More scientists express doubts on Darwin

[K Frame]

Few more thoughts...

"I am skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

First, it should be noted that these scientists are saying that the evidence for Darwinian theory should be carefully examined.

They are not, as a group, REJECTING Darwinian theory.

They (and those supporting them) are also incorrectly using their status as "scientists" as an appeal to authority.

Many of them, in fact, are not connected with the biological sciences -- there are physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and engineers -- in other words, people who have an opinion, but little direct insight into the mechanics or practical aspects of Darwinian theory.

[Harold Tuttle]

i get to play with all kinds of cool stuff at work

the early "Bible" is a written text codifying tales that predate the scribes by thousands of years

is it more possible that 40 days of rain deluged the entire planet,
or that after an intense monsoon event, a land bridge /dam
between the Mediterranean and the Black sea collapsed and inundated the area?

whisper the later around Babylonian campfires for a couple a thousand years and let me know

[Nightfall]

Actually, Nightfall, Miller-Urey did not produce life and even its claim to simulate the atmosphere of the Early Earth is debatable.  Producing a few amino acids is a long way from abiogenesis.

I didnt say it did. If youll observe the question I quoted, it only references the soup. Which I believe is what we see in said experiment, that organic soup. Not life.

Also, there are evidences of Biblical creation such as the way the Noahic flood seems to explain the fossil record and the sudden appearance of vast numbers of new life forms in the pre-Cambrian explosion.  Speaking of Noah, I am told that many scientists are returning to a belief in "catastrophism."

Noahs flood? Ooookay& lets have some fun and examine that one!

7:17 The flood continued forty days on the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth.

7:19 The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered;

7:20 the waters swelled above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep.

So we see it rained for forty days, and forty nights, enough to cover to cover the highest mountains plus fifteen cubits. Well say a cubit is about a foot and a half. This seems to be about right based on reading around the web. Everest is 29,028 feet high. Well just say the water level was 29,050 feet above sea level. It got to that level over forty days and forty nights. 960 hours. Which means a rainfall of 30 feet per hour. Can you imagine what that kind of rainfall would have done? For forty days?! Were talking erosion the likes of which you and I cant comprehend. Wave bye bye to the face of the planet, because its going away. All of this happened, what? 4500 years ago according to the Bible? So how about some evidence of this massive rainfall rate?

As for the fossil thing, maybe you can expand?

[Desertdog]

Actually the reason I posted this topic was NOT to go into a discussion of Darwinism, Creationism or Intellegent Design.  These ideas do not matter one whit because you will believe what you believe.

It was simply to show that to some scientist believe that Darwinism is NOT necesserilly the only explination of the origins of the universe.  
If you can prove them wrong, good.

What does matter is the fact that Secular Humanist, ACLJ, schools and universities and others are preventing or trying to prevent views that are different than the line of "Darwins THEORY of Evolution."  Notice that it is"Darwins Theory of Evolution", not "Darwins Fact of Evolution."

If you do not toe the line of Darwinism you will probably be bashed, ridiculed, ignored, put down, suppresed, and generally considered to not have a brain by Secular Humanist, ACLJ, schools and universities and MSM.

[Desertdog]

Nightfall

You missed quoting;

Genisis 7:11  In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second monthon that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

"on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened."

It wasn't just the rain,

[Guest]

Okay - here's the deal: If you don't think that evolution happens, you shouldn't need to use any antibiotic developed since the 1950s... After all, the germs aren't developing resistance...

That's almost completely irrelevant. No educated person disputes that populations show natural selection. It's simply statistics. It has little to do with theories of spontaneous generation in question. You are saying 'if you don't believe A, then you must not believe B which is obviously true' when it doesn't really follow; nice try.

Of course evolutionary theory is wrong. All scientific theories are wrong.

