Posted on 12/20/2010 7:19:04 AM PST by SeekAndFind
If you're in a room of 100 people, odds are likely about 40 think God created humans about 10,000 years ago, part of a philosophy called creationism, according to a Gallup poll reported Friday (Dec. 17). That number is slightly lower than in years past and down from a high of 47 percent in both 1993 and 1999.
And 38 percent of Americans, the poll estimates, believe God guided the process that brought humans from "cavemen" to today's incarnation over millions of years, while 16 percent think humans evolved over millions of years, without any divine intervention.
This secular view, while a relatively small number, is up from 9 percent in 1982, according to Gallup.
Like most American attitudes, Gallup wrote, views on human origins have political consequences. For instance, debates and clashes over which explanations for human origins should be included in school textbooks have persisted for decades. And with 40 percent of Americans continuing to hold to an anti-evolutionary belief about the origin of humans, it is highly likely that these types of debates will continue, according to Gallup.
The findings also stand in stark contrast to another announcement Friday, this one by John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The memo was issued to federal science agencies to guide them in making rules to ensure scientific integrity.
The Gallup results are based on telephone interviews conducted Dec. 10-12 with a random sample of 1,019 adults, ages 18 and older, living in the continental United States. The findings were weighted by gender, age, race, education, religion and phone lines to make the sample nationally representative.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
I noticed that too! I can very easily imagine the exhale of pained exasperation by the secular elitists toward those who "still" hold the creationist view.
Where did they get these numbers from? A room full of liberal monkeys with a hand full God created people
RE: Not sure why I need to believe humans began 10,000 years ago in order to believe God created the world.
Some Christians have been arguing that you HAVE to believe in a literal 6 day creation, otherwise if you claim to be a Christian, you aren’t taking God’s word seriously.
See here for one 6 day creationist argument :
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i1/sixdays.asp
One of the three scientists who cracked the Human Genome had this to say about those who think creation was an accident. He said you would have a better chance of a tornado running through a junkyard and leaving a fully functional 747 than the Human Genome being an accident.
Strawman to divide us.
The problem is with the basic laws of mathematics and probability, with which evolution is essentially incompatible. The (proportionally) biggest group of people not buying into evoloserism is mathematicians, and not Christians.
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a system for pivoting flight feathers so that they open on up strokes and close on down strokes, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through lungs and a high efficiency heart, a specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters, a beak (since you won't have hands any more...) etc. etc. etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening at once (which is what you'd need), best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. For the pieces of being a flying bird to evolve piecemeal would be much harder. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now:
OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
Creationists are a whole lot less honestly wrong than the evolosers and leftists. Our planet viewed as a pile of rocks is probably a few million years old but our living world, particularly in its present conformation, is likely not much older than the Bible would indicate.
??? I know plenty of Christians and I do not hold anyone’s religion in contempt.
Belay my last. I just figured out what you were saying. My bad.
hmmph...Science on MSNBC? contradiction in terms
Good point. They need to get out more.
I think God has revealed that the young earth theory is erroneous.
The left envies religious Americans because of their advantages, such as increased happiness, optimism, hope, longer life, bigger families and everything bigger that goes along with that. Envy is mostly size envy. Envy does not seek to have a good that others have, but to spoil and destroy that good. Leftists are evil.
RE: “Still”?
One can editorialize under the guise of presenting news using just ONE WORD as the above example shows.
Great point.
Six out of ten choose not to consider (i.e. choose not to think [about]) where the universe came from. Ask any evolutionist how the universe got here, and you will only get insults in response.
Wow, great explanation.
RE: Ask any evolutionist how the universe got here, and you will only get insults in response.
Some are now even willing to accept the faith based idea that the Universe came from NOTHING ( See latest musings from Stephen Hawking for instance ).
Read up boys - some of the best evidence for creation. Of course, you’d need to start w/ the Bible and determine for yourselves the the Genesis creation account is literal and not any other type (anlogy, metaphor, simile, irony, etc.).
Then you’d need to realize that just like GW it only takes a handful of loudmouths (i.e. newspapers and scientific hucksters) to mix truth and lies and repeat ad nauseum. Lyell preceeded Darwin by about 50 years in getting the general public to believe the 1st lie - the age of the earth and universe.
Best agrument I’ve seen against Lyell and his uniformitarianism:
101 Evidences for a Young Age of the Earth...And the Universe
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2264681/posts
Then Darwin carried it much further and asked us to believe how far evolution could go with millions and billions of years of pure chance.
Best defense for created kinds being limited to change within their own kind (just part 1 tho):
Center for Scientific Creation - In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/IntheBeginningTOC.html
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