvious and real.
Who is God's most valuable employee?
Satan.
Obviously still in the old man's employ, otherwise he would have setup a paradise to reward those who turned against the Big Beard, not inflict endless agony on (only!) those who didn't tow the party line.
There is plenty of silliness in the Abrahamic religions (just like all the rest), but this flaw shows up before you can even utter 'In the beginning...'
Just because someone believes in God and creationism doesn't make them drooling morons.
Some of us actually, believe it or not, have brains, and can do analytical thinking.
But why consider that when you can just label people and be assholes about it?
Fact: There are *HUGE* gaps in the fossil record. There is not ONE SINGLE SHRED of fossile
evidence that links one species with another -- no intermediate forms. Intermediate forms almost
ALWAYS contractict survival of the fittest. Can't have one wing, one leg, etc. without being easy prey.
Fact: Most of evolution is based on some sort of dating method -- carbon 14, potassium/argon, uranium/lead,
etc. Ever do any simple research to see how this works?
1. Bring rocks into a place that does dating.
2. Be prepared to know what layer you got the rocks from. Make sure you have 8-10 samples.
3. They date, and give you a number.
Q: Why do you need 8-10 samples?
A: Because the results from each sample vary plus or minus about 10 billion percent.
Q: Why do you have to know the layer the rocks came from?
A: So they will know which wildly varying results to THROW OUT.
Q: How do you know how old the layers are, that you are using to narrow the results?
A: From carbon 14, potassium/argon, uranium/lead dating, silly!!!
I am very sick and tired of being labeled a mindless imbecile just because I choose to
believe what I consider a MUCH easier explanation to what is all around us. I admire
evolutionists in that it takes an unbelievably huge amount of faith to believe an explanation
of the origin of the universe that is so full of holes and circular logic.
science doesn't deal in Truth, and its viewpoints and theories change with time.
Wrong. Science deals with levels of truth, approaching towards a slightly truer truth as time passes.
Somebody much more eloquent than myself already explained this in The Relativity of Wrong, by Isaac Asimov.
Many people who are hard-line creationists (or generally anything hard-line-faith) use their influence for more than just religion. By preaching "faith without question" people can identify those that are easily manipulated and abuse them for whatever alternative motives they want and justify it with mystery.
Most of the suicide pacts, cults, terrorist groups, and dictators operate on the same premise: Blind faith, fear, and promises of a better life (in this life or the next).
Some elected officials on both sides of the issues try to use the same tactics and thankfully it doesnt always work.
Especially when it comes to the wilfully foolish, which you have to be in order to be a fundamentalist of any stripe. If a person had made the decision to lie to themselves to be more comfortable, there's really not much you can do.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The reason the Cambrian stands out is that it's the first period that saw widespread hard body parts that actually had a decent chance of fossilizing. And we even have some good reasons for the morphological variation seen.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
"You can lay out all the fossils that have been collected and establish lineages that even a fool could work up."
What an unfortunately ironic choice of words, as I do believe Mr. Leakey has already worked up the lineage.
I've recently begun to challenge my views that evolution is a fact. I don't debate that adaptation occurs and has for millenia, but when someone comes up with a statement such as ...work searching for fossils in the mid-1960s and his team unearthed a nearly complete 1.6-million-year-old skeleton in 1984 that became known as ...
How do you know it is 1.6 Million years old? Radio carbon dating can't tell you that, and making up other random issotopes to use is a game that leads to the fact that we 'guess' the age to be 1.6 million years... how is this done? Well the science isn't very solid here, and the question arrises as to how exactly does he know that this skeleton is 1.6 million years old, and if there really were thousands these 'pre-human' people how come there is only one fossil? Where did the rest of them go? Presumably whatever preserved that fossil(or the fossils of the dinosaurs) would have preserved a hell of a lot more than one 'pre-historic' version of a specific 'species'
I have only ever asked one question of those that adhere to the "scientific facts" of evolution.... Please explain to me the "moment of origin". Begin with "There was nothing...", and then explain where the "something" came from that allowed process "x" begin.
Once that has been answered, the rest of the debate can continue.
Does this debate exist anywhere outside the US and maybe some south-american countries? -- I have never seen a trace of it in Europe, (where I live).
When somebody visits who actually believes the bible is literally true, the usual reaction is somewhere between utter astonishment, disbelief and ridicule.
This is why I am always surprised that scientists feel the need to even bring this up: it is like zoologists regularly talking about mermaids or the egg-laying easter bunny.
I don't understand why he would even bring up Genesis and God and all that. That stuff has nothing to do with evolution. The fundamentalists who use documents written in 700 BC to make their case aren't going to be swayed by any amount of empirical evidence. They choose to remain ignorant because their theology isn't flexible enough to deal with the truth. That isn't true of all Christian sects.
In fact, most reasonable Christian sects only keep the Old Testament around for its historical significance. The whole point of following the teachings of Jesus Christ rather than old fashioned Judaism is because Jesus told people to repudiate the old teachings in favor of pure morality: love one another and all that good stuff. People who even bother to concern themselves with the afterlife nonsense are the worst kind of, "What's in it for me?" types that misunderstand the whole point in honoring the man and learning what is known about his life (multiple sources are studied rather than a single gospel because it's understood that none of it is very accurate - the parallels and deviations are very interesting, as does how this escapes fundamentalist preachers).
So who's mind is going to be changed by any amount of scientific evidence? It won't be the Lutherans or the Catholics who already believe in evolution. It won't be the Baptists who are batshit insane. I'm pretty sure most Baptists know that evolution, in one form or another, is just a fact of life. They're just in denial and the truth never really mattered to them anyway, or they wouldn't be Baptists.
If the scientific community feels they have enough empirical evidence to claim evolution has exceeded being a theory and can now be considered a verifiable fact, then that's great. By why troll the fundamentalists? They're not going to be convinced unless God himself tells them it's true.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
The Jesus people will simply claim that it was intelligent involvement, and stick to their claims.
