"Darwins theory has nothing to do with adaptive characteristics within a species, taller, more hair, less hair, etc. "
Actually, it has everything to do with it. Because differences among species are nothing more than developing those different morphological traits in different directions. The underlying mechanisms of reproductive speciation are no different than those of "taller, more hair, less hair" etc. ALL of these traits have an underlying genetic substructure that demonstrably changes over time in a population and allows species to develop in different directions and ultimately to become genetically incompatible, at which point their trait development is no longer linked and their ancestors can head off in radically different directions.
"Darwin stated that all life evolved from single cell organisms."
Well, no, Darwin didn't really state that so much in his published work, and he only speculated about it in his letters. In his time, we barely knew anything ABOUT cells in the first place. But that is what was discovered and confirmed over time, and it is what all the evidence says. For most of the planets history, there was only single-celled organisms. Late in the game, eukaryotes come onto the scene. And wouldn't you know it, but they are a group that, is uniquely like US compared to all other life. And we are STILL eukaryotes, to this day!
"In that case there would be transitional fossils, there aren't."
Again, I have no idea what bizarre concept you must have of what a transitional fossil would look like, but you're simply wrong. There are many: more, in fact, than Darwin ever expected anyone to find in his day, given how rare and uneven fossilization is (Darwin never imagined the idea of a backhoe, or core samples in oil drilling, or sonic dowsing, etc.). Of course, creationists love to play games and lie about what we should and should not expect to see in the fossil record. They deny what transitional fossils are, and pretend that nothing is good enough until we find every single individual animal that ever lived in fossil form, which is nonsense. Fossils are only icing on the cake as far as evolution. Even if there were almost no fossils at all, we'd still know that common descent had happened from all the other evidence (though it would be much harder to work out and date the exact lineages).
"The fossil record actually shows: large numbers of life forms suddenly appearing, remaing virtualy unchanged for millions of years and suddenly disappearing. The cyccle repeats several times, with different life forms each time, and no connecion from the previous to the current."
I'm sure that's what whatever you've been reading has said, no doubt because someone without any understanding of geology paleontology or population genetics skimmed a biology journal and yanked a couple of quotes out of context. Unfortunately, it ain't so. While the fossil record is by nature only the broadest overview of things, not an animated sequence in fine detail, all of the overall lines are not only well established in the record, but they all indepedently confirm with both genetic data and all sorts of other patterns (like geographic distribution) that they must fall into in order for common descent to be true. It's simply a lie to say that there are no connections: not only are there connections, but they make things pretty darn clear: we've worked out a "Tree of life" that self-correlates with completely different methods of evidential construction to almost 37 decimal places with JUST only 29 of the major taxa alone.
Oh, and by the way: chordates existed before the Cambrian era, and they survived the extinction. We are chordates (we are STILL chordates, because evolution doesn't randomly take a chordate and make it into an invertebrate: it's descent with modification, not design). How does that make any sense at all with what you just said? It doesn't. Because what you said is simply falsehood.
Are you even reading your own cites? All of them are acknowledgements that there are significant factors grouped in racial kingroups that help target medicine better and that you can't toss out race ENTIRELY as a diagnostic: but they aren't by any stretch of the imagination proof that African Americans can only have African American hearts or any of the other nonsense you've been spewing about vast racial differences. You're doing the old trick of trying to pretend that a small correction from one form of extremism (i.e. race means nothing) is "leading to" the other extreme.
"Wow - what an opinion. As a follower of Christ, and a student of the Hebrew scriptures, it's my understanding that he fulfilled almost 500 prophecies from them."
Well, what can I say? Someone gave you a major line of BS, as far as the Jews are concerned.
Even a brief glance at what you cite shows the problem. The claimed prophecies are tantamount to sloppy desperation on the part of the Gospel authors. Born of a virgin? Nope, sorry. That's not what Isa. 7:1 4 says, and that passage isn't even about the messiah in the first place (it's about the birth of King Hezekiah, which is a sign to Ahaz about some events local to Ahaz's time). Many Christian Bibles translate the word "virgin" but most honest ones have stopped doing so. almah means "young woman," not virgin. Regardless, the only people that care about pagan things like virgin births are pagans, and among pagans, claimed virgin births were a dime a dozen in those days. To Jews, the concept is simply bizarre (but then, the concept that the messiah would not be a son of god is also foriegn and bizarre and counter-theological). But then, Jews have never really been into the idea that sex is so creepy and impure that God has to scramble as far away from it as possible: that's another pagan thing (just like Easter and Christmas were pagan holidays).
"It is noteworthy that this last prediction was made long before crucifixion was invented as a form of capital punishment by the Persians and a thousand years before it was made common by the Romans."
Yeah, well, too bad that's not what the actual Scriptures say. There's nothing about peirced (except in the King James Bible!) What it actually says is "For dogs have encompassed me, a company of evil-doers have enclosed me, like a lion, they are at my hands and feet." Only a very bizarre mispelling of a key word and THEN a very ungrammatical interpretation gets you even to "gouged" will still isn't "pierced." Worse, this passage is King David talking about himself, not about the messiah. Like most of these claimed prophecies, it's a ridiculously lame stretch. No wonder very very few Jews were convinced by early Christians, and not a single great rabbi was impressed with their arguments.
And of course, all this flailing around to try and drum up alternate prophecy is because of one thing: because Jesus completely failed to do any of the things the messiah is supposed to do. And his followers knew it. I don't think they were dishonest exactly, but they had to scramble around for SOMETHING to justify their beliefs in the face of this. And these silly attempts were the best they could come up with.
Note also that the idea that the books contained in the Bible are the ONLY things you need to read to understand Scripture is an idea foreign not only to Judiasm, but even to Christianity itself, at least for the first 1500 years. Until the Sola Scripture heresy began, everyone understood that there were countless other subsidiary texts and traditions one had to know and understand.
Heck, even the NT authors knew that. Some of the "scripture" they reference you won't anywhere in the OT because they aren't there. They are quoting other well-known sayings and writings that aren't in the modern Bible at all. Again, the idea that you can just read Scripture without knowing all the knowledge and context and so forth around it is just not sustainable in the Jewish view.
"born in Bethlehem (Mic. 5:2)"
The passage first of all implies only that David's line comes from Bethlahem and that the messiah comes from this line. Whether the messiah does himself or not is irrelevant (just that he comes from David's direct paternal line... which, you know, come to think of it, doesn't work too well if someone was born of a virgin!) And more importantly, it implies that the messaih will be a "ruler of Israel." Was Jesus a ruler of Israel? Nope. In fact, not long after he appeared, Israel was essentially destroyed: there wasn't any Israel to rule.
