Evolution, Creation, Faith, Science and Civility (I hope...)

[o_soulcutter]

Questioning them is one thing, absolutely denying any plausablitiy whatsoever and refusing to see any argument on their behalf is another.

When the Big Bang happened there weren't stars, planets, comets, or anything for a while. Takes time for those things to collect and form. Light could be a metaphor for...everything. Let there be a universe.

The earths rotation is our way to judge a day. Whoever said that God uses the same calendar as us?

[o_ink]

Originally Posted by SoulCutter

Whoever said that God uses the same calendar as us?

Apparently, the people who wrote the bible feel he does in fact use the same calender. Why else would these use the word "day".
And interestingly enough, how did they know it took 7 days? Man was not there to witness such an event.

All of these little fallacies give me reason to believe that the bible is simply a book of entertaining myths and storys....not the exclusive guide to reach a spot in heaven. Might I add that proving the bible wrong does not prove god wrong, it simply proves man wrong.

absolutely denying any plausablitiy whatsoever and refusing to see any argument on their behalf is another.

You cant absolutely deny the plausablity of the existance of god. Not even science can do that....and this is coming from an Agnostic. These types of discussions always go in circles as you cannot debate over something that has never been seen, smelled, or touched before. I kinda feel that Myth vs Fact related arguements, although intriguing, is ultimately kind of a waste of time. If you wanna debate something, why not debate whether it is right or wrong to teach Darwinism or Creationism in public school's science class rooms.

[o_soulcutter]

I wasn't talking about God, I was talking about the stories you learned in Sunday School.

[o_binarylife]

Questioning them is one thing, absolutely denying any plausablitiy whatsoever and refusing to see any argument on their behalf is another. Cool

When the Big Bang happened there weren't stars, planets, comets, or anything for a while. Takes time for those things to collect and form. Light could be a metaphor for...everything. Let there be a universe.

The earths rotation is our way to judge a day. Whoever said that God uses the same calendar as us?

Thank you Soul Cutter, You are inspring a larger degree of civility in me. Basically I agree with you.

The Bible has a great many intelligent and important points. It is merely that with current science negating the history depicted in the Bible, people tend to bash it. On the other hand, equally close minded people tend to treat it as absolute, literal, fact. The point I've been trying to make since my first post was that I don't want to change anyone's beliefs, merely allow them to understand mine. I would certainly like to understand other's.
Hence why I get frustrated when someone fabricates points for me to say and then argues those, isntead of mine.

I'm pointlessly ranting. Soul Cutter, though in the cosmic meaning of things this has no effect: I like you.

[o_thedarkone]

Originally Posted by |404|Innoc-TPF-

Following back to primitive man does not elevate Evolution to Law. The fossil record you speak of has significant gaps and does not lend itself to the Theory of Evolution. The only person who's brought anything new to the table was Soulcutter with the mention of the Theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. Evolution has no way to address the appearance of whole new species or the significant leap that certain "species" took...hence the gaps in the fossil records as examples of interim species cannot be found...

I must say that it's disappointing to hear you say that fossil gaps are a serious problem when trying to prove evolution. No matter how many fossils are found, there will always be 'gaps'. (How did we get from 1 to 2? Well, at some point we were at 1.5. Ok, but what was between 1 and 1.5? You can keep on going like that forever). Nobody says that evolution is a nice straight line of progress. Some animals, like sharks are so well adapted that there aren't many, if any new mutations that give a young shark a better change of reproducing. In other times, a quick change in conditions can lead to big spurts and jumps of change in just a few thousand years.

If anything, the fossils show how implausible creationism is. There are layers of sediments where you can see that massive die-offs occurred. At one point in our planet's history, 250 million of years ago, 90% of all life suddenly died off. 65 million years ago was another one of these die-offs, and it also wiped out a good chunk of the Earth's species. If evolution does not happen, then where did all the diversity we see in the wild come from? Do all the species we have now in the world come from the few left over from these disasters?


If you find a copy, I'd suggest picking up National Geographic's november issue.

