DARWIN VS. GENESIS

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If your biology teaching in school was like mine, you had little chance of understanding evolution from that.


Wrong. The hallmark of evolution is that you have similarities that depend not only on function, and that the most parsimonious explanation for the similarities not attributable to function is descent from a common ancestor. A more detailed prediction is that if you use different measures of similarities to reconstruct patterns of descent, the resulting family trees will be correlated. You can use similarities in morphology, physiology, behaviour, development, biogeography and genotype, and you will get similar family trees. The correlation will not be perfect because there is no one to one relationship between genotype and various expressions of the phenotype, but when you do the statistics, you will find that the pattern of similarities is very unlikely to have occurred by chance.

If instead you found that the family trees reconstructed from different aspects of the phenotype are uncorrelated, or you find that similarities depend only on function, then evolutionary theory can't explain what is going on. You would have falsified the whole thing.

This is basic. If you don't understand this, you don't understand evolution.

You can test this now (if you have enough time and money) in a virtual ecology. You can either let it evolve, or you can design each species independently and from scratch. If you let your ecosystem evolve, the species will show similarities that depend not only on function, but also on descent from common ancestors.


If you were right about that part, I would concede the rest of the argument. But you are wrong. See above.


The way he labeled his samples while he was with Captain Fitzroy on the Beagle suggests otherwise, or at least that he didn't understand the importance of biogeography. That is in contrast to Wallace, who was inspired to develop the theory of evolution by natural selection exactly through his observations of biogeography, and he took a lot less time than Darwin. If you want to claim people only saw what they expected to see based on the history of individuals, you will have to account for Wallace as well.

Anyway, I am surprised that you are arguing based on reconstructions of individual events. Do you agree that has some value after all?


Go back once again to our discussion of the scientific method. You make observations, see a pattern, derive a hypothetical explanation for what produces this pattern, then you test the hypothesis. If you test your hypothesis only on the data which you used to derive the hypothesis, you have circular reasoning. That is true for all sciences. You MUST test against data which you did not use to generate your hypothesis. Evolutionary biologists do use new data.

You may have made the methodological mistake which you attribute to evolutionary biology: you expect to see circular reasoning, and as soon as you find something that looks like it, you stop, without testing whether you might be wrong. Testing against new data is fundamental to all sciences, and if you don't know that evolutionary biologists test their ideas against new data, you don't know how it is done.


If by "practical" you mean something which you can use to achieve something you want, that is both irrelevant to the question whether evolutionary biology is science, and it is wrong. It is irrelevant because practical application is not a criterion for whether something is science. It is wrong because evolutionary theory makes useful predictions whenever you deal with pathogens, parasites or pests that you want to fight. It is relevant to fisheries policy. It is used to trace the outbreak of diseases.

If by "practical" you mean that it is rooted in the real world, your criticism of evolutionary biology is wrong, and it contradicts your classification of mathematics as science. Some people argue that mathematics is not strictly a science, because whether a mathematical idea has anything at all to do with the real world makes no necessary difference to how you do mathematics. The real world does make a necessary difference to the natural sciences, because the real world is what the natural sciences study. If a relationship to the real world is your definition of practicality, evolutionary biology is more a science than mathematics.


As I understand it, geologists are pretty good at distinguishing sediments laid down over a long time from those laid down during catastrophic events. The creationists also have to dispute radioactive dating methods. The young Earth creationists have to come up with some explanation why you can see things in the sky that look to be further than about 6000 light years away. They either have to claim that God created the light so that it looks as if things were further away, or they have to make assumptions about the speed of light changing which then end up inconsistent with the accepted interpretations of other observations. Look around a bit to see just how many extra assumptions creationists have to make to explain away all the contradictions.

If you want to claim creationism is coherent, I suggest you try to give me an explanation for the current geographical distribution of species that is consistent with the story of Noah and the Flood. Start with koalas, remembering that they only eat eucalyptus.

If you want to examine the coherence of the Intelligent Design brand of creationism, have a look at their claim that you can estimate probability from complexity. Then ask yourself how complex the designer is compared to the creation. If the designer is supposed to have the creation in mind, then that mind must be more complex than the creation. How probable is it then that this designer exists, applying the same methods as the ID people use to estimate the probability of something evolving? I have looked for that answer, I have watched a debate in which a professional ID advocate was asked that question, and there was no answer. I could find no sign that they even try to find an answer.