It's also worth noting that untold numbers of Jews died at the hands of Christians refusing to turn their backs on their beliefs and accept what they saw as a twisting and perversion of the Torah: Christian beliefs being incompatible both with the teachings and ethics and whole spirit of Scripture (which does not include such concepts as original sin or a need for special salvation). What about them? Why were they willing to die for what they believed? Maybe it's because they came forwarned:
(Deut. 13:2): "If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer, and he gives you a sign or a miracle. And the sign or miracle comes to pass, and he calls on you, saying, 'Let us go after other gods, whom you have not known, and let us worship them.' You shall not listen to that prophet or dreamer. For G-d is testing you, to see whether you love the L-rd your G-d with all your heart and with all your soul."
Indeed, refusing to abandon God is one of the very few things that Jews are expected to do even upon pain of death. And on pain of death they did: they refused and were killed in the millions by the end of it all.
"There is not one place on this entire planet that does NOT have evidence of having been under water at some point in time."
Oh yeah? Prove it. Look into it. Maybe while you're hunting down the understanding on this, you'll come across enough geology to know how silly flood geology really is.
And regardless, this is a geologically meaningless statement. In geology, we're not talking just space, but time: places move, and each modern day place contains records of past places dating back more than a billion years that may have moved thousands and thousands of miles. What you need is not merely evidence that some places have been under water at some time, but that the entire world was underwater at the same time. And that is simply not what you find when you actually go out and look. The actual geological record is completely inconsistent with that idea from the tinest detail to the grand macro scale to the way all sorts of individual chains of evidence match up.
"Fossils are found in sedimentary rocks which are formed by water actions. These sedimentary rocks are found on every continent."
Dude, this is such a kindergarten understanding of geology that it's hard to even know where to start. Yes, fossils are found on every continent, and yes, often water is involved (in fact, most fossils are silt-based marine fossils or chalk bed-type). So? How does this demonstrate that they were all laid down in a single great flood?
"So you would you say that it is impossible for all of humanity to have come from one couple, whether that was through Noah or previously through Adam and Eve?"
No, I'm saying that it didn't happen: and it certainly didn't happen 4000 years ago, when there was already human civilization scattered all over the world.
"Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament,"
Not according to the Jews. There are a bunch of very clear things that herald the coming of the messiah. None of them happened with Jesus' coming (hence the claim that there needs to be a second coming). And so the Jes are rightly unimpressed. Misinterpreting a bunch of obscure passages from Scripture (not to mention simply ignoring plenty of important Scripture and tradition just because you guys didn't happen to put it in your Bible) is not the same thing as fulfilling the messianic prophecy.
"and we do not reject its teachings"
That's your take on it. The Jews disagree pretty strongly about that: they don't even think you understand its teachings.
"and hold both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety to be the complete word of God. Islam and Mormon depreciate the value of these in favor of their own texts."
You can hold up any difference and assert that this is the one big differene that makes Christianity special. But from everyone else's perspective, these things aren't even true, much less important distinctions. You could say exactly the same thing about the NT vs. the OT. The Jews certainly think that the NT basically mangles and depreciates and misunderstands Scripture.
How about... the age of the earth? The fact that the earth doesn't have corners, and you can't see to the ends of it by standing in a really really tall tower? That there was no global flood or even a local flood of the proportions described in the Bible? That rainbows weren't invented long after light existed? That plants did not exist prior to the sun? And so on.
What's the use though? If you dead set believe on faith that any text is true, you can always make up ad hoc excuses to explain away any contradiction. That's why the claim that there are no contradictions is so empty: you don't really mean it. Not in the normal sense of the word anyway.
"We have the testimony of many eye witnesses who recorded their experience, and most of whom later died under perscution for their beliefs."
No, we don't. We have tracts about these things, but little in the way of evidence of any of these stories, or even that the people who wrote them down knew anyone in them: almost every single one of those stories is apocryphal with mythic overtones. Even if the latter were true, people die for all sorts of mutually contradictory beliefs all the time (and we have no way of knowing exactly what beliefs anyone died for), sometimes ones that are flat out wrong, even if the people do believe them. If you want to claim that this is good evidence for Christianity, then you must also accept the beliefs about miracles and martyrdom for any number of other sects and cults throughout history. Hell, people died proclaiming all sorts of bizarre beliefs ROUTINELY in those times. It was a dark and superstitious age.
The only first person account we have for sure is Paul, and interestingly, Paul not only wasn't a witness to anything, but he doesn't mention any of these supposedly key miracles at all (in fact, he is particularly conspicuous in that he doesn't mention these things even in places where they would lend support to his arguments). He claims that Christ came to him in a vision after he was dead. Well, my dog Chips did that too. If I was a superstitious dude in a confused and backward age I might run around following and talking to visions too.
"If it didn't happen, why did so many die proclaiming they saw these things? Pretty stupid to die proclaiming first hand witness of these things if one didn't actually witness them."
There is no evidence of exactly what anyone died proclaiming, or even that they knew of what would be written in the Gospels about what Jesus had supposedly done that they supposedly had died believing. Again, if these are the extremely lax historical standards you want to use, then you must accept any number of other mutually contradictory religions and beliefs that all make these sorts of claims. Unfortunately, all the blather about how "well, Christianity is the only religion that..." is just that: blather. Iterant preachers with virgin births performing wonders and getting in trouble and getting killed and their followers trying to carry on afterwards were a dime a dozen. Hell, we have David Blaine and John Edward and Benny Hinn running around TODAY for goodness sakes.
But few of these things even hit the plausibility meter. In Matthew, there is a tossoff line about how when Jesus died, tons of holy men BROKE OUT OF THEIR TOMBS AND WANDERED AROUND APPEARING TO PEOPLE. Now, frankly, if that sort of thing happened, don't you think it would deserve more of a mention... somewhere? Even just the empty tombs: if there had been a mass grave robbing, you'd think that it would have been mentioned somewhere. Something more would have come of it. But no. Matthew doesn't even tell us what happened to any of these zombies. It's just yet another tossoff mythical detail meant to wow the crowd with how cool their religion's founder is. No doubt nnot even just made up deliberately, but thrown in as some rumor somebody's cousin's mother's uncle heard about.
I mean, dude, there isn't any reason to think that anyone was even deliberately lying to explain why anyone said or believed this stuff. People TODAY believe in ASTROLOGY. UFO abductions. All SORTS of nutty nonsense, and on the most confused bits of evidence and rumor all tacked together in the most scatterbrained way: but it's all very sincere. It boggles my mind sometimes about how obviously easy it is to start rumors and elaborate false beliefs without meaning to all the time, even in this very very skeptical age... and yet we are supposed to act like everyone in those times were somehow much much more together and unlikely to do so.
Dude: people think psychics can talk to their pets!!! Today!!! Is it really so hard to imagine that, just like every other religious sect at the time, Christians also had any number of exagerrated and out-there beliefs?
Oh, did they discover it AGAIN? They seem to discover a new "ark" every other month. It always turns out to be some random rock formation in some totally new location that some team of nutcases have convinced themselves is petrified wood (even though there are no rings, but of course they always have some random ad hoc "explanation" for that too).