[o_cruor]

And also I'd hate to think that we are all the result of some heavy inbreeding and incest *shrugs*.

I mean first their was Adam and Eve who supposedly sprouted all of humanity only for god to deem humanity unfit to exist because of their decent into wickedness and cruelty, so he sends the floodings witch wipes out everything except for one pair of each animal we see today. Which in the first place would be impossible since if you'd pick a pair of every living creature on earth it would take a hell of a lot more then a little wooden ship to ferry them all, just a pair of every insectspecies fill up the supposedly large volume of Noah's Arc, not to mention a pair of all known mammals and birds etc.

So the bible would have us think that every animal and human we see today is the result of heavy heavy inbreeding, this in terms of geneology would result in less then fit for life individuals in the long timeframe. Just look at today cheetas are suffering heavily from inbreeding thanks to poaching almost having them extinct.

So Noah and his wife and and their three sons and their three girlfriends are the common ancestor of us all, lol.

My belief period is that the bible is a novelcollection summarised by many writers of days gone by.

[o_d3pth charge]

binary..

how is it possible that you can speak so eloquently about this subject, yet can't spell the word medical?

(just jonesin' with ya )

[o_travis dane]

So Noah and his wife and and their three sons and their three girlfriends are the common ancestor of us all, lol.

To be fair, there are A LOT of retards walking this planet, so there must be some truth in that story.
















[/sarcasm]

[o_binarylife]

how is it possible that you can speak so eloquently about this subject, yet can't spell the word medical?

Haha, I am extraoridinarily horrible speller.
It makes for good jokes though.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Originally Posted by BinaryLife

Wow, read what I typed. No seriously, go read it. Because at no point did I confuse the two, or misuse one. Nor did I use one instead of the other. I also made it clear of this. Seriously, go read my post. (this is meant as harsh. Not as an insult, but harsh, because you just accused me something without reading what I said. That insults me.)

Binary, I did read it. I read it in depth. Fact is your previous post shows that you do not have a clear grasp on the difference between a Theory and a Law.

So, be insulted....don't be insulted....at this point it no longer matters as you're not "listening" anyway.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Originally Posted by TheDarkOne

I must say that it's disappointing to hear you say that fossil gaps are a serious problem when trying to prove evolution. No matter how many fossils are found, there will always be 'gaps'. (How did we get from 1 to 2? Well, at some point we were at 1.5. Ok, but what was between 1 and 1.5? You can keep on going like that forever). Nobody says that evolution is a nice straight line of progress. Some animals, like sharks are so well adapted that there aren't many, if any new mutations that give a young shark a better change of reproducing. In other times, a quick change in conditions can lead to big spurts and jumps of change in just a few thousand years.

If anything, the fossils show how implausible creationism is. There are layers of sediments where you can see that massive die-offs occurred. At one point in our planet's history, 250 million of years ago, 90% of all life suddenly died off. 65 million years ago was another one of these die-offs, and it also wiped out a good chunk of the Earth's species. If evolution does not happen, then where did all the diversity we see in the wild come from? Do all the species we have now in the world come from the few left over from these disasters?


If you find a copy, I'd suggest picking up National Geographic's november issue.

Here's the thing. To not even find a single example of a fossil for a particular gap. That is the problem and it is the biggest hurdle that Evolution has never been able to bridge.

Tackling Law vs Theory... In order to become Law you have to be able to take the same starting conditions for a certain species, add the same influences and changes and then see the same alteration and modification. This is also what prevents acceptance as Law. This has not happened either. The research that Rick Shine has been doing is promising to that extent but I believe it took something like 70 generations to accomplish and has not been reproducible thus far.

For the record, Creationism is also a theory if viewd from the scientific perspective. The quantifiable proof that science requires will, forever, relegate it to theory.

Also, metaphor is employed extensively in the Bible. Raining for 40 days and 40 nights. There are some that believe that to be literal. I believe it is a metaphor for "a very long time". The story of Creation in Genesis. A day is relative and, I believe, a metaphor for encompassing certain tasks that God accomplished. When the Jew's wandered in the desert for 40 years I believe that to be a metaphor for "a very long time".

