More scientists express doubts on Darwin

[Perd Hapley]

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!"

That actually describes evolutionists much better.  Christians do not believe in magic.  Both groups are hypothesizing, although the evolutionist much more so.  Creationists are claiming to know what has happened based on reliable testimony substantiated by physical evidence, versus evolutionists who claim to know what has happened based on speculation which physical evidence cannot prove.

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."

You are talking about what?

[Perd Hapley]

God farted, and there we were.

Divine creation?

Nope, more like divine excretion.

That's the only thing that explains why the human race is such a *expletive deleted*ed up entity.

That's funny, I thought I read Mike Irwin once declaring himself a Christian.

Intelligent design derived from Christian mythos

I hear this charge repeated all the time, and I would like for someone to show me where the originators of ID, Demski, Behe, et al, have shown in their research that they were influenced by the Creation Science movement, or by Christian scripture.  I believe this is nothing more than a smear without basis in fact.  Prove me wrong.

Still waiting on an answer for this one.

[Desertdog]

Now, for the BIG QUESTION in this debate.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The answer is not to be had in our time.  Some day we will die, and at that time, I believe we either pass away into light and knowledge of the answer or pass away into darkness.

[Nightfall]

Question about the Big Bang.  By the time the Earth had formed, would light from the sun or stars already be reaching it?

I'll bite, where's this one going?

[Perd Hapley]

Now, for the BIG QUESTION in this debate.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

That's a good question.  By creationist thinking, the first chickens were created full-grown, or so we would guess.  So these chickens would appear to be, say, a few months old when in fact they were far younger.  This is the concept of apparent age, and one reason why scientific dating methods are not trusted.

Question about the Big Bang.  By the time the Earth had formed, would light from the sun or stars already be reaching it?

I'll bite, where's this one going?

I'm still thinking about Barbara's attempt to reconcile Genesis with the long eons that some theories demand.  The point is that Genesis 1.2 talks about a planet that already has water on its surface, and the very next verse says that God created light.  I know Big Bang cosmology tells us that the sun pre-existed the planets, so it seems that it puts light prior to a planet that has cooled to the point that standing water would occur.  But I can't recall if stars emit light from their earliest stages, or if perhaps they are dark.  But nebulas give off light, and they are thought to be baby stars, right?  

Maybe I have answered my own question.

[Marnoot]

But nebulas give off light, and they are thought to be baby stars, right?

[Disclaimer: It's been over a year since my last astronomy course.] Some nebulae give off light, they'd be emission nebulae, with the light being created by ionized gasses. Other nebulae only reflect light from other sources. A nebula is more of a nursery/womb for stars than a baby star; stars are formed from the material/gasses present in the nebula. As soon as a star is an object that could be called a star, it is most definitely giving off light.

[BryanP]

The Biblical account of creation is not compelling?

No more than any other piece of historical fiction.  Me, I find the Hindu and Nordic mythos to be a more interesting read.

[Harold Tuttle]

so i gather "Creationists " have issues with continental drift too...



http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/stripes.html

Eventually, scientists were able to date and correlate the magnetic striping patterns for nearly all of the ocean floor, parts of which are as old as 180 million years.

[Guest]

But I can't recall if stars emit light from their earliest stages, or if perhaps they are dark.

According to the Biblical account, plants already existed. Plants need sunlight.

I guess with the not giving God enough credit thing..why presume that since God created the universe with a perfect set of laws governing how it would evolve, that they wouldn't be used?

[crt360]

"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.

Hold on now.  Suppose with me for a moment that those craters were in fact built by moon-people.  Would it not be perfectly scientific to investigate these craters, determine they were built by intelligent creatures, and then study them further to find out how they were built, of what material, where the material came from, etc.?  Is it unscientific to investigate a fossil of, say, the head of some mythical king of Atlantis, and declare it to have been designed by a scam artist, rather than a naturally occuring artifact?  How does the design inference mean that we have given up on learning?

For all I know they may have been made by the moon-people.  I have no problem with investigating to see if the craters were built by intelligent creatures.  I was just quoting one of the major proponents of intelligent design and agreeing with his disclosure of a flaw in the process.

Who believed the moon was made of cheese?

This might answer the question:  http://www.skepticreport.com/funnies/mooncheese.htm

[Perd Hapley]

fistful you obviously know a bit of stuff about this subject

Wow, that's something I don't expect to hear in threads like this one.  