How many times must we go through this before people stop being taken in by charlatans and true-believers? This isn't much different than the "true cross" craze.
It's certainly possible that scientists are defending a dogma. It's happened before. But it is much much more likely that you are simply using that excuse as a cover for why your own arguments don't hold up against theirs. Your account of life simply doesn't fit, and in fact stands in direct contradiction to, all of the evidence found in the natural world.
Your understanding of speciation and "missing links" also belies a lack of understanding of what evolution is all about. You can call it dogma all you want: but if you get the basic ideas so wrong in the first place, then your criticisms of it are essentially just straw men, and the likihood that your accusation of dogmatism is just your own defense mechanism becomes more likely.
"It doesn't matter if you still "believe" in evolution but differently then they do."
In science, it doesn't much matter what you believe. It matters whether your ideas hold up to the evidence. If people are sometimes zealous in smacking down those who just like to make stuff up without bothering to really look at the evidence or do the hard work that evolution does as far as explaining things, then so be it. You can go on and on about faith and dogmatism and any other accusation you want to make. Unless you can come up with some evidential arguments worth a damn, it's all just so much hot air.
In the case of a worldwide flood, though, not only have we not found evidence for it, but overwhelmingly have found a geological record that speaks directly against it.
"Often it was claimed by some, that certain sites or events given in these histories could not be true, because evidence for them did not exist. However, sometimes much later, such evidence was indeed found."
As far as I can tell, this common evangelical point has little real truth to it. It mostly derives from the story of a single guy who expected that the Bible would be more fantastical than most people did, and then got overly impressed when some of the CITIES mentioned in the Bible existed. Well, guess what: The DaVinci Code mentions Paris, Pris exists, OMG ITS HISTORY!!!
People tend to be way way too impressed by correlations with Biblical stories and vague details like geography and then to totally ignore or deny all the evidence we DO have contrary to the Bible's account. There is no particular reason to think that the Bible doesn't reflect an oral history reflecting back on actual events in actual places, but also no reason to think that the stories aren't mythicized in exactly the same way all other cultural traditions' stories are.
"This mathematical study shows what we all know: Humans reproduce and one couple can, in a surprisingly short time, be the ancestor of everyone on Earth today. What is interesting about this study is that it puts the time back to the days of Noah, from which indeed the biblical record tells us, present day humanity branched out."
Sigh, no. You've misread the article entirely. I'm sorry, but there were a lot more people alive 4000 years ago than just Noah and his children, and there never was any such era at that point where such a tiny group spread out over a world otherwise devoid of humanity. The last common ancestor of all men, for instance, lived tens of thousands years ago.
"There is no evidence in the fossil record of one species evolving from another!"
Not only is there plenty of evidence, but it's fossil, genetic, and direct observation all fitting together in a very precise manner as to establish the common descent of life on earth. How do you explain away not only all this evidence, but how it all fits together?
"No fossils of the in between steps in the process have ever been found anywhere."
That's because there is no "in between" steps, or at least, they are all in between steps. You seem to completely misunderstand what speciation and evolution is all about. If you are talking about transitional forms, then there are countless examples in the fossil record. But "transitional" doesn't mean that these fossils are like half-pig/half-fish: they are creatures in their own right who happen to share particular sets of features that are otherwise unique to two different groups.
"I mean the creation of a true new species from an older life form, not adaptation (ie a bacteria becoming drug resistant), or a crossbreeding in the wild like the Great Horned owl and the Spotted owl that are creating the Sporned owl, because that is still an owl."
This is what I mean about you not understanding what you think you are criticizing. Evolution NEVER suggests that one thing simply turns into an entirely different thing: that some descendant of an owl will someday be not an owl. It's descent with modification, and if you look at the taxonomic tree, that's what you see: forms that build on one another in a predictable nested heirarchy. Claiming that evolution needs or requires owls to turn into non-owls is like claiming that things that were once mammals will have descendants that are not mammals. That's not the way it works or its claimed to work. Human beings, for instance, still belong to every single taxonomic group that their ancestors belonged to. We're still apes, still haplorri, still eutherians, still therians, still amniotes, still tetrapods, still vertebrates, still chordates, still eukaryote, and so on. At no time did we jump over into another group, nowhere in our entire ancestry.
"Everytime there has been a "missing link" found, it has been proved to be a fake."
Anyone that can say something that stupid, false, and unjustified is probably never going to be convinced by any evidence whatsoever. But hey, I tried.
I actually think this dude is from China. China is probably one of the last cultures on Earth where being explicitly racialist or even racist is still ok in polite society and even taught in schools. If African Americans think racism is still bad in the US, they have no idea what sort of racism they are missing out on in China. Of course, adding that to the sort of psychotic nationalism that the government promotes, and you have a nation that's still sorta scary.
Of course, Asia as a whole isn't much better. The Japanese have an ethnic minority that are to this day treated like the lowest scum imaginable... even though outsiders cannot tell them apart from other Japanese. And of course, both the Japanese and the Chinese regard Koreans as scum.
I'm not trying to say that the West is perfect, but people often forget that at least in the West we've dealt and to some extent matured in how we deal with race in ways that more homogenous cultures so far have not.
"For what it's worth, I'd love to hear a Jew explain to me how the foundation of Christianity - the birth of Christ - is best understood as an extension of what Judaism teaches."
That's not going to happen, given that Judaism explicitly teaches that Jesus is a false prophet: of exactly the sort that was warned about. Given that Jesus didn't fulfill any of the actual messianic prophecies (and no, making up some after the fact like "I THINK this passage in scripture might be implying that the messiah must have a mullet... and so if I write in my Gospels that he did, whoo-hoo! doesn't quite cut it for a rabbi), Jews are not exactly inclined to hand out much extra-credit.
I've always found this immensely amusing. Christianity is premised on a full-scale hijacking of Judiasm: what the Jews, with a fair amount of justice, feel is a grotesque mangling and juvenilely poor reading of Scripture. But of course, Christians disagree. Then along comes Mormons, or Muslims, who basically do Christianity the same thing: build something new and probably incompatible on top of it. And the Christians actually scream bloody murder about how illegitimate this all this... despite their whole religious being premised on the same trick.
Um, what the heck are you talking about? I'm not an expert in transplantation, but I'm familiar enough to know that what you're saying sounds like complete BS: a person's race is neither predictive nor particularly significant compared to all the other important factors. You're talking as if race were more important than blood type, which is pure crazytalk. I don't know what doctors told you this, but it sounds more like you heard what you wanted to hear.
Differences in race are both fairly minor AND have more variance than they do absolute differences. Lactose tolerance is a particularly goofy example, because it's both such a minor difference AND still not as universal as you make it out. Not all Asians are lactose intolerant, and not all people from Wales aren't. There is no medical feature that's both universal to and unique to any "racial" group.
I knew that racism was still a major cultural problem in China, but this takes the cake.