If you want to examine the coherence of Young Earth creationism in a broader context, think of this: if God made the universe look a lot older than the Young Earth creationists say, if the universe and the bible are both the work of the same author, and if the bible is meant to be taken literally, then there is a blatant contradiction between the two works. So blatant that the author is a liar, regardless of whether it is the bible or the universe which is misleading.


Applies to physics and chemistry as well, which you classify as science. It doesn't apply to mathematics, simply because mathematics makes no claims about the natural world.

I'll get back to your points about Popper later, if you're still interested. Popper's ideas have two fundamental limitations, so I don't accept him as the last word on what is science.


Which means that you must infer causality from patterns of observations. You can't observe causality directly. The inference of causality works the same in evolutionary biology and cosmology as in other sciences.


Irrelevant. The development of new technologies is neither a criterion for whether something is science, nor is it a criterion for whether you can infer causality.


That is both irrelevant and wrong. See above.


Would you discuss this with reference to the first law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy? Or conservation of momentum? I never heard of these being derived from more fundamental principles, but both are presumed to apply to all of physics.


This is again the same argument about circular reasoning which I covered above. Taking your specific example, you prevent circularity by testing against other data, for example radioactive dating or strata laid down elsewhere and independently enough that the new data from other strata do test your hypothesis about dates (meaning you don't take a sample a few metres to the side, you go to a different river mouth, different lake, or whatever it is you study).


I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean different interpretations of what truth is, of the meaning or "true", or different interpretations of what is true regarding a specific data set? That is a fundamental distinction, and we can't discuss anything about truth until we agree on what we discuss.


See above. For a simple example, take the case of Noah and the Flood and how that is supposed to explain geological strata worldwide (including where there is no evidence of flooding), and look at how that fits with biogeography.


You can account for a wide variety of observations using the same small set of principles, without having to say all the time "It's like that because God likes it that way, and we can't reproduce any of it now because God used different laws of physics than those that apply now".


The same applies to evolutionary biology.


Both evolutionary biology and cosmology are very much concerned with explaining contemporary phenomena. Evolution with patterns of similarity, cosmology with current distribution of matter and energy. How would you explain either of these without looking into their history?


We've been through this before. It doesn't eliminate supernatural entities, because it is impossible to prove that there are no supernatural entities. The assumption of supernatural influences is simply not necessary to account for what we see in the natural world. If you count that as atheistic, then all sciences are atheistic, with the exception of mathematics which does not depend on what happens in the natural world. You can carry on doing mathematics without any reference to the natural world, ever.


What do you mean by "deny"? I claim that religion is not science. I claim that by the criteria which classify physics and chemistry as science, evolutionary biology is also science, but creationism is not. I also claim that creationism does not provide a coherent and even moderately parsimonious account of the natural world. I claim that the probability arguments of Intelligent Design have a huge logical gap in that they fail even to discuss the probability of the creator they presume to exist, despite the absence of observations. I do not deny anyone the right to believe the world was created 6000 years ago. They are welcome. But if they claim their belief is based on science, but then have to redefine science so that bible verses are considered scientific evidence by their standards (Henry Morris, of the Institute for Creation Research), I protest. I deny that religion is the same as science. I do think I have the right to deny the truth of what is blatantly untrue.

Irrelevant. Some cars are yellow. This doesn't demonstrate a drive towards yellow as the car colour of choice. Most life on this planet is bacterial. That's just how things are. They've found a way that works very well, and stuck with it. Evolution is about conserving what works well, and being very simple works very very well. Were a huge asteroid to smack into us tomorrow, we'd all die off, along with most of the other complex animals and many plants. Bacteria would do just fine, generally speaking.



Where did I make this assumption? Nothing in my evolutionary argument relates in any way to relativity - neither general nor special.



Mere assertion. Molecular geneticists disagree, as do biologists in general. Please explain how you arrived at this conclusion.



I stand by what I said. If you can demonstrate that it's possible, you will win a nobel prize, most probably. There is a great deal of dispute on this matter among physicists, and the matter is FAR from clear.



