Posted on 09/25/2010 9:47:50 AM PDT by spirited irish
More Christian blood-libel. You people have no shame.
>> Why not focus on the lies that are told and evidence hidden by evolutionists?<<
You are looking at only a part of the picture. It isn’t much different then the evolutionists. The do not want to take into account all known data by eliminating any understanding of Biblical truth. You are doing the same by trying to focus only on evolution. I believe, to be complete in our analysis, we need to understand all data including that contained in the Bible. Your focus on proving evolution to be in error is correct but needs to include Biblical truth as well to complete the whole picture.
The understanding of the creation account in Genesis is important in that it completes the view of how this world came to be as we know it.
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I am more interesting in seeing the motives of those who invented and push evolution theory as though it were fact, and people of religious faith who accept it although they should know better.
And the results in the world of evolution-as-fact.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin interests me not at all. As I said above, with God all things are possible. That’s all I need to know.
Of course the Vedic/Hindu/Hare Krishna creationism you apparently accept does have a precise meaning of "day":
The Bhagavata Purana says that men and women have lived on earth for a vast period of time called the Day of Brahma, which is composed of a thousand yuga cycles. Each yuga cycle lasts 12,000 "years of the gods." And since each "year" equals 360 earth years, one yuga cycle equals 4.32 million years while a thousand yuga cycles total 4.32 billion years, summing up the Day of Brahma.
Those unfamiliar with Hindu antievolutionism might be interested to know that, although more "liberal" than fundamentalist "Young Earth" creationism in allowing for (actually insisting on) an ancient earth, it is more strict than even "strict" Christian antievolutionism in insisting on absolutely fixed species (i.e. no "micro" evolution; no evolution even "within created kinds".
The reason for this is two-fold. First because the Vedas teach that species are fixed. All (not just man) have existed here through the "Day of Brahma." IIRC correctly, the Vedas even number the "species of life". I don't remember the figure, but think it somewhere in the millions.
The second relates to the doctrine of reincarnation. In short it is the soul that evolves. In doing so in serially inhabits different "species". These species remain fixed. Hindu creationists see affirming (biological) evolution as denying (spiritual) evolution, i.e. rebirth and reincarnation.
Monod doesn't "continue" to uphold anything. He died in 1976. Does this say something about your idea of "recent times"?
Belief in universal common ancestry depends on particular assumptions about abiogenesis. Without a specific concept of abiogenesis there isn't any reason at all to assume that life arose once, or that it was simple and then became more complex, or that multicellular organisms descended from unicellular creatures. If darwinian evolution isn't concerned with the origin of life how do you distinguish a fossil sequence that is the result of multiple abiogenesis events separated in time from one that is the result of ancestral lineage?
Cordially,
Ping to self
I’m not even interested in the Hindu understanding of creation or day as it pertains to the topic of this thread. The point is that there are two world views; one is that God is the Creator, the other is that life came from nothing and evolved via random accident.
I feel much more kinship with those who accept that God created everything than with godless evolutionists, despite differences in understanding exactly how God created. No human can adequately comprehend exactly how He created or creates anyway, human minds are too limited. Other than be having such truths revealed from within.
If I wanted to discuss the ins and outs of Hindu cosmology, I’d start a thread about just that.
This actually sounds quite excellent... Having taught World Religions for years on the college level, I largely concur with the writer... Good post!
Darwin gets a bum rap from the pious crowd. His book was on the Origin of Species, not the origins of life. He only sought to offer a theory on the variation and adaptation he observed. The last paragraph of "The Origin of Species" states the following:
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
Did you read the whole article? Maybe Darwin mentioned a Creator (I have no idea, I didn’t write the article and am far, far from being an evolution scholar!!!) but generally the current proponents of evolution are certainly atheists.
Although abiogenesis v biogenesis was not addressed in Darwin’s theory, it is readily apparent that the theory became the intellectual justification for men who abhorred God or the very idea of God. A quick scan of the atheist websites and their forums would confirm that is so.
And ironically, the most embittered opponents of the intelligent design movement (esp. atheists) claim a hidden agenda, i.e. that ID is the cover for getting creationism back into public schools.
The hidden agenda crossfire is a goose-gander situation with scientists caught in the middle.
If we ignore the agendas and try to weigh the theory of evolution on its own merits, then we are in betty boop’s ballpark on this thread. Thank you for your illuminating essay-post, dearest sister in Christ!
Of a truth, when one closely examines the mathematical models (Rosen and Shannon) required to understand living organisms in nature, it becomes very clear under Rosen that living things entail a final cause whereas non-living things do not and under Shannon that living things successfully communicate whereas non-living and dead things do not.
That’s strictly an objective assessment based on the math and is not anti-evolution. But final cause (temporal non-locality) is a poison pill to anyone relying on happenstance to deny God.
But one cannot say something is random in the system if he doesn't know what the system "is" and we do not know and cannot know the full number and type of dimensions that exist, massless particles that have no measurable effect, etc.