Eh? What? Hunh? What does this have to do with anything? The existence of a soul is gobbledygook in an argument, no matter who is making it. Maybe such a thing exists, maybe it doesn't (though given that no one can actually define it in any coherent fashion, it doesn't much matter since we can't "know it when we see it" anyway), but since we have no way of determining it or anything about it aside from simply making stuff up out of the blue, it's as irrelevant to a serious debate as if I claimed that you can't invade Iraq because of sdfkjghsdf and iounsmndf.
"This is a straw-man argument as there is general consensus that rocks are not even alive."
It's not a straw man precisely because it is the nature of supernatural arguments to make things up. If you can claim a zygote has a soul (whatever that is) and that (for some unexplained reason) is why we can't destroy it, I can make up the same about rocks. "Alive"? What does that matter: it has an ETERNAL SOUL.
"The argument that embryos are human is based on the observation that embryos are alive and, when properly developed in the mother, become human beings."
That's not an argument at all. It's a statement of facts with all the moral content missing or sloppily implied without really thinking it through.
At no time in the human reproductive process does anything "not alive" become suddenly "alive." Any many points, something alive can die, but most of them have no moral consequences. A stem cell dying prevents a human being from being created in exactly the same way not having any sex in the first place prevents a human being from being created. In both cases, you've ended a potential chain of causality that could have resulted in a human being BEFORE even the most basic structural elements distinctive to human beings have ever been put together.
Stem cells contain instructions, a sort of recipe for how to go about constructing a human being. But these instructions haven't even made it to the "construction site" at the time stem cells are cultured and harvested, much less has the edifice been put together.
It's worth noting that almost all cells in your body contain exactly the same instructions which, if carried out in the right conditions, will build a new individual. Every skin cell you mercilessly squish while typing could be a new human life!
"Seems we agree. The source of stem cell lines will continue to be of interest."
Intellectual interest. I don't see any sound reason why it should be of moral interest.
"But unlike base theories in physics or chemistry it has gone 150 years without a serious mathematical formulation and is underdeveloped."
That's pretty strange claim. Population genetics is a serious mathematical formulation, as are any number of models for mutation, as are the mathematics behind things like genetic algorithms and other such models of how things in biology works. I have no idea what other than those things you'd be asking for.
Compared to physics, the basic variables and known things about biology are to a much higher precision in some sense. We only know the correlation of measurements of G to maybe one decimal place reliably. In contrast, the correlation between the genetic and inferred fossil/morphological record is up to 32 decimal places, even just using 30 major taxonomic groups. Evolution in biology also provides a large unifying framework than physics, for instance, still lacks. Biology isn't necessarily as inherently mathematically inclined as physics, but that's in part because the things it studies are less fundamental and unitary. All the evidence, however, is processed with mathematical measurements and modeling, just the same.
"The description in words that species morph through random mutation and natural selection is not good enough."
That's only the barest of descriptions of what evolution is. The actual papers, the field, is far far far more specific and precise in how it collects, compares, models, and explains evidence.
"The mutation of species seems to be governed by a least action principle of some kind."
Again, I don't see what you are talking about. Models and descriptions of how mutation happens, when, and why, and where and to what degree, is a very complex and robust subject in biology that cannot be summed up in any simple principle.
The full text of your post was "If they profess membership in a church and don't actually agree with the church, then that makes them hypocrites. Seems like quite a problem, don't you think?"
I pointed out that: no, it wouldn't. If I didn't see the context of the earlier discussion, then my second point was indeed offtopic, but the first point is the more important one.
"The source of stem cells is a profoundly important debate. Do we really want to breed and sacrifice a race of sound humans to fix broken bodies already deselected by nature?"
No, we want to culture cells, which are as different from "sound humans" as almost any living thing aside from viruses and bacteria as anything could be. The full grown cow that I eat for lunch is FAR FAR more like a human being than any stem cell. Stem cells are just that: cells. That they are genetically human and can under certain conditions have the set of instructions within them construct a functioning human being is interesting, but it doesn't make them in any way morally comparable to even a fetus of _any_ species, much less a human fetus. With stem cells, the instructions for human being building haven't really even started to get carried out yet. There is no nervous system. There are none, NONE of the qualities or characteristics present that in any way relate to WHY we care about the lives of fellow human beings. None of the basic structures that undergird these qualities (like a nervous system) even exist yet.
On abortion, I can see the reason in saying that with no bright line, we must err on the side of life. But with stem cells, they are so far over on the "non-person" side of that line that that argument becomes nonsense.
"The debate over evolution will end once the science starts getting a better defense."
The debate over evolution in general (common descent, natural selection shaping speciation events, etc.) is over. The only reason people are still debating is because they generally don't know what they are talking about, but they sure are proud to demonstrate it!
I guess you better leave America then, unless you agree with every single bill passed, ever, including the ones that contradict each other.
And, in addition, not all Christian churches believe as a matter of doctrine that zygotes are little tiny people screaming out for protection with their cytoplasm mouths.
"Part of subscribing to a moral code is realizing that its requirements are overriding."
But at least when talking about laws and actions in the real world, I'd like to only include moral reasons that actually have a real world basis. Claiming that stem cells have tiny little souls is as useful in a moral debate as claiming that rocks have then and geology is evil. If someone thinks that killing a stem cell is wrong, then they've as much sent up a giant firework that blows up and displays the words "I have no idea what morality is all about, I just follow rules a bit too literally without understanding what they are for!"
Er, well, I guess that's a bit long winded for a firework.
"Just looking for a few examples of what you'd consider good evidence and what you'd consider bad evidence, and why."
Really good historical evidence requires a convergence of all sorts of different interlocking pieces of evidence, plausibility, and so on. Anonymous religious tracts from a particular movement relating the wonders and sayings of their founders have NEVER been reliable as historical sources: even modern ones are incredibly unreliable, so why would past ones be any less so? Claims made in them about miracles and direct quotes expressed orally are even less reliable.
"Many people who criticize the biblical gospels, on the basis that there isn't enough non-biblical evidence to support them, will readily accept other writings as holding at least a fair degree of truth."
I don't see how so. There's a big difference between an obviously known contemporary figure in a culture who is referenced elsewhere in other sources writing about events, and tracts with unknown authorship passed around relating the miracles of a then upstart religous cult. Unless you are arguing that we should treat Homer's tales as history and Circe the witch as real, I don't see your point.
Your digression in archeological evidence allowing us to guess about cultures is, as far as I can tell, irrelevant. We're talking about the claims made in religious tracts, not inferences about cooking based on pottery.
"there's also no shortage of archaeological evidence supporting some of the Bible's stories."
Again, that a city named Jericho existed does not mean that a story about it is necessarily non-mythical. Myths, especially those that started life as oral messages, aren't necessarily false or even intentional lies, but they aren't reliable history either.