You can lay out all the fossils that have been collected and establish lineages that even a fool could work up.
Perhaps because it was a fool that established it in the first place.
It's an easy move to just claim that evolution is god's method. That's why is not very productive to use evidence of evolution in a debate about the existence of a god. The debate has to be over more fundamental questions, like what information is there in any religious text that could have not been invented by mortal humans.
MrWhy
Newtonian physics was unshakable until Einstein disproved it.
Evolutionists should be deemed anti-creationists (aka anti-religion) and ignore evidence disproving evolution as they claim religious persons ignore supporting evidence. But the hypocrisy is all one-sided. Evolutionists claim there is "all this proof" in support of their case when actually the opposite is ocurring. Take for example (credit attributed below):
1. Sudden emergence of new species out of nowhere, fully complete with all their characteristics and not changing over time. "...the infinitude of connecting links has still not been discovered and the fossil record is about as discontinuous as it was when Darwin was writing the Origin." - Michael Denton, "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis"
2. Computers have shown that the neat evolutionary trees that get drawn up are in fact based on imaginary relations of similarity and difference that owe more to the human mind's tendency to perceive patterns than to the raw biological data.
3. Many putative The order of nucleotides in a DNA or RNA molecule, or the order of amino acids in a protein molecule.sequences which look logical based on the progression of one set of anatomical characteristics suddenly look illogical when attention is switched to another set. For example, the lungfish superficially seems to make a good intermediate between fish and amphibian, until one examines the rest of its internal organs, which are not intermediate in character, nor are the ways in which its eggs develop.
4. ...the evolution of present-day organisms from their supposed ancestors are in fact highly conjectural if not downright false. ... And even the emergence of one species from another has never been directly observed by science.
5. ...(Evolution) remains incapable of explaining how anything could evolve that doesn't make biological sense when incomplete. The wings of birds are the classic example: what good is half of one?
6. It was hoped that a thorough cross-species comparison of these (organic compounds) would reveal the kinds of relationships of graded similarity that evolution implies. But it hasn't. Instead, it has given the same picture of distinct species that examination of gross anatomy does.
7. The data used to support evolution are neither experiments nor repeatable, nor can they be, since the origin of species on earth was a unique event.
Robert Locke
"The Scientific Case Against Evolution"
http://www.godandscience.org/evolution/locke.html
Most Christians I know don't accept a 6000 year old Earth.
Long Day Theory.
When you're looking at a point where science and Christianity disagree, most likely it is bad theology on the part of the Christian. God loves you. Jesus is LORD. I know.
God spoke to me
I am Christian and I believe that evolution is correct, but what bugs me is people that use evolution as proof that God doesn't exist. It has been my experience that only the more fundamentalist Christian denominations still spout about creationism and frankly it is making the rest of Christianity look like a group of ignorant, inbred hicks. I don't view all of Islam as being suicidal, ignorant, western haters, and I would appreciate others to not view all of Christianity as being a bunch of ignorant hicks that all believe in creationism. Even the Roman Catholic Pope believes in evolution.
Young-universe theories in a nutshell:
"The laws of physics changed several thousand years ago, perhaps by divine (i.e. outside of the laws of physics) intervention, and since we don't know what the laws were or even how to estimate what the laws were, we can't (yet) extrapolate backwards more than a few thousand years using only science."
Or, to put it a bit more "scientifically":
"Old-universe theorists assume that the laws of the universe have not changed since the very first small fraction of time, if then. This theory is no more scientifically testable than our theory, which is that the laws of physics did change sometime in the 5-10,000 year ago time-frame. Our theory also states that we do not yet know or have the means to find what those laws are or how the laws of physics changed. We admit an unscientific assumption that a divine being is responsible for these changes. We challenge old-Universe theorists to scientifically prove that the laws of the universe have not changed beyond the very first moments of the Universe's history."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
First of all, there were known issues with Newtonian mechanics decades before Einstein came along, and Einstein didn't disprove Newtonian mechanics so much as make it a special non-relativistic case of GR.
Look up diploidy, idiot.
Bullshit. Similar techniques have been used to trace historic and extant languages since the 18th century.
The lungfish is a modern species, and the rest of the statement is a word salad.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What's so bad about describing an object as roughly 10 units across and 30 units around?
Nothing. Its just scientific types who want to argue about God and will ignore their own mathematical priniciple of "significant digits" in their haste who complain.
"10" is one significant digit. "30" is one significant digit. "30/10 = 3" is not only correct for infinite precision based on individual "units" (like "dollar bills" or "golf balls"), but for the number of significant digits in the problem when talking about real physical measurements. And pi just happens to equal 3 TO ONE SIGNIFICANT DIGIT. "3.1415..." rounds down.
How many scientists pull a copy of Hansel and Gretel off the shelf when they want to calculate the BTU output of a gas stove? "Well, we have this well documented story where an oven raised the temperature of an X pound boy Y degrees, and we know the approximate heat capacity of the human body is Z, so that means ..."
Can we please move on to something more significant to argue about as the proof for no God?
And leave the theology to the theologians?
The notion of Young Earth Creationism wasn't popular in the early church, and in fact the Six Ages of the World theory is just another wacky idea from the supreme Wackadoodle of Western Christianity, Augustine. In contrast, listen to what Origen (3rd century) said:
I'm minded of a legendary, possibly apocryphal quote from Karl Barth (pronounced "bart") when he was confronted by a woman who couldn't believe in a talking snake in Genesis 3. "It is not so very important whether the snake spoke. It is much more important what the snake said." Most serious theologians think that the purpose of Genesis 1-11 was not to give literal history, but to setup the basic propositions that:
You don't have to agree with this; but I wish that those opposed to Christianity (neo-atheists, gay rights activists, and the like) would stop telling the church that we are not permitted to interpret our own sacred texts in ways that we have used for thousands of years.
