Poll Needs FReeping! Evolution vs. creationism

The short: If you believe that “all this” came about because of evolution, then you belittle the sacrifice of the Second Adam, Jesus. If you’re a Christian, then evolution demeans your faith in Jesus, who provided a solution for the problem of the first man’s sin.

That's what you want written in the science textbooks?

Nope. Science should stick to observable phenomena. Which means science should not teach “goo to you” evolutionary theory as fact.

FWIW, we don’t let the state educate our children, so we get to select which textbooks our kids read.

Um, you think there’s evidence of “increasing complexity of life” over a period of billions of years? That may be a theory, but there’s no evidence that a genetic increase of information consistently results in more complex creatures.

If you’re sincerely interested in understanding the creationist perspective, I challenge you to ponder this entire article:

http://creation.com/refuting-evolution-chapter-2-variation-and-natural-selection-versus-evolution

Consider, especially, the “orchard model” described later on that page. The physical evidence is consistent with this orchard model of creation.

Just an aside: Do you believe in God? If not, then of course you’ve selected a model that excludes God.

It should be taught in Bible class.

Um, you think there’s evidence of “increasing complexity of life” over a period of billions of years? That may be a theory, but there’s no evidence that a genetic increase of information consistently results in more complex creatures.

It is not a theory that the evidence exists. The fossil record exists. It is tangible. Whether there is "genetic increase of ininformation" is speculation, but the evidence of increasing complexity is not.

Just an aside: Do you believe in God? If not, then of course you’ve selected a model that excludes God.

Why does a model that permits evolution have to exclude God?

It should be taught in Bible class.

Then how it is the "short answer" to the question that was asked?

Whew, you’re having some difficulty with Logic 101.

Of course the fossil record exists. But there’s more than one explanation for how it came to be. And my use of the term “theory” wasn’t in regards to “the evidence,” and you mistakenly think; “theory” is in regards to your interpretation of the evidence that there’s been increasing complexity of life over billions of years.

Finally, again, your lack of logic has you confused about my final point. My point was that if you presuppose that God does not exist, then of course you don’t believe God had a hand in “all this.” And the theory of evolution is the only theory acceptable to atheists.

My point was that if you presuppose that God does not exist, then of course you don’t believe God had a hand in “all this.” And the theory of evolution is the only theory acceptable to atheists.

Why did you assume that anyone who believes evolution may have happened starts with a presupposition that God does not exist? Are you bringing your own presuppostions to the assement of theory?

Ah, sheesh, you just don’t get logic, do you? I simply asked if you believed in God. I don’t know why you can’t answer that question. Forget it.

I always try to duck the hard questions in public.

Faith is not science. It’s more important than “mere facts.”

Also I see no contradiction in my Christian faith and evolutionary biology.

I’ll let you return to your debate with Theo. ;)

I understand logic, both implicit and explicit. For instance I understand the the basic premise of the poll question is that ID and evolution must be mutually exclusive. ID is an “alternative” to evolution. The basic premise is that if you believe it evolution you cannot believe in an intelligent designer (God). You must choose one or the other.

Physical evidence of increasing complexity of life over a period of billions of years.

Your premise presumes more than there has ever been any objective evidence to support it.

You confuse what you claim to be the "increasing complexity of life" with the fact that too many evolutionists have run out of answers to explain the impossibilites attendant to materialistic explanations for complexity that science is only now discovering.

FReegards!

The absence of a definitive explanation doesn't affect the existence of the evidence. It's still the same evidence, and throwing verbose FUD at one explanation doesn't provide any better ones.

All your grandiose blather about my lack of understanding doesn't provide any better answers.

All you can do is tear down, not to replace it with a better scientific explanation, but just to tear it down so there will not be one.

I never accept anything without evidence.

You accepted without evidence what "somebody" said that you could barely remember anything about before you attempted to use the example to support your evolution-premised position. In fact, you even later said that you didn't need any evidence. That's not thinking like a scientist. What you are is evidence of someone far too inclined to place his faith in his premise at the expense of doing any amount of critical thinking of his own.

The lizard example was studied in depth in an academic environment quite some time ago and was critiqued.

Critiqued by whom? The peer review process? The same process that lends its "credence" to such things as the roundly debunked AGW pablum? That kind of peer review process? What evidence do you have to say that any one who did critique the work was competent to do so -- assuming that any one even did? You place way too much faith in the kind of things which actually require evidence.