Slashdot Mirror
"Darwins theory has nothing to do with adaptive characteristics within a species, taller, more hair, less hair, etc. "
Actually, it has everything to do with it. Because differences among species are nothing more than developing those different morphological traits in different directions. The underlying mechanisms of reproductive speciation are no different than those of "taller, more hair, less hair" etc. ALL of these traits have an underlying genetic substructure that demonstrably changes over time in a population and allows species to develop in different directions and ultimately to become genetically incompatible, at which point their trait development is no longer linked and their ancestors can head off in radically different directions.
"Darwin stated that all life evolved from single cell organisms."
Well, no, Darwin didn't really state that so much in his published work, and he only speculated about it in his letters. In his time, we barely knew anything ABOUT cells in the first place. But that is what was discovered and confirmed over time, and it is what all the evidence says. For most of the planets history, there was only single-celled organisms. Late in the game, eukaryotes come onto the scene. And wouldn't you know it, but they are a group that, is uniquely like US compared to all other life. And we are STILL eukaryotes, to this day!
"In that case there would be transitional fossils, there aren't."
Again, I have no idea what bizarre concept you must have of what a transitional fossil would look like, but you're simply wrong. There are many: more, in fact, than Darwin ever expected anyone to find in his day, given how rare and uneven fossilization is (Darwin never imagined the idea of a backhoe, or core samples in oil drilling, or sonic dowsing, etc.). Of course, creationists love to play games and lie about what we should and should not expect to see in the fossil record. They deny what transitional fossils are, and pretend that nothing is good enough until we find every single individual animal that ever lived in fossil form, which is nonsense. Fossils are only icing on the cake as far as evolution. Even if there were almost no fossils at all, we'd still know that common descent had happened from all the other evidence (though it would be much harder to work out and date the exact lineages).
"The fossil record actually shows: large numbers of life forms suddenly appearing, remaing virtualy unchanged for millions of years and suddenly disappearing. The cyccle repeats several times, with different life forms each time, and no connecion from the previous to the current."
I'm sure that's what whatever you've been reading has said, no doubt because someone without any understanding of geology paleontology or population genetics skimmed a biology journal and yanked a couple of quotes out of context. Unfortunately, it ain't so. While the fossil record is by nature only the broadest overview of things, not an animated sequence in fine detail, all of the overall lines are not only well established in the record, but they all indepedently confirm with both genetic data and all sorts of other patterns (like geographic distribution) that they must fall into in order for common descent to be true. It's simply a lie to say that there are no connections: not only are there connections, but they make things pretty darn clear: we've worked out a "Tree of life" that self-correlates with completely different methods of evidential construction to almost 37 decimal places with JUST only 29 of the major taxa alone.
Oh, and by the way: chordates existed before the Cambrian era, and they survived the extinction. We are chordates (we are STILL chordates, because evolution doesn't randomly take a chordate and make it into an invertebrate: it's descent with modification, not design). How does that make any sense at all with what you just said? It doesn't. Because what you said is simply falsehood.
Are you even reading your own cites? All of them are acknowledgements that there are significant factors grouped in racial kingroups that help target medicine better and that you can't toss out race ENTIRELY as a diagnostic: but they aren't by any stretch of the imagination proof that African Americans can only have African American hearts or any of the other nonsense you've been spewing about vast racial differences. You're doing the old trick of trying to pretend that a small correction from one form of extremism (i.e. race means nothing) is "leading to" the other extreme.
"Wow - what an opinion. As a follower of Christ, and a student of the Hebrew scriptures, it's my understanding that he fulfilled almost 500 prophecies from them."
Well, what can I say? Someone gave you a major line of BS, as far as the Jews are concerned.
Even a brief glance at what you cite shows the problem. The claimed prophecies are tantamount to sloppy desperation on the part of the Gospel authors. Born of a virgin? Nope, sorry. That's not what Isa. 7:1 4 says, and that passage isn't even about the messiah in the first place (it's about the birth of King Hezekiah, which is a sign to Ahaz about some events local to Ahaz's time). Many Christian Bibles translate the word "virgin" but most honest ones have stopped doing so. almah means "young woman," not virgin. Regardless, the only people that care about pagan things like virgin births are pagans, and among pagans, claimed virgin births were a dime a dozen in those days. To Jews, the concept is simply bizarre (but then, the concept that the messiah would not be a son of god is also foriegn and bizarre and counter-theological). But then, Jews have never really been into the idea that sex is so creepy and impure that God has to scramble as far away from it as possible: that's another pagan thing (just like Easter and Christmas were pagan holidays).
"It is noteworthy that this last prediction was made long before crucifixion was invented as a form of capital punishment by the Persians and a thousand years before it was made common by the Romans."
Yeah, well, too bad that's not what the actual Scriptures say. There's nothing about peirced (except in the King James Bible!) What it actually says is "For dogs have encompassed me, a company of evil-doers have
enclosed me, like a lion, they are at my hands and feet." Only a very bizarre mispelling of a key word and THEN a very ungrammatical interpretation gets you even to "gouged" will still isn't "pierced." Worse, this passage is King David talking about himself, not about the messiah. Like most of these claimed prophecies, it's a ridiculously lame stretch. No wonder very very few Jews were convinced by early Christians, and not a single great rabbi was impressed with their arguments.
And of course, all this flailing around to try and drum up alternate prophecy is because of one thing: because Jesus completely failed to do any of the things the messiah is supposed to do. And his followers knew it. I don't think they were dishonest exactly, but they had to scramble around for SOMETHING to justify their beliefs in the face of this. And these silly attempts were the best they could come up with.
Note also that the idea that the books contained in the Bible are the ONLY things you need to read to understand Scripture is an idea foreign not only to Judiasm, but even to Christianity itself, at least for the first 1500 years. Until the Sola Scripture heresy began, everyone understood that there were countless other subsidiary texts and traditions one had to know and understand.
Heck, even the NT authors knew that. Some of the "scripture" they reference you won't anywhere in the OT because they aren't there. They are quoting other well-known sayings and writings that aren't in the modern Bible at all. Again, the idea that you can just read Scripture without knowing all the knowledge and context and so forth around it is just not sustainable in the Jewish view.
"born in Bethlehem (Mic. 5:2)"
The passage first of all implies only that David's line comes from Bethlahem and that the messiah comes from this line. Whether the messiah does himself or not is irrelevant (just that he comes from David's direct paternal line... which, you know, come to think of it, doesn't work too well if someone was born of a virgin!) And more importantly, it implies that the messaih will be a "ruler of Israel." Was Jesus a ruler of Israel? Nope. In fact, not long after he appeared, Israel was essentially destroyed: there wasn't any Israel to rule.
And so on.