You guy's continue to behave as if Theory is Law and there is a clear distinction you miss.

[o_rebel_sniper]

Ok after reading everything you guys have posted i have to say........................my brain hurts . But seriously i really enjoy reading your guys theorys on life and it makes me think. thanks.

[o_xecuter]

Originally Posted by Rebel_Sniper

But seriously i really enjoy reading your guys theorys on life and it makes me think. thanks.

Same
very interesting

but watch 'animals' by Ricky Gervais... explains the creation

[o_otiz]

Originally Posted by |404|Innoc-TPF-

Also, metaphor is employed extensively in the Bible. Raining for 40 days and 40 nights. There are some that believe that to be literal. I believe it is a metaphor for "a very long time". The story of Creation in Genesis. A day is relative and, I believe, a metaphor for encompassing certain tasks that God accomplished. When the Jew's wandered in the desert for 40 years I believe that to be a metaphor for "a very long time".

Now why would you put in a metaphor for "a very long time". It's just too short to bother. Just insert "a very long time" for 40 years, it's not a big deal.
It makes more sense that whole stories are metaphors, such as Adam and Eve. I don't think that particular story is though. I'm gonna say a little part of a good story from Norse mythology.

Thor and companions are in Loki's palace and are competing with his people because Loki challenged him. Thor's challenge was to drink mead from a horn and Loki said that real men did so in one gulp. Thor started drinking and drank for long but had to stop. Then Loki laughed so Thor drank more and more until more would make him explode. Turns out the horn was connected to the sea and that story is how changing ocean levels is explained.

There are more stories like that, that explain things that people didn't understand at the time. They were just made up because there was no way we could have found out how it really works. We humans thirst for knowledge and so we just have to KNOW how things work. If they can't be explained by science then "God works in mysterous ways" until we can.

[o_soulcutter]

There's actually a computer program that has been made that simulates evolution. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it's downloadable for anyone to use. It was featured in either Popular Science or Discover magazine a couple of months ago. Avida the program is called.

The point of it is, they've found a way to make little programs learn and are rewarded for doing specific tasks. Virtual organisms basically. They setup an experiment where the goal was the organisms to learn how to add, through different processes, and something like 17 different species eventually got there...but they all used different processes to do it.

Rewards were something like slightly faster reproduction for doing things that got it closer to it's goal.

I left the magazine at home when I came back to college but here's a link to some of the story online: http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-05/cover/

Here's avida:
http://dllab.caltech.edu/avida/

Doesn't explain the gaps in fossil records, but evolution isn't based on the same thing happening everytime even with the same conditions. That's never been part of the theory. The theory is just that things evolve by chance mutations, it's not because it couldn't exactly be reproduced that evolution isn't a law.

[o_cruor]

Originally Posted by |404|Innoc-TPF-

Here's the thing. To not even find a single example of a fossil for a particular gap. That is the problem and it is the biggest hurdle that Evolution has never been able to bridge.

Tackling Law vs Theory... In order to become Law you have to be able to take the same starting conditions for a certain species, add the same influences and changes and then see the same alteration and modification. This is also what prevents acceptance as Law. This has not happened either. The research that Rick Shine has been doing is promising to that extent but I believe it took something like 70 generations to accomplish and has not been reproducible thus far.

For the record, Creationism is also a theory if viewd from the scientific perspective. The quantifiable proof that science requires will, forever, relegate it to theory.

Also, metaphor is employed extensively in the Bible. Raining for 40 days and 40 nights. There are some that believe that to be literal. I believe it is a metaphor for "a very long time". The story of Creation in Genesis. A day is relative and, I believe, a metaphor for encompassing certain tasks that God accomplished. When the Jew's wandered in the desert for 40 years I believe that to be a metaphor for "a very long time".

You guy's continue to behave as if Theory is Law and there is a clear distinction you miss.

