Sorry...I just had to! ;o)
Posted on 08/08/2002 3:09:19 AM PDT by 2Trievers
JULY WAS one of the most momentous months in the history of paleontology. Two major findings were reported that are beginning to reshape our theories about the origin of human beings. Scientists revealed that a skull found in the central African nation of Chad has both ape and human characteristics. This would not be so unusual were the skull not 7 million years old. That’s a million years older than the skull that previously was the oldest known hominid remain. Another skull, this one found in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, also shows ape and human characteristics. This was a completely unexpected find because until this 1.7-million-year-old skull was found, paleontologists and anthropologists believed that the only humanoid to migrate from Africa was homo erectus, our direct ancestor. If we weren’t the first hominids to leave Africa, who were, and when and why did they leave? It is a shame the brilliant Harvard anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould died earlier this year. It would be interesting to hear what he would have had to say about the new findings. Gould was a sort of radical among anthropologists. He believed in and popularized a different theory of the way evolution works, and his deviancy from the accepted orthodoxy on the subject revealed to the rest of the world what these newly discovered skulls are reinforcing: that evolution is, after all, a theory that has yet to complete its own evolutionary cycle. The truth is, science cannot yet tell us anything conclusive about the origin of our species. The fossil record is scant, and what we don’t know about our own ancestry greatly outweighs what we do know. The one thing scientists seem to universally agree on is that the human race was spawned in Africa. How, when, where and why we changed after leaving that continent is a mystery. We guess that means that, anthropologically speaking, we who inhabit the United States of America are all African-Americans. And this leaves us to wonder two things. 1.) Can understanding this common ancestry help to break down racial barriers and tensions that unfortunately still survive? 2.) Will we look good in a dashiki?
I completely agree with you. As science discovers more and more about the unsolved matters in our world, it generally creates a sense among humans of a reliance upon our selves. "We" can control our world. We then tend to view God in a trivial manner, as an ancient myth alongside Neptune and countless others. This is easier to do in part, because of the spirit of the age in which we are now living in. Post Modernism, there are no moral absolutes. Truth has been boiled down to whatever is right for you....may not be right for me.
Sorry for getting off on a separate tangent.....it's something I sometimes become passionate about. Back to your initial comment....IMO, science routinely reaffirms my belief and strengthens my faith. Not necessarily in what it cannot yet answer, but in what it has already been able to answer.
Beep. Circle takes the square. There are all sorts of ways the Big Bang theory could be falsified -- if for instance it was shown that space really wasn't expanding. There is a line of research going on this right now -- based on an alternate theory of what the red shift of astronomical objects really means -- unfortunately, it doesn't take into account the background radiation that the Big Bang theory accounts for nicely (and predicted years before it was discovered).
Post Modernism, there are no moral absolutes. Truth has been boiled down to whatever is right for you....may not be right for me.
Sorry for getting off on a separate tangent.....it's something I sometimes become passionate about.
Yes, this is another point of contention. SOME non-believers call believers stupid, and believers call non-believers amoral.
Both wrong in my opinion.
Parents and society indoctrinate kids in morals. Kids learn what is good and what is bad, what is acceptable and what's not. For this purpose, it makes no difference why, where and how the parent came into knowledge of what is good and not. Kids will trust the parents authority and develop the moral backbone before they are really able to grasp such abstract ideas as G-d, or afterlife, etc. O-o yes, they will repeat all the right keywords and lots of funny touchy stuff, but no real comprehension. The fact that the moral code was given to mankind by G-d, or mankind developed this morale code on its own, is irrelevant. Kids will learn what you feed them. I agree and follow myself, and enforce in my kids the Judeo-Christian moral absolutes minus G-d. I think they are one of the greatest achievements of our civilization.
"If no G-d, all is acceptable" is wrong, gross misrepresentation, and misunderstanding. More, if we to believe the legends, it was coined by Dostoevsky, a religious man himself, so it may be just a libel.
For you I am wrong. An independent observer will not find a difference in our behavior.
With great respect,
Sorry...I just had to! ;o)
The ONLY thing I'm intolerant of is Intolerance...And I can be as lethal as anyone when confronted with Murderous Intolerance and ISLAM openly embraces such...Other than that...Sure...God created man...but not in 7 days...I'm sorry, I can't go that far off the fossil record...Did he light the big Bang, or write the periodic Table? WOW...I think that's beautiful! I'd sing WTG G*D for that, UBETCHA!
Of course you can. You can find another cause
for background radiation, the expansion of the
universe, and other artifacts attributed to the
big bang. Other falsifiable theories that fit
the data better than the big bang could falsify
the big bang theory.
BWAHAHAHA!
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