It's also worth noting that untold numbers of Jews died at the hands of Christians refusing to turn their backs on their beliefs and accept what they saw as a twisting and perversion of the Torah: Christian beliefs being incompatible both with the teachings and ethics and whole spirit of Scripture (which does not include such concepts as original sin or a need for special salvation). What about them? Why were they willing to die for what they believed? Maybe it's because they came forwarned:
(Deut. 13:2):
"If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer, and he gives you a
sign or a miracle. And the sign or miracle comes to pass, and he calls on
you, saying, 'Let us go after other gods, whom you have not known, and
let us worship them.' You shall not listen to that prophet or dreamer. For
G-d is testing you, to see whether you love the L-rd your G-d with all your
heart and with all your soul."
Indeed, refusing to abandon God is one of the very few things that Jews are expected to do even upon pain of death. And on pain of death they did: they refused and were killed in the millions by the end of it all.
"There is not one place on this entire planet that does NOT have evidence of having been under water at some point in time."
Oh yeah? Prove it. Look into it. Maybe while you're hunting down the understanding on this, you'll come across enough geology to know how silly flood geology really is.
And regardless, this is a geologically meaningless statement. In geology, we're not talking just space, but time: places move, and each modern day place contains records of past places dating back more than a billion years that may have moved thousands and thousands of miles. What you need is not merely evidence that some places have been under water at some time, but that the entire world was underwater at the same time. And that is simply not what you find when you actually go out and look. The actual geological record is completely inconsistent with that idea from the tinest detail to the grand macro scale to the way all sorts of individual chains of evidence match up.
"Fossils are found in sedimentary rocks which are formed by water actions. These sedimentary rocks are found on every continent."
Dude, this is such a kindergarten understanding of geology that it's hard to even know where to start. Yes, fossils are found on every continent, and yes, often water is involved (in fact, most fossils are silt-based marine fossils or chalk bed-type). So? How does this demonstrate that they were all laid down in a single great flood?
"So you would you say that it is impossible for all of humanity to have come from one couple, whether that was through Noah or previously through Adam and Eve?"
No, I'm saying that it didn't happen: and it certainly didn't happen 4000 years ago, when there was already human civilization scattered all over the world.
"Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament,"
Not according to the Jews. There are a bunch of very clear things that herald the coming of the messiah. None of them happened with Jesus' coming (hence the claim that there needs to be a second coming). And so the Jes are rightly unimpressed. Misinterpreting a bunch of obscure passages from Scripture (not to mention simply ignoring plenty of important Scripture and tradition just because you guys didn't happen to put it in your Bible) is not the same thing as fulfilling the messianic prophecy.
"and we do not reject its teachings"
That's your take on it. The Jews disagree pretty strongly about that: they don't even think you understand its teachings.
"and hold both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety to be the complete word of God. Islam and Mormon depreciate the value of these in favor of their own texts."
You can hold up any difference and assert that this is the one big differene that makes Christianity special. But from everyone else's perspective, these things aren't even true, much less important distinctions. You could say exactly the same thing about the NT vs. the OT. The Jews certainly think that the NT basically mangles and depreciates and misunderstands Scripture.
How about... the age of the earth? The fact that the earth doesn't have corners, and you can't see to the ends of it by standing in a really really tall tower? That there was no global flood or even a local flood of the proportions described in the Bible? That rainbows weren't invented long after light existed? That plants did not exist prior to the sun? And so on.
What's the use though? If you dead set believe on faith that any text is true, you can always make up ad hoc excuses to explain away any contradiction. That's why the claim that there are no contradictions is so empty: you don't really mean it. Not in the normal sense of the word anyway.
"We have the testimony of many eye witnesses who recorded their experience, and most of whom later died under perscution for their beliefs."
No, we don't. We have tracts about these things, but little in the way of evidence of any of these stories, or even that the people who wrote them down knew anyone in them: almost every single one of those stories is apocryphal with mythic overtones. Even if the latter were true, people die for all sorts of mutually contradictory beliefs all the time (and we have no way of knowing exactly what beliefs anyone died for), sometimes ones that are flat out wrong, even if the people do believe them. If you want to claim that this is good evidence for Christianity, then you must also accept the beliefs about miracles and martyrdom for any number of other sects and cults throughout history. Hell, people died proclaiming all sorts of bizarre beliefs ROUTINELY in those times. It was a dark and superstitious age.
The only first person account we have for sure is Paul, and interestingly, Paul not only wasn't a witness to anything, but he doesn't mention any of these supposedly key miracles at all (in fact, he is particularly conspicuous in that he doesn't mention these things even in places where they would lend support to his arguments). He claims that Christ came to him in a vision after he was dead. Well, my dog Chips did that too. If I was a superstitious dude in a confused and backward age I might run around following and talking to visions too.
"If it didn't happen, why did so many die proclaiming they saw these things? Pretty stupid to die proclaiming first hand witness of these things if one didn't actually witness them."
There is no evidence of exactly what anyone died proclaiming, or even that they knew of what would be written in the Gospels about what Jesus had supposedly done that they supposedly had died believing. Again, if these are the extremely lax historical standards you want to use, then you must accept any number of other mutually contradictory religions and beliefs that all make these sorts of claims. Unfortunately, all the blather about how "well, Christianity is the only religion that..." is just that: blather. Iterant preachers with virgin births performing wonders and getting in trouble and getting killed and their followers trying to carry on afterwards were a dime a dozen. Hell, we have David Blaine and John Edward and Benny Hinn running around TODAY for goodness sakes.
But few of these things even hit the plausibility meter. In Matthew, there is a tossoff line about how when Jesus died, tons of holy men BROKE OUT OF THEIR TOMBS AND WANDERED AROUND APPEARING TO PEOPLE. Now, frankly, if that sort of thing happened, don't you think it would deserve more of a mention... somewhere? Even just the empty tombs: if there had been a mass grave robbing, you'd think that it would have been mentioned somewhere. Something more would have come of it. But no. Matthew doesn't even tell us what happened to any of these zombies. It's just yet another tossoff mythical detail meant to wow the crowd with how cool their religion's founder is. No doubt nnot even just made up deliberately, but thrown in as some rumor somebody's cousin's mother's uncle heard about.
I mean, dude, there isn't any reason to think that anyone was even deliberately lying to explain why anyone said or believed this stuff. People TODAY believe in ASTROLOGY. UFO abductions. All SORTS of nutty nonsense, and on the most confused bits of evidence and rumor all tacked together in the most scatterbrained way: but it's all very sincere. It boggles my mind sometimes about how obviously easy it is to start rumors and elaborate false beliefs without meaning to all the time, even in this very very skeptical age... and yet we are supposed to act like everyone in those times were somehow much much more together and unlikely to do so.
Dude: people think psychics can talk to their pets!!! Today!!! Is it really so hard to imagine that, just like every other religious sect at the time, Christians also had any number of exagerrated and out-there beliefs?
Oh, did they discover it AGAIN? They seem to discover a new "ark" every other month. It always turns out to be some random rock formation in some totally new location that some team of nutcases have convinced themselves is petrified wood (even though there are no rings, but of course they always have some random ad hoc "explanation" for that too).