Science does not deal in truth. You want truth, you should study philosophy or religion. Scientific theories are models and guesses used to attempt to explain nature in ways that are useful and objective. No scientific theories are correct. Nobody really knows what an electric field is. It's not necessary to know what an electric field is; current electrodynamic theory is rocks solid in its mathematical quantification of electromagnetism, and it's very useful and we can do useful things with the theory, so we keep it around. Newtonian mechanics was and is wrong. Geocentrism was wrong. There is no reason to belive that reletivity is right. In fact it's counterproductive to even ask the question, because it's not valid. No scientific theories are truthful, because science does not deal in truth. It's silly to get worked up over whether evolutionary theory is the 'truth'. The scientific community has embraced it and they find it useful. Just because it doesn't match your book of truth, is no reason to get worked up. If your religious belief can be threatened by science than it wasn't really a religious belief, but rather a type of immature and ineffective science. Don't worry, scientists will never prove that god doesn't exist.


If you do not toe the line of Darwinism you will probably be bashed, ridiculed, ignored, put down, suppresed, and generally considered to not have a brain by Secular Humanist, ACLJ, schools and universities and MSM.

It's not all that bad. It is bad, but not all that bad. It stems from the kneejerk reaction whereby people assume (because status quo) that since you question evolution, you are appealing to religion (which is not known for its scientific objectivism), which is not true at all in my case. Evolution is, after all, a scientific theory. A very terrible theory, but a scientific theory. If you actually believe in evolution, you are as dangerous as the bible thumpers IMO because you have invested faith in something that doesn't deserve it. It's doing exactly the same thing for you as religion does for them. No offense to any bible thumpers present.

[Nightfall]

Nightfall

You missed quoting;

Genisis 7:11  In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second monthon that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. 12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

"on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened."

It wasn't just the rain

Good point. Even if we say this reduces rainfall by half, thats still a huge, drastically earth changing rate of water. But lets be really generous and say the rain was a dinky shower. Most of the water came out of the earth. Well, we get a whole new set of problems. For instance, if there was this massive reservoir of water deep in the earths crust, wouldnt it be super-heated by pressure, as well as the temperature gradient of 29-87 degrees F for every mile you go down? When God let it loose, poor Noah would have been boiled. Furthermore, there would be unmistakable geological evidence to be seen if there had been that huge amount of water under the crust. So we wind up with:

A: Huge rainfall that would have scoured the earths surface (let alone how a wooden, handmade boat survived it).
B: Huge reservoir of water exploding from beneath the surface that would have boiled Noah, and/or left measurable evidence we could see with seismic stuff.

Either way, something really isnt adding up.

[Ron]

Hang it up Fistfull (and other Christian apologists), speculation and postulating are only allowed in evolutionary theories.  To quote the Bible about the fountains of the deep and speculate that that is where all the water came from is not allowed, LOL.

Presenting theories as fact is only allowed if you subscribe to the current scientific dogma.

Maybe a huge ice ball from space hit the Earth and disintegrated and rained on the Earth. It is an acceptable theory as long as you don't mention God.

The closed minded, dogmatic so called scientific minded here make me laugh, they mock our beliefs and don't even see how silly their belief system is, what a joke (on them).

[crt360]

As this was originally about ID, I'll try to stick with that.

"Johannes Kepler thought the craters on the moon were intelligently designed by moon dwellers. We now know that the craters were formed naturally. It's this fear of falsely attributing something to design only to have it overturned later that has prevented design from entering science proper." - William Dembski

Exactly.  It will stay that way, too, at least until we decide to give up and quit learning.  It wasn't that long ago that man thought the Earth was flat, that human flight was impossible, and that the moon was made of cheese.  If we exist long enough, we will figure out everything.  There will be no more mystery.  We will know how far off Darwin's theory really was and intelligent design will be left behind like a no longer needed crutch.

[Mannlicher]

Just another of those subjects that none of us know much about or understand.  We all have opinions though, and will defend them to the death.
Personally, I have no problmes with Darwin being "the man".

[mfree]

I think this was the first argument I ever made that actually left me sick to my stomach and angry that the other party could be so boneheaded and thick. And that's multiple persons in seperate arguments too.

I've studied the issue voraciously.

And I'm not going to tell you what I think of it either, because I'll end up screaming at the computer screen.

[jefnvk]

I don't see the problem with teaching all the THEORIES (Are they still called theories, or are they being passed off as the truth now?).