It is not ‘heresay[sic.].’

If you didn't study it yourself or make the necessary effort to vet the qualifications of the researchers, and the quality of the work, you indeed just placed your faith in nothing more than hearsay.

If you believe the conclusion of the study to be invalid, that is your presumption based on faith, because I have not provided the primary source for you to analyze.

I don't know what the study concluded. Given as little as you remember about it I don't know that you know either. All you seem to know is what you wanted it to conclude and all I know is what you said about it. I would have to place my faith in your understanding of the science, but as I have become more familiar what your scientific thinking ability is at this point all I can say for certain is that you rely too much on hearsay to form valid core scientific opinions.

Since you do not know me personally, I find it unsettling that you can use a couple of blog posts to declare what my world view is. There is a logical fallacy in there somewhere.

You have revealed more about yourself in two blog posts than you are even aware. Go back and read our dialog. Perhaps some of the things I have seen will become more obvious to you. I don't know Obama personally, but I do know his world view. it's not that hard to figure out. If you are unsettled, you're possibly a bit too thin skinned.

Since you work in the field, I suppose you are aware of the scientific studies on the relationship between climate change and human evolution.

I am familiar with the thinking of those who have attempted without much success to make that connection, but their models are flawed. When "scientists" write "is" when all they can truthfully say is "appears to be," I just see someone trying to over-sell their point. That's not science. That's propaganda. I gave you an opportunity to comment about what you have studied and what your study design looks like, but so far you haven't.

I do not take evolution on faith.

Where and how have you observed Darwinian evolution? If you haven't observed it yourself you are merely taking it on faith that somebody else who has a conjecture about it hopes they will see it someday.

You are again incorrectly assuming what my world view is.

Actually, the more we converse the more it is you who are actually making the world view that you hold more obvious.

I stated that there is a great deal of evidence for evolution in other areas of biology because I have either studied the evidence or had discussions about the evidence with knowledgeable people.

OK, so what evidence of Darwinian evolution have you studied and how did you study it? What biases did you encounter in the presentation of the data you studied and how did you filter bias out of the equation? Did you even bother to try? Objectivity in science demands it. Why don't you share your experimental design with your readers, and we’ll judge whether or not your assumptions and evidence to support them are scientifically valid?

You state that “no one has any evidence that which credibly and scientifically supports the Darwinian evolutionary premise.” Since you have worked in the field for many years, I find it surprising that you have not come across one piece of data, fossil, computational study, genetic analysis, etc, that you find at least somewhat valid.

Data is data. You and I have the same data. You and I have the same fossils to study, computational studies based on a false premises give us valueless extrapolations along the lines of the fraudulent AGW "science." Materialist Evolutionists have no idea where all the sophisticated information compacted into the volume of the cell came from. An evolutionist can't cause to happen in a controlled laboratory environment what he alleges happened by chance in an uncontrolled environment. It just takes far too much faith to believe the evolutionary premise.

Evolutionists can produce no evidence for new cellular information arising on its own, and certainly not in direct response to an environmental event. Your premise dies on that alone. Statistical impossibility closes down most of the rest of the evolutionist's arguments to the point of rendering them irrelevant to any thinking person. We’ll someday look in retrospect and wonder how those calling themselves scientists could have possibly adhered to such a specious premise.

Also, to make such a blanket declaration of certainty, you would have to examine and reject every single relevant piece of research ever published on the subject. That is one giant leap of faith.

I didn't say that I didn't take some things on faith. You said, "I never accept anything without evidence," and I showed that in fact you do. When a premise such as yours is based in impossibility common sense allows spirited dismissal of such philosophy.

My position in support for evolution can change at any time in the face of credible studies/evidence that cast doubt on the theory.

Study science with a spirit in search of truth and that change is likely to happen. Question academic orthodoxy. Learn to critique sagaciously.

I wrote: “That said, he has absolutely no idea how he did it, or why he did it, he can’t recreate the formula, and he has no knowledge of the conditions under which it all supposedly happened in order to make it happen again. But yet by faith the evolutionist only sees himself as proof that it occurred.”

You replied: That sounds like the same tired old creationist declaration rather than a reasonable argument from a scientist. There are plenty of ‘ideas’ on how evolution takes place, you just don’t like any of them.