(Note: I have a Ph.D. in "Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity: Textual and Historical Studies" from the University of Virginia -- basically, New Testament as I focused it -- so feel qualified to speak with some authority on this subject.)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
People not interested in facts aren't persuaded by them.
#6495ED - cornflower blue
just because you are religious and have some sort of arbitrary "purpose", then you are just another type of judgemental asshole, no better and likely worse than most.
Does your "god" want you to be an asshole, or is that just an unintended side-effect?
Guess your religion isn't working too well, is it?
Neil deGrasse Tyson sums up the debate nicely. He points out how with all the life and beauty of the world it seems magical, but when you step back a bit, you can see how completely fucked up the design really is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEl9kVl6KPc
Most scientists experience first hand that science was built by all the previous scientists and that their purpose in life, as a scientist, is to continue building the culture of humanity.
All scientific papers acknowledge some of the previous papers upon wich they build.
Humanity's culture has given you so much, why not give something back ? And you may even live long enough to see what you gave being improved by others, which is one of the greatest satisfaction.
You can get much more than what you give. This is like a relationship with someone who has a very big potential, namely humanity.
Well, I know for a fact that it can't be talking about a literal day, because that requires a sun, and the sun wasn't created until the fourth "day" even according to the story.
As I understand it, the sun was created early on, but it was not resolvable until the fourth creative day because the atmosphere had been diffusing the light. Hence the difference between "let there be light" (1:3) and "let there be sources of light in the expanse of the heavens" (1:14).
A good chunk of the Old Testament was written by people who thought the world was flat
I beg to differ. The author of Job knew that the earth is suspended in space (Job 26:7) and that the day-night boundary is a circle (Job 26:10). The prophet Isaiah also spoke of a round earth (Isaiah 40:21-22), as did Solomon (Proverbs 8:27).
If he'd have caught this front page article he'd have saved himself some future embarrassment.
So you're saying he's resting right now?
At least that's how several Christian denominations interpret Hebrews 4.
I assume if there are no false fossils then the universe is billions of years old.
Of course it is. Genesis 1 days are figurative, as we've been discussing over here.
Evil exists because of free will and God would rather have free will and evil than remove free will.
Evil will be removed once it has had its turn on the throne after which it will be destroyed in a lake of fire.
If so I can get all of that but the one thing I still don't get is why would God's intervention in the world reduce in proportion to the availability of reliable evidence?
It's a punctuated equilibrium. Notice how the miracles have been spaced out throughout the roughly six millennia after the creation of man.
I have a number of religious friends who in all other things I respect their logic and reason fully, but I dare not ask them these questions at dinner parties for fear of annoying them
If they are as Christian as they claim they are, they'd be happy to reason with you from the Scriptures.
What's so bad about describing an object as roughly 10 units across and 30 units around?
The fact that you are giving both the circumference and the diameter of a circle; only one is necessary, and it is impossible to accurately give both. I am not blaming the authors of the bible for giving such a description, though, since I doubt they were familiar with geometry or anything beyond the most rudimentary math.
It certainly isn't exact but it's not too bad if you're just approximating for story telling purposes.
My point is that there are plenty of people who say that the bible is not just "for story telling purposes" and that it is the "perfect word of God." When you stop using the bible as a way to illustrate moral precepts and start trying to say that scientific results must be false if they do not agree with what the bible says, then giving a rough and mathematically unsound measurement of an object is most certainly problematic. Again, the people who say that the theory of evolution is the work of Satan do not respond to objects about the measurements given in Kings and Chronicles by saying that it is OK for a story to give such measurements; they respond with convoluted explanations that attempt to justify the measurements as given.
Palm trees and 8
Because if you could reason with religious people, there wouldn't be any religious people. They don't care about evidence or science or logic or reason, because the devil invented that silly nonsense to test their faith.
How much work could a network work if a network could net work?
How many scientists pull a copy of Hansel and Gretel off the shelf when they want to calculate the BTU output of a gas stove?
The same number that pull a copy of the bible off the shelf when they want to know the age of the Earth. That is exactly my point: there is nothing wrong with the bible as an ancient Jewish storybook, but it is absurd to point to the bible whenever someone talks about the Earth being billions of years old. People who give complicated explanations about why the biblical measurements of round objects are acceptable do so because they are absolutely unwilling to admit that the bible is just a storybook and not an accurate description of the physical world.
Palm trees and 8
The only way to win the evolution debate game is not to play.
and condemning anyone who dare believe what they see
People can believe what they see and still believe that what they see has a loving creator. "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands." (Psalm 19:1) God's "invisible qualities are clearly seen from the world’s creation onward, because they are perceived by the things made, even his eternal power and Godship." (Romans 1:20)
to an eternity of torture
The Bible teaches that "the wages sin pays is death" (Romans 6:23), not eternal conscious torment. It teaches an everlasting judgment of destruction for people who continue to act like jerks toward God and toward their fellow man, but it's just that: destruction. Jesus likened the second death to the town dump where garbage was destroyed through burning.
It's perfectly reasonably to beat someone repeatedly, then expect them to love you for it.
"One who loves his children is careful to discipline them." --Proverbs 13:24.
Before you is the collected works of science over the last 400 years. We have shown the body of the heavens is predictable
Yes, creation is a marvelous machine set into motion by its builders, Jehovah God and his son Jesus.
"This man is the devil and the world is 6,000 years old and you're going to Hell unless you believe me!" says the preacher.
Then the preacher is misled. The Bible doesn't teach a literal 144-hour creation, as we've been discussing over here.
Not all interpretations of Matthew 10:34 hold that Jesus endorsed conversion through violence.
So if you think it's ok to eat bacon? You are not following Jesus
That's the Judaizer fallacy. The first hint that one need not follow Jewish dietary laws to do God's will was given in Peter's vision in Acts 10. Later, it was determined at the Council of Jerusalem that even though many early Christians were recruited from Judaism, one need not become Jewish to become a Christian.