Theories based on verifiable evidence and repeatable results are fine to teach in a science class.  Intelligent design derived from Christian mythos has no more place in a science class than does creation stories from The Eddas, those of the Aborigines in Oz or the more recent vintage tracts of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

My question is, though, can you disprove that creation is the way it happened?  If you can prove that either of these did or didn't happen, then throw them out of the cirriculum.  But to just give one theory, and to say this is probably how it happened, without giving any alternate theories, seems to me like this theory is just trying to be passed of as the absolute truth of how it happened.

I'm not even saying the teacher has to read from the Bible.  Or even teach it as a Christian way of creation.  but I do believe that just saying 'nope, we refuse to teach that intelligent design of any sort may have been the cause' is just more indoctrination.

As for the wiki link to the synthesis, that is interesting.  That right there would move me a lot closer to believing the evolution debate than any of the 'stupid religious fundamentalist'-'devil worshipper scientists' argument that this debate has pretty much fallen into.

And one last though.  Even if life can come from rocks, where did the rocks come from?  (and, as with my last question that got answered, if there are any ideas on how all of this stuff just appeared out of nowhere, it is much more appreciated then 'stupid fundamentalist')

[Third_Rail]

Oh, those crazy scientists!

Atomic theory, medical theory, and now evolution? Pshaw! What do they know?

[Harold Tuttle]

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0411/feature1/


Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life's work of Charles Darwin, is a theory. It's a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth's living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it's "just" a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is "just" a theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory. Continental drift is a theory. The existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms? Atomic theory. Even electricity is a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen. Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That's what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionallytaking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.
 
The rest of us generally agree. We plug our televisions into little wall sockets, measure a year by the length of Earth's orbit, and in many other ways live our lives based on the trusted reality of those theories.

continues...
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0411/feature1/fulltext.html

cool project i designed:
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0411/feature1/multimedia/index.html

[Perd Hapley]

Oh, sheesh... Attack of the Religious Loonies...
 
Okay - here's the deal: If you don't think that evolution happens, you shouldn't need to use any antibiotic developed since the 1950s... After all, the germs aren't developing resistance...

Bogie, I too have been guilty of haughtily dismissing other peoples' views just because I found them unpalatable.  I have found that fora like this one can be a good cure for such things.

Creationist scientists, those most opposed to evolutionary theory, have repeatedly affirmed that they believe in natural selection and adaptation.  They sometimes call such changes "micro-evolution."

So, how many dinosaurs were on the ark?

Why ask me when you can read it in the Bible?  Two of every "kind" or species, unless they were considered clean, in which case, seven of each.  "But fistful," says you, "some dinosaurs were gi-normous."  True, but not very young dinosaurs.  Or young elephant or water buffalo for that matter.   

Click the link below for more thoughts on this subject.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2001/dinos_on_ark.asp

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

http://www.fredoneverything.net/EvolutionMonster.shtml

This article explains my thoughts on evolution/Darwinism far more articulately and thoroughly than I could do myself.  It's a bit long, but it's well worth the read.

[Bogie]

Creationist scientists?
 
Ohmibob...

Are those the folks who outline a long series of hypothetical happenings, and then at the end announce "and now poof! the magic happens!"

[Strings]

I don't have a problem with evolution beyond the begining: where did it all start? Unless a scientist in a lab somewhere can actually create life from a "primordial soup", I have trouble buying it. However...

 ID is hampered by the number of proponents that are vocal Christians. not that Christians are bad, but the majority of those speaking in favor of ID seem to hold with the creation story as found in Genesis: this alienates followers of other faiths. I'm talking the difference between "SOMETHING started the process, and we're not sure what it was" and "Yahweh started the process".. The first statement I can buy, the second rings hollow to me...


 If we could actually leave religion out of the equation for a bit, I think we'd be much better off. Unfortunately, I don't think that's possible...

[Harold Tuttle]

well, the Gaia Hypothesis basically says, any planet within a certain orbit zone of a Sol star,
where in water exists in 3 states is bound to produce life and this life as a whole creates a collective force

If you move beyond the realm of hominid feet on the savannah,
this blue ball has been spinning here a long long time
Its valuable cosmic real estate.
The dinosaur epochs lasted millions of years.
Mayhaps a bored enlightenment tweaked the Ort cloud and demoted the saurian stagnation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

On the other hand, the Ghia Hypothesis states that life began in the back seat of a convertible VW

[Ron]

The argument always ends up as a discussion of origins.

