Man of Science or Religion? Come discuss.

Meh we all base our opinions on our own observations. People will quote Hawkings or other people to make a point I just have a reference of my own that I use to present my arguments as well, and they say it better than I would.

You say yourself that theories are maintained until proven otherwise. That is why I reject it. I see more evidence for Divine Creation than I do evolution, but also since evolution is still just a theory it requires a degree of faith to believe in it and continue pursuing it.

Also I am familiar with Kenneth Miller. He says this in one of his books: "I still my reservations about macro-evolution, as the Cambrian era explosion seems to stand in contrast to the Darwinian version of evolution and history."

He is simply a man who subscribes to the idea that the 7 days are more like long periods of time, or eras. I was taught that version of "Creation" (yes it technically is still Creation, just a different theory on it) in college. But my point is that he is skeptical about macro evolution as much as the next guy.

I forgot to add that the man is Roman Catholic, and in today's society Roman Catholicism has strayed away from Christian beliefs in a number of ways (the idea of one guy being God's channel to mankind aka the Pope, the added books of the Bible that were not really added, etc). I'm not saying that a Roman Catholic can't be a Christian, but Roman Catholic does not always mean Christian. And in many circles this guy isn't considered a Christian because of his rejections of so many fundamental Christian ideals, some of which fall under the Conviction level of belief which are central to one's salvation.

 

In the Bible, the number 7 and 40 are usually meant to signify 'perfection' or 'enough' not an actual quantity.

Ha! How do you conjecture that? Have you even read the Bible? Don't worry, that's pretty common among people (Pastafarians) who only care to make fun of religion/God/Christians. There is so much in 'religion' that we, as humans will never know or are not even meant to know. We can only make theories based upon what we observe and know from the Bible, but we can never test it, nor will we ever be able to disprove it as you have so kindly reminded us.

 

May I remind you that the Bible was written by men. Also Tantric, push off will you. I take it you feel strongly about religion, but that doesn't mean you need to be a jerk.

This describes me best: I'm a radical atheist. I think I use the term radical rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god - in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously. It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague wishy-washy Agnosticism - both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much. (Douglas Adams)

 

I have to explain every aspect of why Natendo's statement are born of ignorance and willful blindness.

First on theories. In science, the objective is to acquire more useful information or to create models that simulate reality so that we can better understand our world and create or enhance technologies to benefit everyone. The highest esteemed a thing can be is a theory because if you flat called it the fact of [gravity, newtonian mechanics, cells, evolution etc etc] then you are saying there is no more to learn. Science is set up to try and disprove it's theories so that better models can replace them.

Evolution has survived the rigorous scrutiny and review of every aspect of science from around the globe for 200 years and is universally accepted.

By thinking that theory means a wild guess is willful blindness.

Second, needing faith for evolution. It's difficult to need faith for something with so much evidence from every field of science and common sense that its difficult to believe people are unable to accept it. Evidence includes Embryology, Fossil Records, Speciation, Genome Similarities, Breeding forced traits, taking parents traits (Mendelian Genetics). etc etc.

Not understanding any of these and dismissing offhand is DISHONEST.

Also, you imply that creation and evolution are opposing faith positions while most people who accept evolution are religious themselves. Accepting evolution doesn't mean you don't believe in god in any way!

Thirdly, on evidence for creation. Aside from logical fallacies, outright lies, or statement from ignorance, I have heard and read in my time very few other arguments whatsoever.

Saying that creation is real, because the bible says so, because its gods word, because the bible says it is, because its gods word etc etc is ridiculous circular logic and says nothing and proves nothing.

'Miracles,' faith healing, talking in tongues or whatever is never evidence because they never occur in a controlled and reliable environment and no one has it happen to them, they just heard it happened or someone said it did. All hearsay therefore not evidence.

Finally, something I like people to think about for creation.

Why does the world NEED to be created? Because it's complex? So god must have done it? But if god is more complex than the world is then he must have been created as well. But if you state that he doesn't need to be created, the why did the world need to be created. Why does it need any supernatural magical reason?

The answer is IGNORANCE. You don't know, can't know, but pretend you have the ultimate truth.

Here's a tip. Anyone touting they have the truth knows much less than someone who says they don't know but are looking for better answers. If you think you know everything, you actually know nothing.

Finally (2), if creation science is science, where are the testable new knowledge it brings, or new life saving technologies? There are none because it does nothing to help anyones understanding of anything.

Believe what you like but if you want to convince anyone you better have damn good reasons for anyone to believe you.