Ive been reading /. for a couple of years and doctors(excluding the Phd variant) seem to be a seriously under represented group.
Admittedly Slashdot is a community catering towards other professions(as evidenced by a lack of choice when it came to selecting my profession as i made this id)
I think it actually requires more faith to believe that evolution is capable of the immense complexity that is the human body.
Also as a poster pointed above, evolution doesn't deal with the origin of life as many of the comments seem to imply.
Sorry for the rant, but this post really got under my skin for some reason.
First of all, the process of evolution is a FACT, not a belief, and certainly not a religion. Genetic mutation and selection, all that good stuff? It happens constantly in all living things. Period. It can be repeatedly and reliably demonstrated in experiments. Much of the ecosystem, not to mention all of modern biology (including and especially medicine), would not be possible without evolution. There's exactly zero room for argument on this.
It is the history of evolution where some amount of guesswork comes in to fill gaps in our ever-increasing knowledge. We dig up fossils and other evidence and piece them together as best we can to try to tell the story of our past, no different from social history. But there is more than enough evidence in your own modern DNA to demonstrate a long line of mutations, of which we can actually peel back the layers to trace it back a fair distance. (I'm no biologist, but the things I've read about virus activity in our DNA is particularly fascinating.) We have enough evidence, just from comparing samples of modern DNA from different haploid types (races), to establish a very large part of the story of how modern humans evolved. Likewise, without even looking at the fossil record, we can show from dormant or unusual code that other animals have evolved.
So that's that. Anyone comparing the science of evolution to religion doesn't know much about either one of them. But that's not what irked me. It was how you portray your own brand of weak agnosticism as somehow rational, justifying it not with a logical argument, but with a quantum mechanics thought experiment and a . You, sir, are deluding yourself.
To say that the entire Earth (let alone the entire Universe), in some incredibly unlikely quantum event, from a cloud of dust or whatever, instantly (hell, even within a few thousand years) snapped into place, materializing in such a way as to show fictional evidence of life going back a billion years and with a species of sentient animals complete with personal and social memories of culture and past events is... completely ridiculous. Possible? Maybe. I'm not a physicist, but I would suspect there may be a physical limitation to that sort of thing. I would say it is far more likely that there's an invisible pink unicorn in my backyard. Or a teapot orbiting Mars. The problem is that there's no evidence for any of the above--certainly not for anything on such a conspiratorial scale--and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You're giving credibility to events involving probabilities with more zeroes than the entire world supply of data storage could accommodate... and you don't have a single shred of evidence to point to. No evidence, no argument. Debating about it at this point is interesting, but really only amounts to philosophical masturbation.
If you want to declare Causality to be unreliable and your own senses and memories suspect, then you cannot with a straight face claim to believe in anything. You're simply a hypocrite performing mental gymnastics to protect for your own insecurities.
Oh, and I don't think circumstantial evidence means what you think it does. Circumstantial evidence is by far more common than direct evidence and can, in fact, be much more powerful. With all this circumstantial evidence, we can piece together a pretty tight-knit inductive argument. However, if you were to simply invent a time machine (as I saw you mention elsewhere) to observe the entire Universe, all you would have is your own eyewitness account. Direct evidence, sure, but not nearly as credible. Even if you DID observe the Earth popping into existence, the anomoly would be far more likely to be localized to you, rather than global or universal.
Must be new here.
There is no amount of evidence that could convince these people, because their minds don't operate like that. A scientist observes and builds a model of reality to explain observations. The creationist doesn't need to observe, because he already has a perfect model of reality. Any observations that contradict it are to be ignored, lied about, or dismissed. When a creationist claims to ask for evidence, his intention is not to learn, because he already has perfect knowledge. His intention is to ensnare the audience in a web of lies. This is a discipline called apologetics, in which the only objective of a debate is to score points by hook or by crook. Feeding evidence to them is to feed an endless abyss that spits all of your information back at you, distorted, that listens only to find ambiguities or gaps in your knowledge, to fill them with religion. Give them better evidence, and they will not thank you - they will be angry at you, because you're making them work harder to twist and refute you. Annoy them enough, and they will attack your character personally and professionally.
Once Mr. Leakey realizes this, he will no longer lack animosity toward religion.
Clarification for anyone who may be interested ... ...
In Hindu scripture the supreme god is an embodiment of energy; not a human.
Very interestingly, Vishnu (the preserver of the universe) is supposed to take different forms or Avatars to help keep the universe running (and that's the origin of the term Avatar). The first form was a fish, the second a turtle, the third a lion (more specifically half line / half man). Amazing how that parallels evolution
The rest were humans, but with increasingly subtle differentiations of what is right and what is wrong. Krishna (the Krishna in Hare Krishna) is the 7th or 8th avatar based on who is counting, and is a God for our times if you will.
Just like nearly every other religion, hinduism has "populist" stuff, which the more politically minded (who get to run temples and run their own sects or cults) use to control the population. Thats how most folks in India see the Hare Krishna movement. In India, as education has spread, the hold of these folks has got weaker, and you can see that in the changing norms and standards in India. 10 years ago you could be spat on for wearing a bikini. Today Bollywood heroines can't make it big without at least one swim suite scene in their movies.
Hinduism is about 5,000 to 7,000 years old depending on whose reckoning you follow. If you want to see the future of Christianity and Islam, and to understand how the Church and State use religion to control folks - go study Indian history. You will see parallels everywhere. Institutionalized ignorance to control the populace. The aggregation of wealth into the hands of the a few claiming to control the gates to the Gods and heaven. Extreme factions united by a single extreme belief pushing their agenda over that of the majority. The use of religious fanatism to win wars.
Been there; done that.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
most people of the so called "evolution" theory can never ever link humans to whatever they wanna believe,and most people who "believe" in "evolution" are ignorants who just go with the flow to prove something childish,if you wanna be an atheist ,just be that,don't try to fake some scientific evidences just to satisfy your childish needs !! it is impossible with the current state of "sciences" to prove anything of that stuff they claim about "humans" !
