Does evolution contradict creationism?

Talk Origins ^ | 1998 | Warren Kurt VonRoeschlaub

[shubi]

There are two parts to creationism. Evolution, specifically common descent, tells us how life came to where it is, but it does not say why. If the question is whether evolution disproves the basic underlying theme of Genesis, that God created the world and the life in it, the answer is no. Evolution cannot say exactly why common descent chose the paths that it did.

If the question is whether evolution contradicts a literal interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis as an exact historical account, then it does. This is the main, and for the most part only, point of conflict between those who believe in evolution and creationists.

[shubi]

There is plenty of evidence for creationism as a cult.
Also, I was responding tongue in cheek to another post by another cultist. Go up thread.

Remember no personal attacks. Accusing me of spamming hurts my feelings boohoohoooo lol

[shubi]

shubi:What about getting sucked into the creationist cult and losing your Soul?

Hick:I thank you shubi for finally revealing yourself. I figured that if I picked the scab long enough the puss of Christophobia would manifest itself.

In respect for true believers, please refrain from identifying yourself as one who believes in God. Its embarrassing for us, and it shameful for you.

Thanks in advance. Maybe someday you will have the courage and integrity to actually defend your faith in evolution rather than deploy a volley of lies and insults against the Word of God.


Me again: This is exactly why creationist cultists are so despicable. They try to dupe weak-minded Christians into believing their uninformed interpretations of the Bible and force them into submission to heresy.

Then on top of that, they try to force their silly religious beliefs into biology classrooms and ruin potential scientists with nonsense.

[shubi]

Sorry, I think I posted that to you in error. You obviously are not the Scarecrow of the Oz Creationism.

[shubi]

"Why can't all of Gen 2 be one day?"

Up until about verse 5, the first section of Gen 2 refers back to the 7 yoms of creation. After that, it starts into the Adam and Eve narrative, which is a separate creation story from Gen 1 to Gen 2:4. Much of the Genesis 2 narrative is drawn from earlier pagan stories.

This would have been a good way to make people comfortable culturally, when instructing them in a new religion. Paul did the same thing with the unknown god.

[RadioAstronomer]

Remember no personal attacks.

I did not attack you personally at all. However, IMHO, your delivery needs to be toned down. And yes, it comes across as spamming a thread when you post the same loud rhetoric over and over again. Especially when some of the "stuff" you post is wrong such as your statement; "The Big Bang is not a theory" (post #54).

[shubi]

"No they are not, so than at one time the big science theory was the earth was flat, didn't make it so."

Flat Earth was actually pre-science. However, notice that once the evidence indicated the Earth was round, science discarded the flat-Earth hypothesis.

This is very unlike the creationists, who would still believe the Earth is flat if they were told to do so by the cult's leaders.

[shubi]

You wrote: "However, the real question is if the literal interpretation of the Bible is falsifiable. It is. It has been down many times. Just one: Dinosaur bones are in chronological order in the strata and dated to millions of years, showing species change over time."


This is the sort of blind and stupid thinking believers in evolution fall into. First it is man that observes the rock strata with certain fossils in them. Because we know rocks were laid down over time we can say bones in lower courses are older...so what? It just means life at that time died at that time and was fossilized. But there is NO indication, absolutely NO hint of gradual changes from species to species.

shubi: That is a very clever sentence, as it is true that species to species differences are difficult to tell from just bones. This is because species differences are very very slight, such that a layman looking at two different species of related beatles would not be able to tell the difference.

Just different life in different eras (that always appear in-toto suddenly in the fossil record and they continue on THE SAME, until extinction or they live on into the next era like sharks and cockroaches). It is only because you wear evolutionists glasses that you LABEL a previous era of life as more primitive than a later era.

shubi: No, it is because the progression of developments of anatomy from two layered jellyfish to worms to annelids to mammals that labels something more "primitive".

That something appeared earlier in the fossil record in no way means it is MORE PRIMITVE than later life of similar morphology, it is simply the labeling game of evolutionists. I can just as well say that different life was created in successive ages and the fossil record bears witness to my interpretation far better than yours, as no transitory species have ever been found, other than labeling games by evolutionists who find a half bird, half lizard, and pronounce it a transition between birds and lizards. How do you know? It could just as well be a lizard-like bird all in its own right! This theory falls in on itself by the weight of its own illogic and contradictory causes and effects. Imagine we are to buy the driving force of evolution that says: "Survival of the fittest," species gain a new niche because they are driven by ruthless competition to exploit some mutation of genes. So a fish starts growing legs to walk on land, but it takes millions of years for the process (wink, wink). All the while it is subject to the same ruthless competion that started the process, but it is no longer an efficient fish, and not yet an efficient land animal. So all the other animals suddenly give this half-assed newly forming species a pass? And they do this for the required million years or so? Freaking ridiculous crap parading as science. Only those that want to find anything, believe anything, but in the immediate creative power of God would buy into this junk.

shubi: Your arguments are the same old fallacy of arguing from personal incredulity. What is the motivation behind you sticking to silly Bible interpretations and substituting that for science? What are you afraid of?