Then you have to understand that fossils are very rare overall, every creature or human that dies will not leave a fossil for "later" generations to find not by far. In fact only a very very small piece of the things that die will leave a fossil and that under very special conditions such as drowning in a lake or likewise and then sinking to the bottom, fleshy parts get deteriated and then mud begins to pack ontop of the bones and then then bone is slowly deteriating as minerals get filled where bone once was, thus creating a replica of the bonestructure but made of stone out of the minerals sort of like how stalaktites form in caves.

And this is a very rare to actually happen to preserve the bones in such a good shape that it leaves a fossil.

So the reason for them not being able to find the missing link is simply that no humanoid of that era became fossil or even left any bones to find.

But evolution has more backing it up here then creationism, if could created man in his own image then why did he create these humanlike apes and even cromagnon people until finally getting to our current race homo sapien sapien. I mean what of the other guys left behind, homo sapien neanthertalenis, homo erectus or even Australophiticus.

Surely you can't claim these are in the image of "God". Yet they are us, or at least our ancestors.

Originally Posted by |404|Innoc-TPF-

In order to become Law you have to be able to take the same starting conditions for a certain species, add the same influences and changes and then see the same alteration and modification. This is also what prevents acceptance as Law. This has not happened either. The research that Rick Shine has been doing is promising to that extent but I believe it took something like 70 generations to accomplish and has not been reproducible thus far.

But that's the beauty of evolution it isn't confined to one way as different mutations might arise that are equally beneficial for sustained life in the change of surroundings, evolution is adaptation. Bacteria does it in a very short timeframe whereas the more complex a being is the higher is the chance that most mutations are malign, meaning they will most likely make the lifeform less fit for life and malformed etc. Such examples in humans are all the genetical decieses we see around us, Down's syndrome, Huntingtons etc.

And in larger lifeforms a mutation if beneign takes a lot more time to show itself in a population.

Whereas in bacteria if a mutation is beneign for example a mutation that allows it to survive a certain antibiotica as I've mentioned before then that bacteria will thrive as the others die. Then that bacteria will split into 2, then 4, then 16, then 32 etc until we've got a whole colony of resistent bacteria. That is also how viruses like HIV manages to adapt to certain medications, and then if the patient gives up on the medication for a while the mutated HIV virus loses its benefit over the other nonmutated and a balance between resistent and no resistent are established until most mutated are gone. So when the patient later starts on the medication again the medication is once again effective until a new mutation arises in the HIV.

My point with all this being that evolution is not law in the sence that it has to take the same road as the last time.

If all life on earth were extinguised right now except for a single celled organism similar to the first ones that created us all, then evolution could take a completely different path, so no creature would look the same as the ones we see today. In fact there might not arise any sentient life at all, and if it did it sure didn't have to arise from apes and primates this time around as it did ours. The possibilities are endless with DNA and evolution.

No we are most likely and I'm quite sure of it the result of pure chance, for there to be a planet here that could accept life (being in the Goldielocksarea from the sun), then for there to be a catalyst to create life, there is talk of a metiorite carrying aminoacids the very foundation of life in it. It crashed in the newly formed oceans on earth and their out of the primordial cesspool, sprung the first singlecelled organism, which became multicellular organisms until finally through billions of years of evolution arriving at us.

Originally Posted by otiz

Now why would you put in a metaphor for "a very long time". It's just too short to bother. Just insert "a very long time" for 40 years, it's not a big deal.
It makes more sense that whole stories are metaphors, such as Adam and Eve. I don't think that particular story is though. I'm gonna say a little part of a good story from Norse mythology.

Thor and companions are in Loki's palace and are competing with his people because Loki challenged him. Thor's challenge was to drink mead from a horn and Loki said that real men did so in one gulp. Thor started drinking and drank for long but had to stop. Then Loki laughed so Thor drank more and more until more would make him explode. Turns out the horn was connected to the sea and that story is how changing ocean levels is explained.

There are more stories like that, that explain things that people didn't understand at the time. They were just made up because there was no way we could have found out how it really works. We humans thirst for knowledge and so we just have to KNOW how things work. If they can't be explained by science then "God works in mysterous ways" until we can.