People who give complicated explanations about why the biblical measurements of round objects are acceptable do so because they are absolutely unwilling to admit that the bible is just a storybook and not an accurate description of the physical world.
I'm sorry that you find the concept of "significant digits" to be complicated. It is quite accurate, within the number of significant digits used, to talk about a round object that is 30 units in circumference and 10 units in diameter. Your inability to suss out what one digit of significance means doesn't make the description any less accurate. It probably wasn't intended to be more accurate than 1 sig. digit, and so the fact that it isn't means nothing.
That's of course no problem assuming that you are not using planar, but spherical geometry. On spheres, the quotient of circumference and diameter is always smaller than pi. As an extreme case, if the circle is the equator, then the circumference is just twice the diameter.
Of course if you use that assumption to calculate the size of that sphere, you'll find a sphere circumference of exactly 60 units. I somehow doubt they used such a large unit that the circumference of the earth has only 60 of them.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It is a more complicated explanation than, "The people who wrote that passage did not know about Pi or that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle is constant and that therefore only one measurement is needed." Nowhere does the bible talk about significant digits; nor does the bible take the time to explain how the measurements were taken, which would go a long way toward justifying such large margins of error.
Palm trees and 8
God created (or as some would say organized the existing materials) this earth and placed man on it. So that's what happened but does it explain in detail how that happened? Not to my understanding it doesn't, nor does it explain everything ever but is more along the lines of spiritually oriented. The point being is it impossible for both to be true, to some extent at the very least.
/flamebaitfornotagreeingwiththestatusquo
IS based on EVERYTHING changing on earth. One of the most important core tenets of the text is that God is the only thing which is unchanging in this universe.
Your point draws the circle back to the catch 22 of metaphor and judgment. If breaking the rules results in judgement unto hell, shouldn't the rule book use a style a bit more nailed down than metaphor? Unless I'm only to be judged metaphorically.
As you metaphor, so shall you be metaphor'd.
Mr. Leaky: You are not American, so you might not quite understand our uniquely American style of entrenched stubborn irrationality.
In America, we have the "Birther Movement" -- a surprisingly large group of people who believe (with all the passion that a human can muster) that President Obama was born in Kenya, and that all so-called evidence of his American birth has been fabricated in a massive conspiracy.
Over the past few years, we have found that no amount of evidence (such as birth certificates, newspaper birth announcements, etc.) has had any effect on the Birther Movement. In fact, it's quite possible that the effort to document Obama's American birth has strengthened the Birther Movement, because it provides more "evidence" of the massive size and scale of the "conspiracy" that is working to cover up the true origin of his birth.
So I make a bold prediction: I believe that as your stronger evidence of evolution emerges, a sizable group of Americans will become even more adamantly opposed to it. Their intensity and clarity of purpose will attract additional Americans to their cause, and the percentage of people here who reject evolution will grow over time.
Modern science isn't that conceptually different to most religions (talking organised religions here). Its followers believe in empirical evidence (evidence collated by our senses alone). Most religions share this belief, but add further avenues of perception on top. More importantly, almost every religion (amongst other things):
1. Believes it deprecates all previous religions.
2. Insists it is incompatible with other religions (despite evidence to the contrary).
3. Claims to answer all the questions you have (and if not now it will in the future).
4. Hates being compared on the same platform as other religions.
Go ahead and mod me down if you think I don't "understand science" or am a troll sent from the Vatican, but you'll only be confirming point 4.
> there is nothing wrong with the bible as an ancient Jewish storybook
Don't forget the splitters...
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
2. Computers have shown that the neat evolutionary trees that get drawn up are in fact based on imaginary relations of similarity and difference that owe more to the human mind's tendency to perceive patterns than to the raw biological data.
...and physics is the study of frictionless elephants whose mass can be ignored. Are those "neat evolutionary trees" trees actually used by biologists or are they simplifed examples given in popular accounts?
4. ...the evolution of present-day organisms from their supposed ancestors are in fact highly conjectural if not downright false. ... And even the emergence of one species from another has never been directly observed by science.
Not so.
5. ...(Evolution) remains incapable of explaining how anything could evolve that doesn't make biological sense when incomplete. The wings of birds are the classic example: what good is half of one?
Well, at least you didn't dredge up the eye here.... Presumably you don't mean "half of one", you mean "something halfway towards one", well, then....
7. The data used to support evolution are neither experiments nor repeatable, nor can they be, since the origin of species on earth was a unique event.
"The origin of species on earth" is a process, not an event. Yes, evolutionary biology, like geology, is a "historical" science, so it makes "retrodictions", but....
Does this debate exist anywhere outside the US and maybe some south-american countries? -- I have never seen a trace of it in Europe, (where I live).
Yes, it does. I suspect Jewish creationism is enough of a minority view that the debate isn't huge in Israel, but I might be mistaken there. I don't know how significant Hindu creationism is.
Yet another article that seems to imply you can't believe in evolution and be a Christian. This is not the case and Biologos is one such institution setup by Christian biologists that has a wealth of information to support the case for Christians accepting evolution and genesis. One of those involved was previously head of the human genome project. The book "the language of science and faith" which I have just finished reading provides additional insights.
The far right will just invent a bigger fool to counter.
The dead are already sleeping on a backup disk. After the dust settles from Armageddon, the dead will be restored from backup over a thousand years so that people can clean up Earth under Jesus M. Christ's guidance. As I understand it, the rate of this resurrection will be carefully controlled to match the increase in Earth's carrying capacity due to cleanup efforts. This "great fsck" will make Earth like new, and once it resembles Earth at the end of the sixth creative age, Christ will hand it back to the Father.