 

@bold1
"Just a theory" is, technically, true, but it implies that there are higher levels of understanding and evidence than "theory." In science, there is no higher level. Theories explain evidence. There is atomic theory, the theory of relativity, germ theory of disease, and endless other theories just like evolution that are used every day and science has a very high degree of certainty of, and nobody disputes those over the "just a theory" argument. Why is that, I wonder? If creationists are so skeptical that they won't accept scientific theories on the grounds that they should be better than theories, why don't they do the same for the rest?

I don't know if we're still playing the "here's a source go read it" game, but this is a great explanation about the "only a theory" misconception (scroll down to it). If you care to read the rest of the page too, it might educate you. In the upper right-hand corner there is a link to a rebuttal to the list by a creationist and then a rebuttal to the rebuttal.

@bold2
Your particular sect doesn't have a monopoly on the title Christian. Roman Catholics accept the divinity of Jesus and the truth in the Bible, and that makes them by definition Christian. They just aren't Protestant. This doesn't matter anyway.

 

As for evolution vs. creationism, I prefer to believe that all things were created, and that evolution was God's way of developing nature, perhaps. I don't really know (no one does), but this is just what I have, as a Lutheran Christian, formulated through my experiences.

For that graph, it looks made up. Why:
1. No 50%, 0% or 100%
2. Looks very unprofessional and like something someone came up with when they got bored in history class.

There is no way to determine a correlation between religiosity and intelligence without heavy bias.

 

I think from here on forth the graph should be discluded from conversation. It has no place, albeit many strong religious people can APPEAR stupid, but thats just ignorance. And thats a minority.

 

couldn't be further from the truth, in my (Agnostic) case

 

Really? Me being a jerk? If you're referring to this:

I merely took a statement made by our oh-so-courteous Ladnil and modified it:

Yet, I am the jerk amongst comments such as this as well:

On the other, actually on-topic hand this:

I would have to consider one of the 'truest' things said on this thread so far.

I think we all need to remember that this thread is simply a place for the convergence of different opinions, no one is going to 'convert' (for lack of a better term I guess) anyone from one way of thinking to another, nobody's ideologies are going to change because of discussion on Forgehub.com. All this is meant to be is to share our ideas and maybe open up a train of thought for new ones as to how these two ways of thought can co-exist. Maybe.

 

You say that is a 'jerk' comment, yet I fully explained why that was the case, and I did not say Nanetendo himself is ignorant, merely that his statement was.

In any case, I would much prefer if we all avoid personal insults, and over-generalizations. So no 'all [a]theists are/are not...' or anything.

The thing is with the comment Originally Posted by Ladnil
"Don't worry, that's pretty common among people who only look to creationist/religious sources for information about evolution." is that you don't go to scientific sites to look at religion, and you don't go to religious sites to look at evolution.

Either case you will get a degree of misinformation due to bias, perhaps to a greater degree with creationist sites which oftentimes will misinform on purpose (Kent Hovind being the best example, who brought a bunch of false arguments up that are absolutely false and circulate heavily now through creationist circles. Kent Hovind was arrested under numerous charges including forty-five counts of structuring cash transactions, twelve tax offenses and other offenses, and is currently incarcerated in a federal prison)

You have to be weary of your sources, they may just be false.

 

You know Orlando, I don't appreciate being called blind or ignorant. Believe me I have done plenty of studies on the theory of Evolution and have come to my own conclusions. If I disagree with you whatever no big deal, but you don't see me calling you ignorant for not seeing what I hold to be the truth.

I wasn't at any point trying to convict people of anything, I was just giving my opinion.

[br][/br]

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Edited by merge:

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I am not with any sect. I define a Christian as someone who professes Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior for all mankind and as someone who accepts the basic principles that are held at a Conviction level (aka required for salvation, things like Jesus was more than just a man and that he actually died and rose 3 days later etc etc).

Doesn't matter what church you go to or what "sect" you are labelled as, that is all irrelevant. What matters is what you believe, not what group you are with.

I read the link you gave me, and the rebuttal, and I would have read the other rebuttal but the link doesn't work. Either way Wallace's rebuttal makes sense and thanks for pointing it out to me.

 

I did not say that YOU were blind or ignorant, however now that you have put it as such I will, however note that:

I said that the STATEMENT that "evolution is just a theory" is blind and ignorant. I said this because it is a VERY common and VERY false claim made by people who, for the most part, know better.

You don't say "gravity is just a theory" yet it is Gravitational Theory. The reason I said willfully blind is that had you chose to look at anything about what a scientific theory is, you would not have made that statement. Theory as you used it equates to hypothesis in scientific terms. Therefore, it is your choice to ignore this, and if you use it as you did, then YOU are being willfully blind.