Moreover, order cannot rise out chaos in an unguided physical system. Period. There are always guides to the system. Cellular automata and self-organizing complexity have rules. Chaos theory has initial conditions, etc.
Which brings me to the insights of my dear brother in Christ, TXnMA!
As you truly said, TXnMA, few consider relativistic time.
I very strongly agree with Jewish Physicist Gerald Schroeder that when we consider relativity and the inflationary theory, that six (earth relative) days from the inception space/time coordinates are equal to approximately 15 billion years from our present space/time coordinates.
God was the Creator, the only observer of the creation and the author of the only account of it. So it does not surprise me at all the description would be relative to the inception space/time coordinates.
God the Father has revealed Himself in four ways: in the Person of Jesus Christ His only begotten Son, in the Person of the indwelling Holy Spirit, in Scripture and in His Creation both physical and spiritual. And His revelations do not contradict each other.
Man is not the measure of God.
God’s Name is I AM.
You are correct, although I would say it is really only one assumption: That abiogenesis is a rare, if not unique, event.
This is hardly a wild or arbitrary assumption, however; at least once you reject, as Darwin did, "spontaneous generation," the idea that life arises from non-life as a regular, mundane process of nature. (Some previous scientists, including Creationists of course, had accepted spontaneous generation. Although the number of proponents had been long dwindling, it was universally abandoned as a result of experiments by Louis Pasteur, conducted about the time Darwin's Origin was published.)
Once you've decided that abiogensis is a complex, and probably halting and gradual process, i.e. not "spontaneous," it becomes reasonably obvious that once life does exist, it would adaptively crowd out, and in fact likely and literally eat, the intermediate stages of any further attempt by nature to create life.
Interesting, however, that while you get this right, our article author gets it wrong, and falsely asserts that Darwinian evolutionists not only do, but must accept "spontaneous generation". (The fact that Haeckel also got it wrong, writing at a time before there was any available term contrasting "spontaneous" generation with abiogensis, does not help her.)
Materialist philosophy is neither new nor scientific, but one of the most ancient superstitious beliefs in the world. The ancient version held that matter has always existed and everything that exists consists of matter. According to the modern version, invisible dead-matter spontaneously generated itself from nothing, and then by way of evolution magically produced everything else. To believe this is to believe that the nothingness within the magician’s hat spontaneously generated the bunny.If evolutionism was a gas-powered generator, then spontaneous generation would be its indispensable fuel, admits Ernst Haeckel, pantheist mystic and ardent defender of Darwinism.
Well put as usual.
My comment was directed to your assertion that darwinian evolution isn't even concerned with the origin of life. If that's the case then why, for example, do Darwinists object when someone postulates a complex genome as a starting point?
Without a specific concept of abiogenesis how do you know that the first reproductive cells were simple and then became more complex, or that multicellular organisms descended from unicellular ones, or how would you distinguish a fossil sequence that is the result of multiple abiogenesis events separated in time from one that is the result of ancestral lineage?
Since you answer to these questions necessarily follows from your particular assumptions about abiogenesis, there is a logical connection. Separating evolution from the origin of life is not logically coherent.
Cordially,
ping for reading later today. thank you friends for the pings.
Stultis, you wrote: "Monod doesn't 'continue' to uphold anything. He died in 1976."
Well then let me revise and extend my remarks. Monod continued to uphold Darwinist doctrine in all its metaphysical purity until the day he died. I.e., he never "recanted."
Are you suggesting that more recently Darwinian biologists have retreated from their doctrine of random mutation and natural selection as exclusively accounting for the rise of species, or that they have questioned the adequacy of the Newtonian scientific framework with respect to living systems?
This would be news to me.
It seems Monod himself strenuously resisted any departure from the received orthodoxy. Indeed, his ongoing public animosity toward Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a major pioneer of open systems theory, is instructive:
Bertalanffy was a person whom Jacques Monod loathed, and whom he (among many others) castigated as a "holist." By their very nature, open systems require going outside a system, going from a smaller system to a larger one to understand its behaviors. Stated another way, openness means that even a complete understanding of internal parts or subsystems cannot, of itself, account for what happens when a system is open. This flies in the face of the "analysis," or reductionism, that Monod identified with "objective" science. [Robert Rosen, Essays on Life Itself, 2000; p. 18]Now living organisms happen to be open, not closed, systems.
Bertalanffy, who "has become well known as the father of General System Theory" ... [ibid, p. 31]
...came to develop this [theory] as an alternative to reductionist, Cartesian ideas, which he felt were not only scientifically inadequate for biology but had deplorable social and ethical side effects for humanity at large....No wonder Monod loathed him!
I have to say that I regard Monod as remarkably closed-minded for a scientist....
This is one of the more interesting — and revealing — "scientific squabbles" I've ever come across....
And if the hostility of the response is any indication of the effectiveness of the argument, then Bertalanffy obviously won the debate.
Thank you for sharing your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
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