Evolution makes no claims as to the origin of life. The theory of evolution only suggests a mechanism through which life changes over subsequent generations. You may be thinking of abiogenesis, which has little if anything to do with evolutionary theory. If you believe in genetic heredity and that the fittest are more likely to survive, then I'm not sure how you can take issue with the idea of evolution. In any case, if abiogenesis interests you, Freeman Dyson (of Manhattan Project fame) wrote an awesome and readable piece "origins of life" that you might find interesting.
if Jesus died for your sins, including original sin, then before Jesus there was no way to be absolved of original sin
True. The blood of animals sacrificed under Jewish law just covered up sin; it didn't wash it away. But it was a symbol of the provision that Jehovah was going to make in the blood of his son Jesus, which would absolve Jehovah's loyal followers whether they died before or after Jesus.
Why do people get bent up about fossils. Surely even if you removed all fossils, there is still enough other evidence to support evolution?
and in fact, if I wanted to dispove evolution, wouldn't looking for a fossil "out of place" be a good way to do it?
First of all, there were known issues with Newtonian mechanics decades before Einstein came along, and Einstein didn't disprove Newtonian mechanics so much as make it a special non-relativistic case of GR.
And there are significant issues with evolution as well, which is why it is still a theory. Even after decades of research, the evidence against evolution is accumulating while the finding of fossil records of the "missing links" is languishing.
Look up diploidy, idiot.
The comment was about the fossil records, not genetics (yet). Moron.
Bullshit. Similar techniques have been used to trace historic and extant languages since the 18th century.
How fast did those computers run in the 18th century? A non-sequitur.
The lungfish is a modern species, and the rest of the statement is a word salad.
The lungfish was how the theory of evolution was initially sold, claiming how 4-legged creatues appeared on earth 360 million years ago. It doesn't look like the lungfish has evolved at all in 360 million years to me. Plus, why it does it have more DNA per cell than humans? So go ahead and dismiss the rest of the "word salad" without addressing the points.
Adaption, variation, mutation, and secondary speciation of plants or bacteria isn't proof of evolution.
There is no such thing as a half bird. There were feathered dinosaurs who may have used the feathers for cooling. At any rate, co-option of one feature for another purpose is a hallmark of evolution.
The point is 'what good is half a wing', not 'half a bird'. Did wings just suddenly appear or were they adapted from ancestral forelimbs? Scientists don't even know if these "protowings" were adapted from gliding creatures or adapted from dinosaurs into powered flight.
HORRIBLY TORTURED FOR ETERNITY
What the hell are you talking about? The Bible teaches that "the wages sin pays is death" (Romans 6:23), not eternal conscious torment. Death/Sheol/Hades is not torment; it is an unconscious state (Eccl. 9:5). Gehenna is not eternal conscious torment either; it is destruction in the lake of fire, a second death from which there is no resurrection.
Cats aren't mentioned in the bible either, so do (bible following) religious people believe in cats? :P
Well, if you actually read the survey trends, you'd see they are _dropping_ from past surveys.
You'd also notice that the percentage of those who answer 3) is similar for those who attend church regularly and those who rarely attend.
I suggest you read this and then think about the margin of error for this non-scientific poll.
But hell, there are big problems with the wording of the question right out of the gate:
"Which of the following statements comes _closest_ to your views on the origin and development of human beings?
1) Human Beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life but God guided this process
2) Human Beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life but God had no part in this process
3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?"
----------
1. What does "pretty much" mean in question number 3? As worded this strictly does not preclude evolution. I know what the survey writers were getting at, but it's poor wording.
2. So what does "come closest" mean in the question? Why not map to 4) Other?
3. Despite asking questions about educational level, the survey never asks whether the person has been exposed to the theory of evolution.
Throw in a bunch of respondents who either don't understand the question, can't be bothered to think about their response longer than the commercial time between their shows, inconsistencies in those that perform the telephone interviews and you're damn well sure the margin of error is not +/- 4%.
What would be interesting to me, is the breakdown of those that answered #3, one aspect being religious affiliation and whether that view contradicts church teaching (i.e. Catholics don't believe #3).
Assuming an omnipotent God, why should she create a world without a perfect history according to the rules she set out to govern the world? The only proof of the past is the traces that it has left on the present, and that includes your memory of what happened 5 minutes ago. And try proving the present. Good luck.
If I were a composer, I would be annoyed at audience insisting that only the final chord of my composition is worth looking at because I am such a genius that I can't be expected to keep time.
"You are such a great author! I worship you!" "What have you read from me?" "Oh, nothing. I would not want to defile your creation by trying to read sense into it. But I have been told by others that your works are fabulous!"
Genesis is what you come up with when your world is not informed by science. It's a way of explaining good and evil and the origins of the universe and man in a way that the uneducated can understand. It's an explanation that worked until science figured out all but the very beginning of the universe. ...and God said, "Let there by light..." and there was a big bang.
Since most of your response refers to the the Talk Origins' article Observed Instances of Speciation, I will post a summarized response from Specious Speciation: The Myth of Observed Large-Scale Evolutionary Change:
- Not one of the examples studied documents the origin of large-scale biological change.
- The vast majority of the examples do not even show the production of new species, where a "species" is defined by the standard definition of a "reproductively isolated population."
- Only one single example in the FAQ shows the production of a new plant species via hybridization and polyploidy, but this example does not entail significant biological change.
- Only one of the examples purports to document the production of a reproductively isolated population of animals -- however this example is overturned by a later study not mentioned in the FAQ.
- Thus, not a single bona fide example of speciation in animals -- e.g. the establishment of a completely reproductively isolated population -- was found.
Nowhere does the bible talk about significant digits;
"The Bible is not an ancient mathematics textbook, therefore it is inaccurate and unbelievable." Somehow it seems a bit arrogant to assume that a concept that most (but apparently not all) scientists are familiar with would be a complete mystery to an omniscient being. "Hey, God, your Bible doesn't mention protons and electrons and man knows all about them, so man is clearly smarter than You are!"
nor does the bible take the time to explain how the measurements were taken,
"The Bible does not report every detail of daily life as experienced by the people of the time, therefore it is inaccurate and unbelievable."
which would go a long way toward justifying such large margins of error.