Read this. ALL OF IT.
Objections to evolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This deals with EVERY issue you attempt to pull with evolution. I found this in less than FIVE MINUTES. If I can get this info, then so can you, so if you disregard it, you ARE being willfully ignorant. ALSO note that there is no flag on this page, so NO person has raised any issues about accuracy or bias in this page. And if you doubt the accuracy of the page, check the sources, there are 184 different sources cited.

You say you have done studies on the theory, yet you purport falsifiable ideas that have answers in evolution, yet you ignore them. Truth when you refer to what is known about the world is not something you can choose. It is something you learn from what is observed. Evolution is observed, and is not something that is reasonably disputed.

If you want to say that you have read up on things, don't give such blatant untruths, they show that what you say is in no way based on what is known, but rather on misinformation garnered from unreliable sources.

If you want to point out something that is ACTUALLY wrong with evolution, make sure there isn't already an easy answer available on the link provided, because I will not deal with those issues as they are there provided for you and any issues that are on there and you bring up will be spawned of willful blindness.

 

Maybe I should've worded it more gently, but there is only one source that quote mines that section without the following sentence. Without the complete quote, it seems that Darwin thought evolution as ridiculous, with the complete quote it is clear that Darwin was using the expression of amazement as a rhetorical device to further emphasize power of natural selection to create these complex structures over millions of years. In other words, the creationist sources distributing that quote are lying about Darwin's words, plain and simple.

When someone is seeking information from a source that is actively lying to them, I find it difficult to show respect. If my tone made people so defensive that they fail to acknoweldge that they are being lied to, then I truly regret that.

The "just a theory" argument is similar. The common conversational use of "I have a theory" implies that it's little better than a guess, but that is simply not true in science. Because the word has different implications based on context, I can understand where the layperson might get confused and think that there is doubt over evolutionary theory. When a supposedly credible source distributes that argument though, it is a clear case of intentionally misleading people for ideological reasons. In other words, they don't care whether they're right, they only care whether people believe what they say so they continue to propagate the lie of "only a theory."

 

Since I'm not the only one posting links anymore. Here is just about every rebuttal to Evolution I can think of:

Rebuttals Against Evolution

I read all of Wikipedia so feel free to read all of that

 

Here is as full a response I can give:

In response to the first link:
General Rebuttal to the Theory of Evolution
It opens with the differentiation between macro and micro evolution:
This is dealt with in this portion of the article I cited: Objections to evolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Next it deals with "gradualism" or the lack of evidence of gradual changes in the fossil record, and this is dealt with in this same portion of the article as above, and in another article on transitional fossils:
Transitional fossil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

After that it goes on to deal with punctuated equilibrium, which is the theory that evolution moves at variable speeds, often giving rise to spurts of change.
The essentials of the argument is that the change in rate somehow contradicts the gradual change over time, however this argument is a bit confusing, so if you could elaborate on it, I could more effectively respond to it.

It goes on to saying that evolution is not shown in genetics, and this is not mentioned in my earlier cited article, however it is not a very stable argument, dealing not with Molecular evolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia but with the Molecular clock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As the molecular clock is merely a fairly...minor way to deduce age, this argument is rather baseless, more of a strawman argument than anything else, and I won't really get into due to my knowledge of it not being complete enough to give an honestly accurate answer.

Next it deals with the human evolution and states that the gaps in the timeline show that humans didnt evolve. However, again in the article earlier it does deal with how the fossil record is not very reliable as conditions to make fossils are rare. That says, we know quite a bit more about human evolution than the article you cited indicates. For example it says **** erectus was the last step before sapiens, yet rhodesiensis was estimated to be around 300,000–125,000 years ago. Given that (as said by the article you cited) sapiens (us) arose up to 100,000 years ago, more likely more recently however, this timeline does not seem unreasonable.

The next, and final argument is that climate and ecology have little influence on evolution.
This is untrue for the simple reason that evolution is literally random mutation and natual selection, so the creatures which are better suited to their environment reproduce more easily (because they survive) thus passing their genes on. To say that the environment (that includes the climate and ecology in case you want to pick at me) has no effect upon the survivability of a species, or that those better suited to an environment are not more likely to survive and reproduce is ridiculous, and therefore so is this argument.
And it also says that there is no evidence of geographical isolation creating change see this article.