That's not a creationist declaration. That's just a quick off-the-top-of-the head listing of the kind of questions evolutionists have simply have no answers for, but must be able to answer to lend an ounce of validity to a Darwinian materialist's evolutionary premise.

FReegards!

The “somebody that said” are your colleagues in the field of biology. Professors presented research and formed a conclusion based on evidence at the time. I believe the conclusion to be valid. There is certainly a chance that the conlclusion is wrong. That is reason, not faith.

You are up against at least 99 percent of biologists in your complete rejection of evolution. Even the fundamentalists in the ICR and other anti-evolution groups want to “teach the controversy.” You don’t seem to think there is one, and that evolution is completely invalid and has absolutely no merit whatsoever. I don’t believe that position is reasonable. You mention the ‘fraudulent’ theory of global warming. I also do not believe that is a scientifically honest statement. From what I can see, the field is dominated by alarmist scientists, but that does not invalidate all data. I personally know physicists working in this field. They are debating this issue intensely, and the debate is focused on the contributions of human activity vs. solar fluctuations.

Again, you cannot know what my world view is based on the previous blog posts. It is not logically possible. At most, you could conclude that I was lazy and/or unprepared by not having the lizard evidence directly available for the discussion. I may base my world view on astrology or the teachings of Buddha. For all you know, I could be a devout Catholic. After all, the Pope believes evolution is valid, and does not believe faith and evolution are mutually exclusive.

You ask how I personally observed Darwinian evolution. I have not, but that is completely irrelevant and logically unecessary.
I, along with most physicsts, will never personally observe elementary particles. We believe they exist because instruments detect miniscule changes in fields and/or missing energy that is then inferred to be the escape of a particle. The same reasoning applies to many of the processing in evolution.

I am not going to rehash and reprint my notes from all of my biology related courses for you to personally analyze, because I have other things to do. You can easily read through the >100,000 articles on google scholar alone to see where I may look for new information on evolution. How about the legal opinion from the conservative, Bush-appointed judge in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial? Your good friend Michael Behe certainly had alot of trouble explaining how irreducible complexity invalidated evolution when he was faced with the responses from other scientists.

“An evolutionist can’t cause to happen in a controlled laboratory environment what he alleges happened by chance in an uncontrolled environment.”-you

You should at least get the definition of evolution correct. I’m sure you are aware of the fact that evolution involves random mutation AND natural selection. Natural selection is not random chance.

The “somebody that said” are your colleagues in the field of biology. Professors presented research and formed a conclusion based on evidence at the time. I believe the conclusion to be valid. There is certainly a chance that the conlclusion[sic.] is wrong. That is reason, not faith.

It is clear that you are too naïve or perhaps simply too stupid to realize that every time you say "I believe" that in itself is a statement of faith.

You and my presumed “colleagues” of whom you speak place a lot of faith in their pitifully inadequate powers of what they term, "reason." You too often confuse the two concepts even as you have done again here.

You are up against at least 99 percent of biologists in your complete rejection of evolution.

And I’ll just call bull shit on your "stats." Prove it, or are you just going to continue parroting more MSM bilge? You say down-thread that you have never witnessed Darwinian evolution. Neither has anyone else. Those who want to believe in it like yourself have more faith in the un-observed and the materialistically impossible than I, speaking as a scientist, could ever possibly have.

Quite frankly, I don't think you know what 99% of biologists think about evolution. You are all bluster, and a gas bag of exaggeration. I suspect you know few enough biologists personally to even be able to form a studied opinion one way or another. We certainly know what much of politically driven academia tells them they MUST say to get their grant funding and tenure track positions in liberal academe, but that's got more to do with coercion than anything resembling scientific experimentation.

Even the fundamentalists in the ICR and other anti-evolution groups want to “teach the controversy.” You don’t seem to think there is one, and that evolution is completely invalid and has absolutely no merit whatsoever.

Actually the controversy arises from the academic emperors of the evolution-driven orthodoxy standing there intellectually naked before the scientific world, clothed only in their willful ignorance of the mathematical and practical impossibilities which characterize their precious dogma.

They are one with their dogma. From it proceeds their worldview. It is their religion, their ego crutch, and their god. They created themselves. Still, the wizards of smart can't tell you how they did it -- all they offer is a hypothesis, and though still without any ability to test it, they inflate the meaning of hypothesis to say “theory” -- which by definition the premise of evolution simply is not.