1) That is a hypothesis, and NOT a theory. If you use the terms interchangeably, you probably shouldn't be discussing scientific matters.
2) The burden of proof is upon the proponent of the hypothesis. It's not the job of science to disprove your hypothesis. It's your job to prove it. I can say that it's my view that Bill Gates is actually an from a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, but if I want to be taken seriously, I won't say, "Prove me wrong!"



Sigh.

1) Neither the anthropic principle nor the existence of human desire are evidence for anything of the sort. At least, not if one accepts logic as a good basis for argument.
2) I reiterate that the burden of proof is upon the believers in God. It's probably worth pointing out that there is NO evidence that god exists, and there is NO evidence that god doesn't exist. The question of the existence of god is not a scientific question. To illustrate my point, can you name a hypothetical finding which would disprove the existence of god?

Wow interesting post, lots of meat on the bone. Kudo to you.

We seem to be travelling similar paths of thought without quite intesecting.

Of goldi is interesting that it was mined by the ancient egyptians at a time when it really should have had no practical application bar its ability to act as a radioactive sheild isnt it?

I should disclose that I do believe in God but I find religion to be a farce or at best a comedy of errors. I was raised as a catholic but I began to really doubt the roots of my faith as a young child whilst kneeling in a church on prime real estate that booasted 24ct gold crucifixes and preahed that the over a third of the world was starving and that I should help? As igrew older and became aware of the Vatican etc it occured to me that if the Catholic church felt even an iota of the worlds pain that it pretends to that it would happily preach mass from school halls, sell up its incredible wealth and feed said starving and eliminate considerable suffering through its mind boggling wealth. After all did not Jesus do this???

When I read Genesis what really intrigues me is Genesis 6.0 and the references to the Nephilium it speaks of them and then they are referenced again in the book of Revelation in the Ends of days. Everything eludes to them being of alien intelligence and cross breeding with humans.Maybe Genesis isnt versus Evolution at all. Maybe this is the overlap that makes them one in the same

I am further intrigued by the Catholic churches wish to supress their existance even though they are reference in the Koran , the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Torah and The Book of Enoch that only resufaced in the last two centuries after the church declaring it to be heresy. What is so threatening regarding the existance of something referenced in the Bible

I am not pretending to understand the puzzle here but the pieces sure intrigue me.

[That's why we need the internal and external peace that Jesus Christ brings when He indwells a person and strongly influences a culture. Religion is a poor substitute for that and a perversion of our instinctive need for Him. All perversions result in sick behavior and often in violence. Religion is man trying to reach up to God, trying futilely because it can't be done. Christ is God reaching down to man, meeting us at our own level. No one can earn eternal life any more than they can earn the entire Internet. It is a gift, freely given by the Creator and though His efforts to rescue us collectively are high, His efforts to save any single one of us are light. A Human operating system just does not take up much memory compared with what He has to store us in. Our main need is to invite Him to indwell us, enjoy His gentle, loving inward Presence and let Him do the work of debugging us so it is safe to let us into Heaven. (Any operating system with a bug in it can damage the whole network its connected to). I am sure there are other beings in the Universe. I do not know if they need someone like Jesus to rescue their planet, but it is painfully obvious, we do.

If we are ever to over come our thirst for revenge and power and land, that cause so many of our wars, we need to learn to forgive like Christ, accept persecution like Christ, learn to feel and act with compassion for our neighbors however different, like Christ. He is more than a philosophy. He is a person who can indwell us and fix us, each one of us. But if a philosophy were all that He were, we still need Him.

Christ can also unite diverse peoples as it did His day when Greeks and Jews first came together as one in the early church, and as it has in this country where blacks and whites and reds and yellows and browns worship together and work towards a common goal of improving the Body. I live in the South. I see how things have changed, and I see how so much of the Civil Rights movement was powered by faith in Christ and by the goal of Christ which is to unite the Human race in Love.

We have a long way to go. But we've come a long way already from where we were.