I will deal next (because it will be quick) with the Evolution and the Bible/Morality section, as it is dealt with in the article I originally cited:
Objections to evolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Next I deal with the Origin of Life section:
This has absolutely nothing to do with evolution, but with Abiogenesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Next is the cambrian explosion section:
Essentially this deals with the 'explosion' of more complicated life in the cambrian era, however the problems of this time are mainly due to lack of data, incorrect analysis of data etc. While this is definitely the most real argument brought forward, it still does not provide more than a bit of doubt upon evolution, and much new data has been brought relatively recently that shows evolutionary trends. Also, there were several major catalysts that could have caused this explosion, for the sake of simplicity, here is the article on the explosion:
Cambrian explosion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The last section to deal with is the section on human descent, and some of it directly contradicts things that are known.
For example; one source says that people could have lived for up to a thousand years, yet all evidence points to people getting longer lifespans not shorter.
The majority of the others point to human morality and consciousness, which really is just based on social dynamics. To have a population that successfully survives, it cannot be killing itself, or creating circumstances which harm the rest of the population, as that would eventually lead to the demise of all the individuals within that population. Therefore the evolution of morality makes sense in that those individuals who do things that are beneficial to the population are more likely to survive. Consciousness, I honestly don't know enough about the neuroscience, so I would have trouble giving an accurate answer here. However this is something which generally is dealt with in how the brain works etc.

The other arguments in that section really have nothing against evolution, instead saying how biblical stories align with what is observed. This I will not deal with, as it does not deal with the issues at hand.







Now, I have dealt with the qualms you had to the best of my ability (I am not an expert in these fields and thus my answers will be to a degree inaccurate, and as with the neuroscience area, I am actually not well versed in the technicals of some parts) and my only hope in writing this is that you can better understand why I dismiss your claims, however I do realize you are unlikely to change these beliefs.

What I would like to say however is this:
Science is not a thing that is perfected. There are holes. But the goal is to fill them until there are none, however this is unlikely to occur, due to the fact that the more you know, the more you realize there is to learn.
To see these gaps as the complete failure of an idea, despite their often small impact, is not an acceptable way to deal with them. And to propose ID or creationism is correct because these ideas are false is a logical fallacy, as ID and creationism have FAR less evidence, delving more into emotion than fact, and they do not help our understanding of our world (that is the goal of science).

What I am saying is EVEN if evolution was NOT true, it would not prove creationism is.

Oh and just saying, thanks for being civil about this, I realize I was slightly rude in my statements, however I saw errors that were overwhelmingly glaring, and I felt minorly outraged that someone could believe something that was such idiocy (I refer to the 'just a theory' argument, which holds basically no weight even in ID or creationist circles, the rest of it, though I believe it to be misinformation, it not necessarily a bad argument).

If you please, try to pick apart my response.
AND I STILL SAY:
Evolution v. Religion is a false dichotomy, they are not polar issues...

EDIT: I forgot to deal with the article you cited earlier into the discussion, as I hadn't thought about dealing with it when I was writing the rest of this up, this will be a bit short as I am trying to finish it quickly:

It deals with essentially there being not many fossils indicating transitions, however as I said earlier, there are plenty, look at the transitional fossils link.

He also states that " Instead, it shows the sudden emergence of new species out of nowhere, fully complete with all their characteristics and not changing over time"

This is ridiculous, as there is much evidence of transitions, and many instances of creatures, organs etc slowly developing.

He also attacks the idea that fossils need certain conditions to form, which is sort of ridiculous as well, as fossils dont just appear, they have to go through certain processes to be created, and these conditions are rarely met.

He also attempts to go into the unrelated fields of the origin of life, which is unrelated to evolution, which only deals with life after its appearance.

He says some other things that are all dealt with in the article I cited earlier such as it not being scientific, as dealt with here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objections_to_evolution#Scientific_status

 

Creationism and Evolution(ism) are both theories that try to explain 'how' things are the way they are, but neither can answer 'why'. 'Why' is outside the domain of objectivity. Creationism claims to know 'why', but the metaphysical argument behind it is...well, lacking, to say the least ('God said so' is hardly compelling if I don't believe in Him). Pure science at least admits that it cannot answer those types of questions.

 

How do you explain the fact that the fossils line up exactly at their expected depths, which corroborates the timeline of evolution. All the animals from the Cambrian period are at the depth that they ought to be, just as all of the animals from the Cretaceous period are at their correct depth.

Evolution is a fragile theory. All it would take to completely debunk it would be one modern fossil at the depth of an ancient period.

 

A fossil rabbit in the precambrian era?

 

Is he not banned (again) atm?

Either way, this thread is interesting, but its getting slightly...out of hand? I dont know how to describe it. It all seems like the whole thread is just evolution vs creationism...