The "large margins of error" you proclaim happen to be within the margin of error for the reported measurements, according to current scientific processes and thought. I think the problem lies not in the Bible but in your understanding of the purpose and context thereof, and modern scientific concepts regarding math. Please go look up "significant figures" and don't use the "images" section of Google to do it.
In this sense some countries like Norway are living in the future ...
The dissent isn't about evolution as a scientific theory useful for making predictions. The dissent is against scientists claiming that a scientific theory can make metaphysical claims, or rather, that the misguided metaphysical claims it makes are valid outside of science. To wit: we think we've proven some kind of evolution, therefore there is no God. The next step drives many, if not most?, champions of evolution: .. and therefore there is no morals, no meaning, no significance, no restraint other than what the will of [us] impose on [ourselves].
http://www.alternet.org/story/154252/the_republican_brain:_why_even_educated_conservatives_deny_science_--_and_reality/
Just want to point out that the theory of evolution is constantly evolving itself, or should be: Scientists Late to Recognize Human and Giant Mammal Coexistence
"The Bible is not an ancient mathematics textbook, therefore it is inaccurate and unbelievable." Somehow it seems a bit arrogant to assume that a concept that most (but apparently not all) scientists are familiar with would be a complete mystery to an omniscient being.
The concept is, however, a mystery to a large number (and I would go as far as to conjecture a majority) of the people who read the bible and who rely on it as a source of knowledge. One would think that an omniscient being could have taken the time to clarify a simple detail like significant figures, or to explain why it is necessary or sensible to report both the radius and the circumference of a circle.
"The Bible does not report every detail of daily life as experienced by the people of the time, therefore it is inaccurate and unbelievable."
You are the one who tried to bring scientific reporting techniques into this conversation, not me. When scientists report a measurement, they are expected to report how that measurement was taken so that other people can assess their technique and possibly duplicate their results. With this passage in the bible, we are left guessing about how the measurement was taken -- was it based on the dimensions of someone's arm? Was it based on a standardized rod? A ruler? Some other apparatus?
The "large margins of error" you proclaim happen to be within the margin of error for the reported measurements
Those margins of error are enormous by any reasonable standard, and any scientific paper would need to explain why they are so big. If taking the measurements was particularly difficult with ancient technology, then they are acceptable measurements since nobody would expect anything better -- but as noted above, we have no idea how those measurements were taken.
You keep harping on about significant figures, but you miss a more general point: the bible was not written by some omniscient being, it was written by people thousands of years ago. Those people were not mathematicians or scientists, and the is no reason to expect that what they wrote should be remotely accurate. Take the bible for what it is: an ancient book of stories, poems, and edited copies of government records. It is absurd to use the bible as a record of anything scientific -- not merely because of a passage about a round object, but because of the sheer weight of scientific evidence against biblical assertions.
Palm trees and 8
Perhaps "moot" as in "moot point" is in the sense of an issue that is only debatable academically because it is otherwise irrelevant under the facts. Or perhaps it derives from "moot court", an exercise in which law students practice a fake appellate case in front of law professors.
What complicates any discussion of hell is that there are two distinct states called "hell" in English translations of the Bible. One is Sheol or Hades, the place where the dead sleep unconsciously: "the dead are conscious of nothing" (Eccl. 9:5). The other is Gehenna, where the unrepentant are permanently destroyed in the second death. Which hell are you talking about?
As a study of the past, material science can only investigate 'what appears to have been, based on current evidence', and not 'what actually was' in the very possible case that these two notions: 'what appears to have been', and 'what was', do not converge. It is not sensible for one conducting a scientific investigation into 'what was' based on current evidence to assume otherwise, for then they have no foundations. But just because this is a necessary assumption for the investigating scientists neither makes it true, nor implies that others should take on this assumption. The alternative is that the past cannot be deduced logically from available evidence, and then one must look to other sources of inspiration. Scientists do not do this, but many religious believers do. Thus we find that the two camps may be standing on different, incompatible, foundations, both of which can make sense depending on your standpoint. Total victory on the part of the evolution brigade is as absurd as an 'it's all in Gen 1' approach, being possible only with the kind of conquest over peoples thinking and beliefs that the Christians and Muslims have tried in the past. (Guess what: other belief systems survived, and a new one is now in the ascendency, but needs to learn from past attempts at conquest of belief and realise that there are better ways forward.) On both sides, though more on the fundamentalist religious side, people need to be encouraged, gently, to open their minds to other possibilities besides the ones they take on faith. And this taking things on blind faith is, so far as I'm concerned, philosophically unavoidable. Anyone whether of a holy book or a science book, who believes otherwise is deluded.
John_Chalisque
One of my points is that Fundamentalists are not the only game in town with respect to religion and the Evolution Controversy. As to attributing this book to the Hare Krishna movement, the forward to this book had Something-Something-Center for Krishna Consciousness. I took this organization to be speaking for whom we in the West call "the Hare Krishna's" rather than Hinduism in general.
I have the impression that the Hare Krishna movement does not speak for all Hindus and may even, in India, be regarded as something as an heretical sect. On the other hand, I kind of have the impression that Hinduism isn't as "uptight" about perceived heresy and deviationism as the three major Abrahamic Western religions. Correct me if I am wrong, but an observant Hindu would not be going around saying "Don't pay heed to those Hare Krishna people" but would not necessarily be endorsing everything they say. I also have the impression that the Hare Krishna movement comes out of the cultural context of Hinduism -- at least they base parts of their religion on Hindu scripture and religious culture?
Leakey, an atheist, insists he has no animosity toward religion.
It's not covered by Genesis. There's no explanation for this change going back 500 million years in any book I've read from the lips of any God.
No animosity, but has no problem confusing the issue. Not getting religious here (don't accuse me of having a religion in any replies - you'd be having a difficult time understanding what nihilism is if you do that).