How many times must we go through this before people stop being taken in by charlatans and true-believers? This isn't much different than the "true cross" craze.
It's certainly possible that scientists are defending a dogma. It's happened before. But it is much much more likely that you are simply using that excuse as a cover for why your own arguments don't hold up against theirs. Your account of life simply doesn't fit, and in fact stands in direct contradiction to, all of the evidence found in the natural world.
Your understanding of speciation and "missing links" also belies a lack of understanding of what evolution is all about. You can call it dogma all you want: but if you get the basic ideas so wrong in the first place, then your criticisms of it are essentially just straw men, and the likihood that your accusation of dogmatism is just your own defense mechanism becomes more likely.
"It doesn't matter if you still "believe" in evolution but differently then they do."
In science, it doesn't much matter what you believe. It matters whether your ideas hold up to the evidence. If people are sometimes zealous in smacking down those who just like to make stuff up without bothering to really look at the evidence or do the hard work that evolution does as far as explaining things, then so be it. You can go on and on about faith and dogmatism and any other accusation you want to make. Unless you can come up with some evidential arguments worth a damn, it's all just so much hot air.
In the case of a worldwide flood, though, not only have we not found evidence for it, but overwhelmingly have found a geological record that speaks directly against it.
"Often it was claimed by some, that certain sites or events given in these histories could not be true, because evidence for them did not exist. However, sometimes much later, such evidence was indeed found."
As far as I can tell, this common evangelical point has little real truth to it. It mostly derives from the story of a single guy who expected that the Bible would be more fantastical than most people did, and then got overly impressed when some of the CITIES mentioned in the Bible existed. Well, guess what: The DaVinci Code mentions Paris, Pris exists, OMG ITS HISTORY!!!
People tend to be way way too impressed by correlations with Biblical stories and vague details like geography and then to totally ignore or deny all the evidence we DO have contrary to the Bible's account. There is no particular reason to think that the Bible doesn't reflect an oral history reflecting back on actual events in actual places, but also no reason to think that the stories aren't mythicized in exactly the same way all other cultural traditions' stories are.
"This mathematical study shows what we all know: Humans reproduce and one couple can, in a surprisingly short time, be the ancestor of everyone on Earth today. What is interesting about this study is that it puts the time back to the days of Noah, from which indeed the biblical record tells us, present day humanity branched out."
Sigh, no. You've misread the article entirely. I'm sorry, but there were a lot more people alive 4000 years ago than just Noah and his children, and there never was any such era at that point where such a tiny group spread out over a world otherwise devoid of humanity. The last common ancestor of all men, for instance, lived tens of thousands years ago.
I know this is a troll, but hey, why not?
"There is no evidence in the fossil record of one species evolving from another!"
Not only is there plenty of evidence, but it's fossil, genetic, and direct observation all fitting together in a very precise manner as to establish the common descent of life on earth. How do you explain away not only all this evidence, but how it all fits together?
"No fossils of the in between steps in the process have ever been found anywhere."
That's because there is no "in between" steps, or at least, they are all in between steps. You seem to completely misunderstand what speciation and evolution is all about. If you are talking about transitional forms, then there are countless examples in the fossil record. But "transitional" doesn't mean that these fossils are like half-pig/half-fish: they are creatures in their own right who happen to share particular sets of features that are otherwise unique to two different groups.
"I mean the creation of a true new species from an older life form, not adaptation (ie a bacteria becoming drug resistant), or a crossbreeding in the wild like the Great Horned owl and the Spotted owl that are creating the Sporned owl, because that is still an owl."
This is what I mean about you not understanding what you think you are criticizing. Evolution NEVER suggests that one thing simply turns into an entirely different thing: that some descendant of an owl will someday be not an owl. It's descent with modification, and if you look at the taxonomic tree, that's what you see: forms that build on one another in a predictable nested heirarchy. Claiming that evolution needs or requires owls to turn into non-owls is like claiming that things that were once mammals will have descendants that are not mammals. That's not the way it works or its claimed to work. Human beings, for instance, still belong to every single taxonomic group that their ancestors belonged to. We're still apes, still haplorri, still eutherians, still therians, still amniotes, still tetrapods, still vertebrates, still chordates, still eukaryote, and so on. At no time did we jump over into another group, nowhere in our entire ancestry.
"Everytime there has been a "missing link" found, it has been proved to be a fake."
Anyone that can say something that stupid, false, and unjustified is probably never going to be convinced by any evidence whatsoever. But hey, I tried.
I actually think this dude is from China. China is probably one of the last cultures on Earth where being explicitly racialist or even racist is still ok in polite society and even taught in schools. If African Americans think racism is still bad in the US, they have no idea what sort of racism they are missing out on in China. Of course, adding that to the sort of psychotic nationalism that the government promotes, and you have a nation that's still sorta scary.
Of course, Asia as a whole isn't much better. The Japanese have an ethnic minority that are to this day treated like the lowest scum imaginable... even though outsiders cannot tell them apart from other Japanese. And of course, both the Japanese and the Chinese regard Koreans as scum.
I'm not trying to say that the West is perfect, but people often forget that at least in the West we've dealt and to some extent matured in how we deal with race in ways that more homogenous cultures so far have not.
"For what it's worth, I'd love to hear a Jew explain to me how the foundation of Christianity - the birth of Christ - is best understood as an extension of what Judaism teaches."
That's not going to happen, given that Judaism explicitly teaches that Jesus is a false prophet: of exactly the sort that was warned about. Given that Jesus didn't fulfill any of the actual messianic prophecies (and no, making up some after the fact like "I THINK this passage in scripture might be implying that the messiah must have a mullet... and so if I write in my Gospels that he did, whoo-hoo! doesn't quite cut it for a rabbi), Jews are not exactly inclined to hand out much extra-credit.
I've always found this immensely amusing. Christianity is premised on a full-scale hijacking of Judiasm: what the Jews, with a fair amount of justice, feel is a grotesque mangling and juvenilely poor reading of Scripture. But of course, Christians disagree. Then along comes Mormons, or Muslims, who basically do Christianity the same thing: build something new and probably incompatible on top of it. And the Christians actually scream bloody murder about how illegitimate this all this... despite their whole religious being premised on the same trick.
Could only God claim that they were done? Because... that's all we got.
Um, what the heck are you talking about? I'm not an expert in transplantation, but I'm familiar enough to know that what you're saying sounds like complete BS: a person's race is neither predictive nor particularly significant compared to all the other important factors. You're talking as if race were more important than blood type, which is pure crazytalk. I don't know what doctors told you this, but it sounds more like you heard what you wanted to hear.
Differences in race are both fairly minor AND have more variance than they do absolute differences. Lactose tolerance is a particularly goofy example, because it's both such a minor difference AND still not as universal as you make it out. Not all Asians are lactose intolerant, and not all people from Wales aren't. There is no medical feature that's both universal to and unique to any "racial" group.