So smart are they that they created themselves, but can't tell us why, or how, and the more complex they are realizing this whole life thing is they've run out of a credible amount of time required to make it all happen! You see, at the heart of it is this simple fact – if you don’t have the time, you don’t have the premise.

Don't you realize that all those estimates made about the time it's supposedly taken life to happen were based on what science claimed it "knew" back in the 40's and 50's. Now your side has only 4.5 billion years you originally claimed you needed to see complexity of life only as you understood it back then to explain life on earth.

But in the ensuing 50 years the complexity is orders of magnitude greater than you or anyone in science ever imagined, and what was already mathematically impossible to explain using an evolutionary model, just became that much more difficult as the body of evidence of complexity increases.

Even Francis Crick, credited co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, admitting the impossibility of simple random chance and natural selection to explain all this complexity -- the explanation you appear to be the sucker for -- believed in his own brand of Intelligent design: “directed panspermia” (F. H. C. Crick and L. E. Orgel, "Directed Panspermia" p 341-346 v 19, Icarus, 1973).

Crick didn't think 4.5 billion years was enough time for random chance processes and natural selection to take its course. Crick's premise was that some intergalactic intelligence of some sort designed all the complexity – not the God of Creation at all of course. And not that he had any science to back it up either -- all purely speculation – but that is how he dealt with that complexity thing. Since he’s been on the other side of life since 2004, one wonders how well that silly explanation went over with the Creator.

In the end you are stuck with a bad model that explains nothing and based on a time interval you thought was as sufficient as it was essential to the premise -- which is now insufficient to explain all the complexity of life processes that is now known! So, tell me: if you don't buy Crick's premise, how many more years must you invent out of thin air like you all did last time to try explain life in all its complexity now?

I don’t believe that position is reasonable. You mention the ‘fraudulent’ theory of global warming. I also do not believe that is a scientifically honest statement.

Academe had the public trust at a time when everyone listened to and believed the likes of "Uncle Walter" (Cronkite), Frank Baxter, and the MSM. The fraudulent and political approach to science that academe had gotten away with for years as they elevated Darwinism as "science" crashed into the wall of the testable in the AGW debate.

As the time intervals were much more compressed, and credibly timed and witnessed data could readily be evaluated, AGW has crumbled. The AGW guys still squeal and squawk because their egos and their funding are tied to the premise (see Mann’s payoff story at UVa. that VA AG Ken Cuccinelli is trying to get to the bottom of .) The propaganda of AGW is no different from the propaganda of Darwinism. Both are nothing more than the politicizations of science for an intended social goal -- neither of which have any basis in science.

From what I can see, the field is dominated by alarmist scientists, but that does not invalidate all data.

And Darwinists often dominate academia. Neither your AGW alarmists, nor Darwinists are doing science. Their doing social work. Data is data, and it stands on its own. AGW and Darwinists have their world views into which they attempt to fit data, but their methods stray too far from objective science to call what they do an honest study of science.

I personally know physicists working in this field. They are debating this issue intensely, and the debate is focused on the contributions of human activity vs. solar fluctuations.

There is enough observable science to dismiss the human element of global “warming.” Are your esteemed physicists the same "scientists" who were preparing us for a new ice age back in 1974 too? Temperature cycles were recorded throughout the middle ages and in pre-Industrial America. Human contribution to climate change throughout recorded history has been vanishingly influential at best.

There is no debate amongst your physicists whose grants and funding depend on research based on this lie. The premise MUST be AGW or they won't get funded. Simple as that. Similarly, in bio-science the premise must be Darwinism or the academic high priesthood of Darwinism won't get funded. Peer review is meaningless when the “peerage” is all bought off by the politically entrenched. Your naïveté regarding this kind of stuff is quite revealing.

Again, you cannot know what my world view is based on the previous blog posts. It is not logically possible.

Your world view has been plainly obvious for all readers to see, and has been revealed repeatedly by your own demonstration on this very thread. There is prima facie evidence of your world view right here.

At most, you could conclude that I was lazy and/or unprepared by not having the lizard evidence directly available for the discussion.