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quote="Sand"]Another assumption of those religiously inclined which is immersed in hubris is the inclination to look upon humanity as a static creation.
This is a symptom allied to the religious lack of comprehension of the immensity of space. It is the misunderstanding of how ephemeral the human race may be. Genetic analysis has amply demonstrated that there are negligible differences between the various groups of Homo Sapiens but this in no way discourages the murderous impulses which motivates the daily torture and butchery that humans indulge in upon each other. One of the best financed creative activities in the most capable section of humanity is in the technology and manufacture of weapons which humans seem to delight in using on each other. Religion plays no small part in this enthusiasm. Advances in genetic capability which may increase the variations amongst humans seems most likely to make these destructive impulses even more vociferous. The species has existed for, at most, around a couple of million years and, extrapolating upon current inclinations, seems unlikely to make it through the next couple of centuries - at least in its current form. In comparison to the ant, the cockroach and even the somewhat less intellectually capable paramecium, humanity seems to be capable of only a very short existence.
This leads me to wonder if humanity's much prized intelligence has any real survival value. It may be an amusing effort in a wrong direction for biological temporal extension.[/quote]

Some Christians do believe in evolution. Google, "Teilhard DeChardin."

Evolution IN the Bible

1 Cor. 12:27. We are body of Christ, and individually members of it. Eph 4:15 Rather speaking the Truth, In Love, we are to grow up in ALL WAYS into the Head, into Christ. John 15:1-2 I Am the vine. My Father is the Vine-dresser. Every branch and me that does not bare fruit He takes away. Every branch in me that does bare fruit He prunes so that it may bare more fruit. Luke 13:9 The Kingdomof Heaven is like a mustard seed......it grew and became a tree, & the birds of the air perched in its branches. The word. "evolution" originally meant how a seedling escapes from its seed, unwinds and reaches towards the light.

So the Bible not only says how God did it, if we know how to look at it with the eyes and mind of an Aspie, but it also shows where He came from!

Not completely though. Because nowhere in the Bible does it say how Christ got back to the past to be God in the past as well as be who we evolve into in the future. But we know relativity teaches time and space are bent by the gravitational mass of the Universe, so time circles. Now we add the Gospel of Thomas verses 18 and 19 The Gospel of Thomas was a manuscript found in a Gnostic Monesteray and rescued just SECONDS before it was going to be tossed in the monesteray furnace to help keep it warm.

18. The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our end come?"
Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.

Whatever else He did or didn't do, Jesus beat Einstein to this by about 2000 years! )

http://www.proofgodexists.org
http://www.poemsofdarwinsgod.org
http://www.gigglesfromheaven.org

I believe that there is a "god". I believe that prayer works. I believe in the big bang and in evolution. I believe in Karma, and aside from my belief in a higher being, I consider myself a Buddhist. Mostly.

I do not believe that God has a hand in everyday life. I do not believe that answered prayers are a result of divine intervention, but an accumulation of positive energy toward a person for whom the prayers are being offered. And scientific proof of evolution is too overwhelming to be ignored. I believe "karmic law" is just another law like physical laws. Cause and effect.

I don't claim to know all things. With new information, I could change my mind. I'm always open to new information. I don't discount anyone's thoughts or beliefs. They might be right, I might be wrong. I think it's all about what we feel within ourselves.

Heya guys. This thread seems to be winding down anyhow, but it is moving on over to the Politics, Philosophy, and Religion forum because it seems improperly filed under General Autism Discussion. Carry on.

The one I said. If we went everywhere and every when, and did not find Him, and managed to do that without evolving into God ourselves. But there are many of us who have found Him already. That is what being Born Again is all about. You have not done it so you do not understand it and can not believe it. If it had happened to you, you would understand and would be a witness not just a believer. You have to take a leap of faith to do that. That's hard for scientific types, but even scientists take leaps of faith. We had to take a BIG leap of faith to think we could get to the Moon. We did, and we got there! After that, building Heaven seems easy and will only be a matter of time.