[shubi]

The Big Bang has enough evidence to make it a theory?
I have heard it called a theory, but I always thought that was the common usage. I thought it was still a hypothesis. But, as I have said, I am a biologist not a cosmologist.

In any event, if you don't like my posts, don't read them.

[stockpirate]

This is very unlike the creationists, who would still believe the Earth is flat if they were told to do so by the cult's leaders.

Creationism has just as much supporting it as does the other theory. Both are lacking any proof. One used the remains of animals that are extinct and try to say it shows some type of linking. To beleive evolution you must make giant leaps of faith, and to believe in creation it is just a small question of faith.

[longshadow]

I'm still waiting for the back-up for the stunning claim: "The Big Bang can be proved wrong in a matter of seconds...." posted in #49 of this thread.

Somehow, I don't think we are ever going to see it...

[shubi]

Creationism is NOT a theory.

The TOE connects millions of pieces of data.

[Jehu]

Do you actually read and think about such sentences as:

"That is a very clever sentence, as it is true that species to species differences are difficult to tell from just bones. This is because species differences are very very slight, such that a layman looking at two different species of related beatles would not be able to tell the difference."

Difficult to tell? You cannot tell at all! You can take the bones of the Australian wolf (forget the scientific name) and those of the American wolf and very few biologists, even paleontologists would know the difference, yet anyone seeing them alive would immediately discern the difference. The are not even in the same family! One marsupial, one mammal. It goes to my point that evolutionary doctrine forces scientists into very unscientific behaviors. No branch of science is replete with so many frauds over time...from the tooth of a pig being used to build an entire exhibit of a caveman family, to the skull of Lucy!

Evolutionists so want their theory to be true! What are they (you) afraid of?

As for me I am not bothered at all. I not only have good evidence that the Bible is always true, and always victorious over history, over all its critics. But I have my own personal experience with God, not to mention the testimony of millions that have had personal experiences with God, not a few of them men of far greater intellect than you or I. Among them you will find the founders of modern science. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, and the list goes on...

Evolutionists are human and they cannot even pretend that "science" washes them of their prejudice and bias, although they try. Evolution is, by and large, an excuse to deny God as the creator. It always boils down to the fact that evolutionists and modernistic Christians cannot face the creative power of God that transcends time and process. The evidence is all around you. Do not think a fallen intellect is an excuse, men have been trying to hide from God and wearing their fig leaves since the fall.

As long as I can place God at a distance, even through process or time, I do not have to face my own rebellion and disobedience to Him. I can always pretend I have no moral obligations to myself, family, nation, and God. O, how the ruthless tycoons of the 19th century like Rockefeller and others welcomed and embraced Darwinism...now they could cloak their ruthlessness in psuedo-scientific mumbo jumbo.

[stockpirate]

Ah, what is it?

[Reuben Hick]

Any explanation of science only invites more ridicule from them,

Ok, I give, when did any of you Sons-of-Monkeys offer science? Just typing the word does not mean that you are employing science. OTOH, I believe I have had the exclusive franchise on introducing science into the discussion. I ask about all of those benficial mutations that are never observed (which you have to have reproducable observations in order to even enter into the arena of "science"). I ask you folks to provide science that demonstrates how dead fish can lay on the lake bottom unmolested for thousands and thousands of years slowly being covered with sediments - never decomposing, never becoming a meal for another fish, never having its bones shifted by currents. I question the sanity in expecting fruitful results from SETI - and there you have utter ridicule on parade. Come on you scientists! Where's my explanation for abiogenesis? Where's that scientific explanation for how new information gets introduced to a biological system? I want to know how you transform energy into heavy metals. How do evolutionists look at a tooth or a single bone and not only know how the complete critter looks, but also skin and hair color?

creationists are alot like liberals, they feel threatened by any rational challenge to their views

Judging by how the evolutionary lobby cries in protest over the mere thought of allowing a word of discussion of Creationism into the halls of knowledge and scientific inquiry, I would say that you and your pals are projecting.

Viva Hypocrisy!