Those who don't believe in ID are always left arguing that CHAOS + TIME = ORDER.

You can fill the theory up with all kind of fancy words and explanations but you cannot escape the silly premise that order arises spontaneously out of disorder. That the inanimate given enough time will become animate.

Chaotic dead matter given enough time will become Amadeus Mozart.

And they mock the religious folks.....sheesh

[Bogie]

So I suppose that all the amino acids, DNA, RNA, etc., don't mean anything...

Next time you get a blood transfusion, tell 'em to just grab something off the shelf - you don't need to worry about type matching. If some girl shows up on your doorstep with a freshly hatched baby, and it kinda sorta looks like you, remember that DNA means nothing to you.
 
Anyone can call themselves a "scientist."

[Perd Hapley]

I can't see the Bible conflicting with evolution

 This is the only part of the whole Biblical creation story that [conflicts with evolutionary theory]

Forget about reconciling evolution and Genesis, just tell me how to reconcile those two statements.  Or explain how plants grow for thousands or billions of years without bees and other animals to spread seed and pollen, or without earthworms to break up the soil.  Or explain why Adam was alone with the animals until Eve came along.  Shouldn't they have evolved together?  

editOh, Barbara, I almost forgot a major conflict.  The Bible has birds and fish coming about in one day, then land animals the next day.  Evolution, if I remember rightly, has the aquatic animals evolving into amphibians and reptiles (land animals) which then evolved into birds.  

Christians believe that "the wages of sin is death," so we cannot accept death as the mechanism for biological progress, or that it occurred before the garden of Eden.  Jews must still explain why a loving God thinks that death is "very good."  You really have two different ideas of creation here.  One that presents a faultless and peaceful paradise, and one built on eons of bloodshed, violence, mutation and disease.  

I can't see the Bible conflicting with evolution, unless you argue that the entire thing is in there, which we can see every day is not true.

What do you mean?

Yep, Genesis says six days..but it was written thousands of years ago when people didn't have quite the same understanding of the concept of billions of years. If it had been explained, they wouldn't have understood.

Where do you get that idea?  In what way do you understand billions of years better than Moses or Noah might have?  

The chronology in Genesis is pretty close if you think about it..closer than you would expect for people who were still developing concepts like zero.

Wait, where did the Genesis account come from?  If it is divinely inspired, then it should be more than just "pretty close," and the sophistication of those ancient people is inconsequential.  If it was written by human beings, why would it have any relation to modern scientific theories?  If they didn't even understand zero, how would they know about evolution or big-bang cosmology?

[Ron]

So I suppose that all the amino acids, DNA, RNA, etc., don't mean anything...

Next time you get a blood transfusion, tell 'em to just grab something off the shelf - you don't need to worry about type matching. If some girl shows up on your doorstep with a freshly hatched baby, and it kinda sorta looks like you, remember that DNA means nothing to you.

Anyone can call themselves a "scientist."

Given enough time the chaos in the above post may evolve into something coherent.

Nobody is arguing against science or as Fistful mentioned against natural selection and adaptation.

Godless materialism and secular humanism forcing their belief systems into every area of our lives is the problem. I don't want my taxes going toward the spread of your religion and supporting causes that are the logical extension of your beliefs.

I make no claim to be a scientist, or philosopher. Looking at it from my vantage point I do not believe that chaos is the genesis of all structure and LIFE. There is an organizing principle and an Organizer as far as I am concerned. If you cannot see it you are truly blind (IMHO).

[Stand_watie]

Many of them, in fact, are not connected with the biological sciences -- there are physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and engineers -- in other words, people who have an opinion, but little direct insight into the mechanics or practical aspects of Darwinian theory.

Actually I'd say mathmeticians are the better scientists to judge the likelyhood of darwinian evolution than biologists.

My geography professor at a midwestern university used to joke that the mathmeticians were all 'creationists'. Upon pressing he meant that most didn't think random selection could account for complexity of life.

[Perd Hapley]

Some creationists have noted that university theology departments are more likey to attack creationism or ID than the science departments, and that the science department is more likely to question evolution.