Posted on 08/05/2013 8:55:32 AM PDT by marshmallow
“According to science it was only one”
Then you have misunderstood the science. EVERY extinct species is a failed try. There are many more species that have gone extinct than there are ones that have survived.
You have also misunderstood the term “missing link”. That is a term invented by creationists. Nobody working in evolution is looking for a “missing link” because there isn’t one. Instead, assuming that evolution is true, we expect to see a whole mess of very similar, closely related species. In particular, with regard to human evolution, we would expect to see multiple species that have characteristics that are intermediate between human and ape. I personally think it’s pretty telling that there are species that have been found in the fossil record that are so mixed in terms of their humanity and “apeness” that creationists, who are comitted to the notion that there should be nothing that is ambiguous in terms of it being an ape or human, cannot agree whether these creatures were apes or humans.
Your post also smacks of projection. It is not scientists speaking with certainty. Science only can tell us what the best theory to fit the evidence is. Right now, evolution is the best explanation for the diversity of life. New evidence would imply a new theory. Nothing in science is EVER proven or certain. It is instead religious people who speak with certainty.
IOW, if someone finds a precambrian rabbit fossil tomorrow or finds an organism that has a hereditary mechanism that is not nucleic acid based, I am fully prepared to come on this forum and state flat out that evolution is wrong. If somehow (and I know, this CANNOT be done, which is why religion is not scientific) someone were to prove tomorrow that God doesn’t exist, would you be willing to admit that you were wrong?
What you have here is pretty much the modern Catholic take on evolution. It follows from the Augustinian process of Biblical analysis, as with the existence and nature of free will.
Being Catholic, this all was taught from childhood, we never had any problems with literal understandings of the Bible.
I can see where it can be a problem though, if one starts from a fundamentally different understanding of the Bible.
Yeppers, thought that the numbers were just a wee bit off.
Certainly, my original point is proven; we are all inbred if you look back far enough."
I agree, and the Bible alludes to this. It's amazing that so many things can be found in the Bible that people have just recently discovered scientifically. It's as if God had the Bible written so that we chase after Him, so as to find out how he does things. Michael Faraday, and many other scientists, have followed this inspiration with great results, and many of the sciences were discovered because of it.
Or as Mr. GG2 would say “show me the monkey men” :-)
Matter can be destroyed - it turns into energy. We can do it.
See nuclear fission and fusion.
Thats why e=mc^2
Conversely matter can be created.
Its the law of conservation of energy, not matter.
Most scholars date the use of metals in Eurasia from around the same time you’d assign to Adam and Eve. Again, the other human group, that is, Cro Magnons and their descendants including Basque, Ainu, Austrlians, Canary Islanders, most if not all Amerind groups, never stopped using stone tools and only ever used metal for ornaments, until forced out of that by descendants of Adam and Eve. Basque words for a knife, an axe, or anything that cuts are based on thir word for a stone...
Well stated, but I suggest you read the passage yourself. As I stated in my previous post, it tends to be the religious people who speak in terms of absolute certainty, not the scientific ones. If we are wrong, we are wrong, but given appropriate evidence, science is quite willing to admit that it made a mistake. We might well be wrong now too, but it’s the best explanation we have given the evidence that is out there. Unless you believe that the physical evidence is planted by God to intentionally deceive us (and I HAVE run across people who believe precisely this), then evolution is our best effort at explaining the details of how all the diverse species of life originated.
It always amazes me that people who use the Bible as their authority can come to completely different conclusions. The Bible may well be the inerrant word of God, but we are the all too errant recipients of that word. When often times we cannot understand what we are trying to tell each other, what makes you think that you, and only you, have the true understanding of what God has told us in the Bible?
You are certainly free to believe what you want, but so am I. I tend to think that the Bible is a guideline that God gave us to help us get along well with each other. It has helped us build a lasting human society, which functions well when we obey the Bible, but functions poorly when we don’t. It is NOT a book about technology or science. God put enough in there for us to understand where the universe came from, but not any of the details. We, of course, may never find out all the details, but that does not mean that we should give up trying. A lot of good has come from this exploration of the details of the universe.
Fair arguments from logical standpoints. Given that positive proof of God as existent or non-existent will never be conclusively (scientifically) proven, we'll call the science a draw.