[Reuben Hick]

I'm still waiting for the back-up for the stunning claim: "The Big Bang can be proved wrong in a matter of seconds..

Since proponents of the Big Bang are unlikely to entertain any problems to the theory, merely dismissing them as objections to ultimately be resolved, it is unlikely that any proofs will make it through the labyrinth of biases and deliberate blindness.

Yet...

1. The primordial explosion should have propelled all the matter/energy of the cosmos out radially from its center, and by the principle of conservation of angular momentum, none of it could ever thereafter have acquired any kind of curvilinear motion.  Yet there are all kinds of curving and orbiting motions of the stars and galaxies of the cosmos, a situation that seems quite impossible if the universe began with the Big Bang.
2. Sensitive measurements in recent years have increasingly been showing that the background radiation is not homogeneous and isotropic (that is, the same in all directions), as it should be if it had been produced by the Big Bang, but is anisotropic in all directions.
3. The universe is anything but uniform in large-scale structure, as both the Big Bang and Steady State theories require, but instead is full of huge agglomerations of matter in some regions and vast empty spaces in others, scattered around the cosmos in far from any uniform manner.  Some astronomers are now trying somehow to to imagine a primeval lumpy Big Bang.
4. In the context of the primeval fireball it is hard to justify the accumulation of any amount of matter in any one location such as a star.  If the explosion is driving all galaxies apart in the resulting expansion, how could it fail to drive all atoms apart before they came together in galaxies?
5. And saving the best for last, the most serious objection comes back to the second law of thermodynamics.  Explosions produce disorder, not order.  The primordial superexplosion surely would have produced absolute chaos and the most utter disorder.  If the universe is indeed a closed system as evolutionary cosmogonists allege, then how in the name of sense and science could this primeval chaotic disorder have possibly generated the beautifully organized and complexly ordered universe that we now have?

[derheimwill]

Hebrew poetry often does this. Take as example the story of Bathsheeba. The story is preceded by a summary description of a period of wartime. But the Bathsheeba events happen during the war. Gen 1:1 gives an overall summary - kind of like a title. Then, more detail is given in the seven-day-story. All of this is then backdrop for the Eden description. 2:4 is not an event. The Eden description end with the description of Adam and Eve. Then, in chapter 3, we beging moving in time again with the story of the Fall. The yom you spoke of in verse 4 is actually a b-yom: in that day.

[shubi]

Hebrew poetry often does this. Take as example the story of Bathsheeba. The story is preceded by a summary description of a period of wartime. But the Bathsheeba events happen during the war. Gen 1:1 gives an overall summary - kind of like a title. Then, more detail is given in the seven-day-story. All of this is then backdrop for the Eden description. 2:4 is not an event. The Eden description end with the description of Adam and Eve. Then, in chapter 3, we beging moving in time again with the story of the Fall. The yom you spoke of in verse 4 is actually a b-yom: in that day.

I agree that 1:1 is a summary of creation and an introduction. There is a lot more to it than that, but I don't have time to go into it with you right now.

And I would agree that it is typical to go back and forth temporally, as the Hebrew verbs did not have the same sense of time we use in English.

However, there are some interesting points about the seven yoms you must consider. Each has a number, except the first day really should be translated "day one" because it did not use the "harishon" form for first. The rest use second, third etc. This is significant.

As to the bet in front of yom in the 4th verse, I see little significance in this. I know some say if it is a prepositional clause yom takes on a different meaning, but this is a simplistic view at best. The Hebrew had no spaces between words, so putting the bet with the yom is arbitrary. It might just have been a separate word in the minds of the Hebrews. In any event, it does not change the meaning of bucket if I say "in the bucket". And the form of Genesis 1 to Genesis 2:4 fits Hebrew poetry's thought rhyming, in that the summary at the end is a repetition with an amplification of the thought. The two together should be convincing to anyone who is an objective analyzer of the Hebrew that "yom" means long periods of time. Why would verse Gen 2:4 talk about generations if it wasn't? It means long generations or lists of geneologies of the history of the Earth and the Universe in this context.

To trivialize "yom" here and not connect it to the intended meaning God reveals to us in the fact of evolution is disingenuous at best, rejection of God at worst.

[derheimwill]

Why would verse Gen 2:4 talk about generations if it wasn't?

I'm not suggesting that definition but, it's not "day 8." I believe it refers to day 6.

[shubi]

The yom in Gen 2:4 obviously refers back to all the 7 yoms in Gen 1.

[derheimwill]

A distinction without difference. I am primarily arguing the coherency of Gen. 1 - 9 and the historicity of the account.