I knew that racism was still a major cultural problem in China, but this takes the cake.
Eh? What? Hunh? What does this have to do with anything? The existence of a soul is gobbledygook in an argument, no matter who is making it. Maybe such a thing exists, maybe it doesn't (though given that no one can actually define it in any coherent fashion, it doesn't much matter since we can't "know it when we see it" anyway), but since we have no way of determining it or anything about it aside from simply making stuff up out of the blue, it's as irrelevant to a serious debate as if I claimed that you can't invade Iraq because of sdfkjghsdf and iounsmndf.
"This is a straw-man argument as there is general consensus that rocks are not even alive."
It's not a straw man precisely because it is the nature of supernatural arguments to make things up. If you can claim a zygote has a soul (whatever that is) and that (for some unexplained reason) is why we can't destroy it, I can make up the same about rocks. "Alive"? What does that matter: it has an ETERNAL SOUL.
"The argument that embryos are human is based on the observation that embryos are alive and, when properly developed in the mother, become human beings."
That's not an argument at all. It's a statement of facts with all the moral content missing or sloppily implied without really thinking it through.
At no time in the human reproductive process does anything "not alive" become suddenly "alive." Any many points, something alive can die, but most of them have no moral consequences. A stem cell dying prevents a human being from being created in exactly the same way not having any sex in the first place prevents a human being from being created. In both cases, you've ended a potential chain of causality that could have resulted in a human being BEFORE even the most basic structural elements distinctive to human beings have ever been put together.
Stem cells contain instructions, a sort of recipe for how to go about constructing a human being. But these instructions haven't even made it to the "construction site" at the time stem cells are cultured and harvested, much less has the edifice been put together.
It's worth noting that almost all cells in your body contain exactly the same instructions which, if carried out in the right conditions, will build a new individual. Every skin cell you mercilessly squish while typing could be a new human life!
"Seems we agree. The source of stem cell lines will continue to be of interest."
Intellectual interest. I don't see any sound reason why it should be of moral interest.
"But unlike base theories in physics or chemistry it has gone 150 years without a serious mathematical formulation and is underdeveloped."
That's pretty strange claim. Population genetics is a serious mathematical formulation, as are any number of models for mutation, as are the mathematics behind things like genetic algorithms and other such models of how things in biology works. I have no idea what other than those things you'd be asking for.
Compared to physics, the basic variables and known things about biology are to a much higher precision in some sense. We only know the correlation of measurements of G to maybe one decimal place reliably. In contrast, the correlation between the genetic and inferred fossil/morphological record is up to 32 decimal places, even just using 30 major taxonomic groups. Evolution in biology also provides a large unifying framework than physics, for instance, still lacks. Biology isn't necessarily as inherently mathematically inclined as physics, but that's in part because the things it studies are less fundamental and unitary. All the evidence, however, is processed with mathematical measurements and modeling, just the same.
"The description in words that species morph through random mutation and natural selection is not good enough."
That's only the barest of descriptions of what evolution is. The actual papers, the field, is far far far more specific and precise in how it collects, compares, models, and explains evidence.
"The mutation of species seems to be governed by a least action principle of some kind."
Again, I don't see what you are talking about. Models and descriptions of how mutation happens, when, and why, and where and to what degree, is a very complex and robust subject in biology that cannot be summed up in any simple principle.
The full text of your post was "If they profess membership in a church and don't actually agree with the church, then that makes them hypocrites. Seems like quite a problem, don't you think?"
I pointed out that: no, it wouldn't. If I didn't see the context of the earlier discussion, then my second point was indeed offtopic, but the first point is the more important one.
"The source of stem cells is a profoundly important debate. Do we really want to breed and sacrifice a race of sound humans to fix broken bodies already deselected by nature?"
No, we want to culture cells, which are as different from "sound humans" as almost any living thing aside from viruses and bacteria as anything could be. The full grown cow that I eat for lunch is FAR FAR more like a human being than any stem cell. Stem cells are just that: cells. That they are genetically human and can under certain conditions have the set of instructions within them construct a functioning human being is interesting, but it doesn't make them in any way morally comparable to even a fetus of _any_ species, much less a human fetus. With stem cells, the instructions for human being building haven't really even started to get carried out yet. There is no nervous system. There are none, NONE of the qualities or characteristics present that in any way relate to WHY we care about the lives of fellow human beings. None of the basic structures that undergird these qualities (like a nervous system) even exist yet.
On abortion, I can see the reason in saying that with no bright line, we must err on the side of life. But with stem cells, they are so far over on the "non-person" side of that line that that argument becomes nonsense.
"The debate over evolution will end once the science starts getting a better defense."
The debate over evolution in general (common descent, natural selection shaping speciation events, etc.) is over. The only reason people are still debating is because they generally don't know what they are talking about, but they sure are proud to demonstrate it!
I guess you better leave America then, unless you agree with every single bill passed, ever, including the ones that contradict each other.
And, in addition, not all Christian churches believe as a matter of doctrine that zygotes are little tiny people screaming out for protection with their cytoplasm mouths.
"Part of subscribing to a moral code is realizing that its requirements are overriding."
But at least when talking about laws and actions in the real world, I'd like to only include moral reasons that actually have a real world basis. Claiming that stem cells have tiny little souls is as useful in a moral debate as claiming that rocks have then and geology is evil. If someone thinks that killing a stem cell is wrong, then they've as much sent up a giant firework that blows up and displays the words "I have no idea what morality is all about, I just follow rules a bit too literally without understanding what they are for!"
Er, well, I guess that's a bit long winded for a firework.
"Just looking for a few examples of what you'd consider good evidence and what you'd consider bad evidence, and why."
Really good historical evidence requires a convergence of all sorts of different interlocking pieces of evidence, plausibility, and so on. Anonymous religious tracts from a particular movement relating the wonders and sayings of their founders have NEVER been reliable as historical sources: even modern ones are incredibly unreliable, so why would past ones be any less so? Claims made in them about miracles and direct quotes expressed orally are even less reliable.
"Many people who criticize the biblical gospels, on the basis that there isn't enough non-biblical evidence to support them, will readily accept other writings as holding at least a fair degree of truth."
I don't see how so. There's a big difference between an obviously known contemporary figure in a culture who is referenced elsewhere in other sources writing about events, and tracts with unknown authorship passed around relating the miracles of a then upstart religous cult. Unless you are arguing that we should treat Homer's tales as history and Circe the witch as real, I don't see your point.
Your digression in archeological evidence allowing us to guess about cultures is, as far as I can tell, irrelevant. We're talking about the claims made in religious tracts, not inferences about cooking based on pottery.
"there's also no shortage of archaeological evidence supporting some of the Bible's stories."
Again, that a city named Jericho existed does not mean that a story about it is necessarily non-mythical. Myths, especially those that started life as oral messages, aren't necessarily false or even intentional lies, but they aren't reliable history either.