That was established as truth from the outset of this debate. Your world view takes all that kind of stuff on faith. In fact, your position is more faith-based than any biblical Creationist’s ever was!

I may base my world view on astrology or the teachings of Buddha. For all you know, I could be a devout Catholic. After all, the Pope believes evolution is valid, and does not believe faith and evolution are mutually exclusive.

You may very well have added still other preposterous elements to the confused mix which comprises your world view. I don't particularly care what the Pope thinks, or whatever you think he thinks (which you have not quoted entirely correctly here either). But your confused, evolutionarily driven world view is your own to justify and for which you must answer – but for which here you can’t seem to mount a credible defense.

You ask how I personally observed Darwinian evolution. I have not, but that is completely irrelevant and logically unecessary.[sic.]

Then you are by your own admission taking Darwinism completely on faith, and are not subjecting it to rigorous scientific falsification, as any scientist with an ounce of credibility should do.

I, along with most physicsts[sic.], will never personally observe elementary particles. We believe they exist because instruments detect miniscule changes in fields and/or missing energy that is then inferred to be the escape of a particle. The same reasoning applies to many of the processing in evolution.

I wouldn't insult the study of physics -- the science most closely assessable with mathematical certitudes -- with the palaver and fantasy that is used routinely to try to prop up Darwinism. What instrumentation do you propose is capable of testing Darwinism?

Physical changes are testable and mathematically predictable in a world governed by physics. Evolution has no physical world in which to perform tests, because that world no longer exists -- if in fact it ever did in the first place. No artificial world can be created to mimic a world, which was never observed in the first place, or to cause to come into existence the processes on which "evolution" so fundamentally relies.

I am not going to rehash and reprint my notes from all of my biology related courses for you to personally analyze, because I have other things to do.

So what you're saying is that I'll just have to take it on faith that you know what you're talking about, is that it?

You can easily read through the >100,000 articles on google scholar alone to see where I may look for new information on evolution.

Yes, but all that literature counts for just so much toilet paper when downloaded and printed off, if you haven't demonstrated any understanding of anything you read, any better than you understood anything about that silly TV show or whatever it was that had you UNCRTICALLY thinking you could actually witness evolution in just 40 years' time. Pathetic. Where did you say you were going to school anyway?

How about the legal opinion from the conservative, Bush-appointed judge in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial?

You know that faggot in California, Chief US District Judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled that California’s proposition 8 forbidding gay marriage was unconstitutional is also a Bush 41 appointee too. So what’s your point? We were discussing science, though I am not surprised that an evolutionist losing his side of the debate as you are would find himself distracted by such irrelevancy.

Your good friend Michael Behe certainly had alot of trouble explaining how irreducible complexity invalidated evolution when he was faced with the responses from other scientists.

Behe did a fine job testifying to irreducible complexities readily seen in nature, both in his book and in his court testimony. Lawyers were called in to sway a politically charged issue which at its heart involved affirmation of parental rights to setting local educational standards. It was a trumped up case, as was Roe v. Wade in the context of abortion – another bad court decision.

Courts are political entities, not scientific debating societies. When high priests of evolution can’t support their position and have to resort to political constructs and the force of the State rather than an honest study of objective science to establish their position, you’ll understand my FR tagline a lot better. Again your inability to discern the basis of issues is indicative of your lack of adequate study of issues before choosing to comment upon them.

“An evolutionist can’t cause to happen in a controlled laboratory environment what he alleges happened by chance in an uncontrolled environment.”-you You should at least get the definition of evolution correct. I’m sure you are aware of the fact that evolution involves random mutation AND natural selection. Natural selection is not random chance.

Oh, I get it – your definition of evolution uses random chance when you want it to and then doesn’t use random chance when you don’t want it to, is that it? Of course, you are creating yourself here, aren’t you! You’ve got to explain how intelligence arose from non-intelligent randomness, when there is no evidence in nature of order arising from disorder. Hopefully a course in thermodynamics shows up in your curriculum at some point in your educational pursuits. Looks like you have just checkmated yourself there, my friend. It’s truly amazing what passes for critical scientific analysis in youth these days.[/shakes head in dismay]

Natural selection is about maintaining the integrity of the gene pool and weeding out deviations from that gene pool. There is no evidence of an organism creating new genetic information. There is only evidence of intergenerational loss of information, and mutation leading to dysfunction and system non-function.