There is much more evidence for God than there is against Him. Not any of it is the "smoking gun." But there is evidence. There are the strong and modified weak Anthropic Principles which you do not believe which shows me you obviously haven't studied it. Stephen Hawking said it has, "deep theological implications." There is Near death experience evidence which is not conclusive at all, but is indicative. More studies of that are going on. There are the prayer studies, some of which have proved prayer works, and some of which have not. But at least one of those studies was done, not just double blind but triple blind. Not only did the scientists an the subjects not know who was in the prayed for and not being prayed for, but neither the scientists nor the prayed for and unprayed for group even knew a prayer study was going on. The prayed for group got better without needing to know, ruling out the placebo effect in that particular study. The conditions where prayer seems to be failing to prove improvement, all involve free will. Prayed for alcoholics don't get better than nonprayed for alcoholics, etc. Considering how hard it is to live with some of us "saints." we may be driving them to drink! :0) One cardiac study showed negative proof. The prayed for group got worse, but in this case, the prayed for group were all heart patients who were told they were being prayed for. If I were a heart patient and a nonbeliever and I was told I had been placed in a prayer study it might make me much more anxious. (I'm THAT bad?! !! Things are THAT desperate!!? ) That couldn't be good for their hearts. There is evidence that religious people do better at surviving and nurturing their young which indicates when the time comes that we can bring about the building of Heaven and the placing of the Jewish Carpenter as the Head of that, there will be enough of us around who want to do so, to do it. There is the Bible Code which can be and is often badly misused as a cheap and completely ineffective fortune telling device. But the original mathematical study was quite scholarly and rigorous and precise and showed there is hidden information in the Bible that had to be placed there somehow from the future, way after it was written. Treating other books writtenin Hebrew with the same careful study does not yeild anything but a few coincidental and minut bits of "information." while the Bible has tons of it. No, that doesn't even prove God. There could be other explanations. And NO, it doesn't mean every word in the Bible is literally true anymore than the Big Bang theory is literally true. (Sound can not travel in the vacuum of space. There was no big BANG, only a completely silent, sudden expansion). But it shows, we'd better take a closer look at it. Something is going on in there. Its indicative. If God does not exist, there are forces a plenty in the future that think it is good for us to believe He does and they went to a lot of trouble to work that code into a book that was being compiled over centuries by dozens of different authors. We can't even figure out how that was done. Obviously we'll figure it out someday.

Another unexplored avenue of proof is what I call the photon difference. Go to Youube.com . Look at the videos made by Atheists. Look at the darkness of their faces and the darkness of their eyes. Notice Carl Sagan for instance (though technically he was just an honest Agnostic). I have a lot of respect for him but his eyes and his face were lacking light. Then go to the videos made by Christians. We glow. So much so, several times I have been able to tell an African American was a Christian just by that glow. It really shows up on darker skin. (Asking them confirmed it). If this is not proof of God, it is proof there is some genetic difference between Atheists and Christians that effects the appearance of our skin. Sometimes the eyes of nonbelievers will glow ALOT in a visibly different way from the way believer's eyes glow but their skin always remains lacking in glow.

Or simply travel forward in time until the very well known and proven effects of relativity gently curve time around the gravitational mass of the Universe and we get back to the past without time's arrow having to impossibly bend backwards. Christ was the first one to have this comprehension of circular time. He had it before Einstein.

The Gospel of Thomas is a manuscript that was found in a Gnostic Monastery in 1945. Here are verses 18 and 19.

18. The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our end come?"
Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.

Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."

How about Computers, Math, Science, and Technology?

Circular time is a misconception. Einstein firmly established time as a dimension and it is definitely not circular. The second law of thermodynamics clearly indicates the death of the universe in a state of total even distribution of energy and matter and total quiescence.

I'd considered that, but since the topic appears to be unfolding as a debate, it made more sense to me to put it where those types of threads tend to congregate. So there's the tie-breaker for you.

Nazi Germany was full of people who would be able to solve riddles and work SAT problems. We can invent computers that can do those better than we can. If we are to survive and flourish as a species we also need to preserve compassion, street smarts. integrity, courage, honesty and something we aspies don't often have, the ability to nurture

Okay. So why quote me?

Whoa... elizabethhensley is giving me ACTUAL head-ache... I need a REAL aspirin from trying to read all this... Is there no more -er- "coherent"/"simpletonian" way you could express yourself?
I've even lost track of wether I'm the dumb one, or if you are...

It's sad to see the results of the votes that the majority of you out there believe in Evolution,which is not even a scientific fact but science fiction. I can't believe that Darwin's view has been widely accepted by the scientific community and most of mankind. Just take a look at the human brain. It's role in all living things(except for plants) suggest that life did not evolve but was created by an Intelligent being(God). Evolution came about because of man's rebellion and denial of the existence of God.