Let's talk about gambling then. If Atheists have it right and there is no God (intelligent design, omnipotent being, etc.), I find out when I die (or maybe not) and have lost nothing. BUT, if there is a God that a soul denied .... well.... it can't be good. Right?
I'm conservative. Given 50/50 odds and it being life or death, I'll go the safe route. My money's on God. lol
It doesn’t matter what creationists believe or don’t believe. Such increases in genetic information have been observed. That’s the whole reason for the microevolution vs. macroevolution distinction in the first place. Even creationists no longer can deny that evolution, including increases in genetic information, has taken place.
Example: bacteria in a colony that are killed by antibiotics will develop a resistance to the antibiotic used to kill them. This has been observed multiple times and represents an increase in genetic information, ie a new geneotype has developed which confers the resistance. I suspect that many of the things you refer to as “adaptation” are actually increases in genetic information.
Ah, Pascal’s wager! Of course, you realize, right, that this argument applies equally well to Odin, Allah, Neptune, Vishnu, or the flying spaghetti monster. It’s not particular to the Christian God. If you find that convincing, then you must also worship just about every other god that people have ever worshipped.
The Bible takes account of only the known world at the time that God transmitted its essentials to humanity. Those individuals had little to no idea of what was going on barely beyond their horizon, let alone the rest of the world.
I suspect that the flood stories came from the deluge that may have opened the Black Sea to the Mediterranean ~ 8,000 years ago. If that hypothesis is correct it must have caused total havoc for the people there, and would have been passed down as oral history until it was recorded.
Noah indeed may have built an arc. But there is no geological evidence of continents submerged at the same time.
I knew I was right apes did come from man.
Thanks for the ping, dear sister in Christ!
It would not upset the ToE one bit. All that would happen is that someone would declare *Look, a rabbit is a living fossil after all.*
Then maybe instead of posting Bible verses at me, try communicating with me directly.
Oh, it certainly would. Current evolutionary theory would not accomodate any of the things I listed. A precambrian rabbit would be very disastrous for our current theories about the evolution of rabbits, and mammals in general. We would have to come up with some other evolutionary mechanism for mammal development.
Detection of non-nucleic acid heredity would be disastrous on a more fundamental level. Evolution proposes that all life is genetically related. A life form that doesn’t even have nucleic acids as a hereditary mechanism could not possibly be genetically related to those that do. That would certainly falsify the idea of common descent.
Of course, most creationists suffer from the fallacy of false dichotomy. If any of these things were found and evolution falsified, that does not mean that creationism wins. There would be a new SCIENTIFIC theory formulated and tested against the available evidence. I’m sure creationists would dislike the new theory just as much as they do evolution. (BTW, you notice that most scientists spend their time gathering evidence for evolution, not trying to falsify creationism; they understand that false dichotomy is a fallacy.)
“All males trace their y chromosomes back to Noah.”
That sounds scientific, but it is not.
Of course it isn’t. Scientifically, we don’t even know if a man named Noah actually existed. However, we can trace the ancestry of all males, via the y chromosome, back to some most recent ancestral male. If we (unscientifically) use the Bible as our guide, that would be Noah.
I do realize that. But you are applying the argument incorrectly and it doesn't affect or undermine my faith at all. "Pascal's wager" is not about promoting one god over another, it's the argument of the existence of a deity against the denial of a deity. It's an argument to challenge atheists. It is but one of many.
I submit that to move an atheist from their devout position all you have to do is prove their belief takes as much faith as your own. First, get them to admit they are strict and devout about their logical and scientific belief. Finish with what "proof" means and show that no scientific theory has proven or disproven the origin of anything from the universe to life any more than religion has. Then remind them how strict and devout they are about their logic and explain their belief is a leap of faith at some level as well. If you have them stumped, then you can toss in Pascal's Wager for fun.
I never shy away from these discussions and have found myself in quite a few over the years. I learned early on, however, that to truly start the process of changing one's heart and mind on this subject, you have to start at their level and create doubt about what they believe. You aren't going to convince them to go get baptized after one discussion. Jesus may have been able to do that, I've not seen it happen but have watched many try (sometimes even here on FR).
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