First, the fossil record agrees with the order that Genesis lists creation as having occurred. (The second time Genesis mentions what God did it isn't an ordered list, which tends to confuse some people who claim it contradicts the 'long' version of God creating everything earlier in Genesis). But Genesis and Evolution agree in the order. It might not list or explain change within the plant and animal kingdom, but that's because it's not a book about biology/evolution. My Physics and Mathematics text books don't list anything concerning this change, and the reason for that is they are also not books about biology or evolution. In fact, religion/philosophy books aren't too concerned with science, but they are concerned with how people live their lives. Leakey's statements ignore the fact the evolution came out of Christianity. Darwin's grandfather came up with a lot of the early work that Darwin used in devising his theory, and Darwin went through University as a Christian, he didn't become an agnostic till after his favourite daughter, Elizabeth, drowned. The church at the time accepted Evolution. In fact, the Pope even said that the official stand of the Catholic church is that evolution is correct. But, the war between Christianity and Evolution came about because of people like Huxley and Russell spreading FUD about the two being incompatible, which isn't true. This has forced some religious into one corner and they have things completely wrong about Evolution being an attack on their religion, and then you have the other corner where certain athiests/agnostics etc use Evolution as a thing they claim disproves the existence of God (which is doesn't).
Leakey's statement might not be directly hostile to religion, but it is deliberately misleading in the fact that there is no reason why any book covering 'the word of God' would have anything concernign Evolution any more than it having the solution to Fermat's last theorem in it.
So I guess your argument is leaky.
Who cares? It's all just a simulation anyway!
That said there are plenty of fundamental crazies out there, particularly in the US it seems (when did that happen anyway)... I once heard of a "professional" geologist, who was also a creationist. I am not sure how someone would be able to segregate their belief that the world was created 5,000 years ago while at the same time have formal training in things like geologic time spans etc...
Is it in God's interests to just sit and wait until [Armageddon]?
The Bible portrays Jehovah God as infinitely just and patient. The Adversary has been exploiting these qualities to make God give him a fair chance to run the world under his leadership. God already knows that Satan's system will fail; he just needs to show everyone else. Yes, it'll fail within a spirit creature's lifespan, which is far longer than a human's, especially post flood. This means humans will be collateral damage in this conflict, but God recognizes this and has provided for a resurrection through his son Jesus M. Christ.
scientists are not trying to deceive everyone (well, most of them)
Yes, some scientists are examining this world in good faith to learn the underlying rules governing its operation, but others are just seeking moar grant money by breaking things up into LPUs.
This assumes that "why" is a valid question in the first place, and you're already begging the question of whether or not there is an entity to ascribe some kind of purpose to. Even if this question is outside the realm of science, that doesn't mean that philosophers or theologians have anything at all to contribute to this discussion that's based in reality.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Wow, sure is atheist in here...... I openly encourage you to disprove creationism then. I'll STILL be waiting in 50 years for someone to be able to do it. Before you ask, No I'm not a young earth creationist, I AM however a believer in intelligent design, the universe is far to ordered in its chaos to be a product of "Just the right amount of X and Y at the exact point in time" Random chance? Really? HAH
While the evolutionists are trying to use scientific research to figure out what it is that they believe in, the creationists will be expanding their ideas through rampant fornication. Lets face it, dear Darwin tells us that the organism which reproduces will exist, not the one that does the research. :)
US First?
Wasn't that the name of Charles Lindbergh's gay little Nazi club or something?
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
While evolution remains a theory, it cannot be fully accepted. Theories are validated by experiments. If experiments verify, for example, that after 100 generations an amoeba can change into a volvox or a paramecium then that would be a confirmation of one aspect of the evolutionarily theory. If evolution is scientifically true, this experimental validation should be easy.
As neither I am always amused at how dedicated atheists show just as much naivette as their dedicated theist counterparts.
...." - Yeah... That's the primary theme in all religion. It really is that simple. </sarcasm> Come on, stick to talking about fossils. It's what you know.
First... What evendence is going to change the minds of the majority of young-earth creationists? Ha! You think you can ever dig up enough fossils? Tell me another one!
"There's no explanation for this change going back 500 million years in any book I've read from the lips of any God." - Actually, there are plenty of old-earth creationists who believe that God did it but science describes how. Yes, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic texts say it happened in 7 days but there is plenty of reason for a believer to believe those days were figurative. Is this just a watering down to cling to an old belief even in the face of contrary evidence? Maybe. But there are the Psalms that say a day to God is like 1000 years and 1000 years is like a day. That makes no sense as a unit conversion formula as it goes both ways but plenty of sense if you just take it to mean that units of time are meaningless to him. That also makes sense if you believe as science tells us that time itself is a part of the universe. Wouldn't that mean that a God who created the universe and therefore must be not a part of it is also outside of time or at least in some other timeline? I'm not arguing that this is or is not the truth. My point is that even with insurmountable evidence for evolution this is about as far as an atheist can hope to get in convincing people.
"I see no reason why you shouldn't go through your life thinking if you're a good citizen, you'll get a better future in the afterlife
""If we're spreading out across the world from centers like Europe and America that evolution is nonsense and science is nonsense, how do you combat new pathogens..." - I would imagine that a creationist doctor would combat new pathogens the same way as any other. With drugs. I don't even hear the Pat Robertson types saying all Science is nonsense. Is it really necessary to understand the origin of something to kill it? Even if it is necessary to explain the origin of new pathogens a creationist can (and does) just invoke the term "microevolution". You've got to admit, even as a full believer in evolution as the origin of all species, a few mutations to cause some RELATIVELy simple bug to change shape and link up with this protein as opposed to that is a much easier thing to comprehend and accept than the huge number required to make me and you from even homo erectus let alone from early archea. I feel pretty safe that even if the whole world becomes young-earthers tomorrow disease research will continue and we will not simply return to the conditions that brought on the black plague. At least not for that reason.