That is exactly what I believe the bible to be next to a novel that is, it's a way people with their limited minds had to create a superbeing that was responsible for all the things they could not and wouldn't bother to understand.

Why do we exist? Well cause God created us in his image Duh'

Why are some men evil? Well because Eva got tricked and seduced by the wicked snake in Eden to eat the forbidden fruit which made them selfaware from the brainwashed slaves they were before.

Why are women less worth then men? Well because Eve let herself be seduced by the wicked snake, honestly.

The church has been the biggest oppressors of women of all.

Only until recent years have women been accepted more as equals. And still no where near it in all honesty. And what's to blame a bloody book. It's a mindset that's accompanied "men" since the early ages. I'm not saying religion is the only culprit but it is one of the big ones.

Ok long post I'll stop now

[o_backd]

Jewish linguists wrote the first chapter of genesis ("let there be light" and so on..) during the Babylonian domination as a political statement.
It is written in a way that it contradicts most, if not every fundamental element of Babylonian religion/culture.. at least that's what scientific biblestudies have demonstrated.

[o_binarylife]

Also, metaphor is employed extensively in the Bible. Raining for 40 days and 40 nights. There are some that believe that to be literal. I believe it is a metaphor for "a very long time".

met·a·phor Audio pronunciation of "Metaphor" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (mt-fôr, -fr)
n.

1. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world's a stage” (Shakespeare).

It would be a more intelligent interpritation if you understood it as a "Cleansing of evil from the land. Goodness washed over everyone like water floods the desert."

I can't spell, but I'm good at interpritation, and grammar. You're opinions may differ and you have every right of that. All I ask is that you stop lying about points that I've made. You have accused me of saying things that I haven't, and I have proven so. This makes you a liar. Your word no longer means anything. At no point have I done the same to you, because my goal is to understand your way of thinking. Not to persecute you, or to attack you. You are clearly not doing to the same for me.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Binary,

Please provide a specific example of where I have lied about your posts.

I still do not have any sense that you really do understand what you're talking about. You criticize my example of "40 days and 40 nights" being a metaphor for "A very long time". Instead you stated

It would be a more intelligent interpritation if you understood it as a "Cleansing of evil from the land. Goodness washed over everyone like water floods the desert."

A more intelligent "interpritation"? I included the word Raining to help identify where the reference came from...however you believe it to be less intelligent than your statement? Hello? The metaphor I was referring to was the element of time. Perhaps others were mislead by the inclusion of the word raining but only you seem to attribute it to be a commentary on my intelligence. More intelligent if I understood it as.....? Umm...I told you very clearly what I understood it as.

I can't spell, but I'm good at interpritation, and grammar.

I think that statement stands on it's own.

Binary, please provide examples of where I have lied about what you posted. As seems to be your habit...you talk about issues or points without really discussing, supporting or proving them. I haven't lied. What I believe has happened is that you're trying to discuss things you do not fully understand.

[o_|404|innoc-tpf-]

Cruor...couple of things.

I agree that fossils are rarely intact. We're frequently getting only parts. However, to not get even a single partial sample of one of the gap generations? Doesn't that seem a bit odd? I certainly don't have an explanation for it. You have fossils of the prior versions and fossils of the versions that came after the gap...but not even a fragment of that gap version?

Also, I think you're saying that the ability to reproduce results over and over is part of what prevents Evolution becoming a Law. Am I understanding you correctly? I believe we're in agreement if that's the case as that is what I have been saying.

Where you and I differ is that I cannot see billions of years of pure chance setting up the sequence of events that lead to us be exchanging on this message board today. That is one thing that I think requires as much faith as believing in Creation. I would certainly take ID (Intelligent Design) well before pure chance.

On Eve and Original Sin...there are certainly churches who subordinate women because of that. However, mine does not. Adam and Man shared equal guilt. He knew he was not to touch the Tree yet did so anyway. And, in ways, Adam was worse as he immediately tried to scapegoat Eve... Even within Christianity there is variation...and that variation is also different depending on what country you're in.

Otiz,

Forgot to mention it. I love Norse, Greek and Roman lore. It's something I actually started reading at age 9.