- just want to ask, how valid do you think any science is that has the 'answer' and looks for the explanation?

How useful do you think it is to beg the question?    

I post these links so the curious can see why their simplistic arguments against creationism are no better than some creationists' amateur prattling about the Paluxy tracks or Darwin's supposed deathbed recantation

As with the global warming thread I guess my issue with discussions like this (and global warming, and whether blacks are better at sport and 1,000 other pop science subjects) is that there is a lot of stuff that people 'know', so I sympathise with your comment.

Thank you.

[jefnvk]

God farted, and there we were.

Divine creation?

Nope, more like divine excretion.

That's the only thing that explains why the human race is such a *expletive deleted*ed up entity.

Straight up.  No *expletive deleted*it.

No *expletive deleted*it, or nothing but *expletive deleted*it?

Honestly, anymore, I don't care about this debate.  I wanna take this all the way to the beginning.  If evolution is true, that still doesn't explain where all the matter in the universe came from.

Of course, as mentioned earlier by someone, if someone wants to argue against evolution based on that all the matter couldn't have popped out of nowhere, they would be a fool to argue that a creator could do the same.  So, in my opinion, nothing is going to be solved until you can start at the beginning.

Which isn't going to happen, except maybe after you are dead.

[Guest]

Please elaborate.  Are you talking about God arising out of nothing, or about Him creating something where nothing had previously existed?  Are you talking about life forms reproducing asexually?

First, sorry for not replying earlier. I still get to read here a lot but I am usually too busy to reply. Basically, I was hitting on the point jefnvk stated. Everything just being here without a creater or just popping out of... something else is just as viable as a creater existing for all of time. Anyway, I just got done with my studies so I'm a little muddled in the brain, haha. I'll leave this discussion to you guys.

[Iain]

Probably a bit guilty of begging the question.

Still, if I decide to go on a search for God and yet tell you that I will not find God, not even in thunderbolts, wet fleeces or plagues of locusts and tell you that all these things have normal rational explanations, then I'm not really looking for God.

[Perd Hapley]

so i gather "Creationists " have issues with continental drift too...

Not at all, just that it happened much more quickly and was probably linked to the Flood.

But I can't recall if stars emit light from their earliest stages, or if perhaps they are dark.

According to the Biblical account, plants already existed. Plants need sunlight.

I guess with the not giving God enough credit thing..why presume that since God created the universe with a perfect set of laws governing how it would evolve, that they wouldn't be used?

No, I was talking about Genesis 1.2 and 1.3, before plants or even dry land are mentioned.  The plants, of course, were created when light was apparently ambient, emenating from who-knows-where.  This is another reason why billion-year days are a poor interpretation.  

What do you mean about this perfect set of laws?  More elaboration, please.

[Guest]

We can see that scientific principals are at work every day. We can measure them, quantify them, etc. We know how fast the universe is spreading out, we can measure the distance between solar systems, we can see the smallest bits of matter and see how it constructs itself into larger pieces of matter and to a certain extent, how it forms into life. We don't understand it all, but big chunks of it, and it all works as planned..gravity always works. The speed of light is always the same. Why would you assume that God wouldn't work within those forces and laws to create what we see and instead used some sort of hocus-pocus to create everything in a week? I don't see anything much in the Bible that conflicts with it except the one verse I mentioned, although I'll admit not to being a Biblical literalist.

What about the Tree of Life,which I would presume means when we became Homo Sapiens, and when our heads got large enough that it caused pain for women to give birth.

If you take the Bible literally and believe the earth and all its creatures were created in 6 earthly days and that the world was populated by Adam and Eve, who the heck lived in Nod that God had to mark Cain against? Do you believe God created zillions of dinosaurs, packed them on the ark, let them loose, killed them off and then arranged their fossils to appear to be millions of years old? Is this one of those Miracles that Only God Can Understand and some how large ugly reptiles are some sacred secret that all died out 5800 years ago and turned to stone, while writing from UR still exists.

Nearly everything in the Bible can be scientifically explained. Why would you argue that it shouldn't be?

[Strings]

there's an even better arguement against ID and Creationism: "why?"...

 evolution doesn't require an answer to "why?", whereas ID and creationism DO...

[Guest]

It really doesn't? For me, it's perfection demands a Creator.

I think most people who really do have faith, do for a reason. I've had experiences that lead me to believe that God does exist and that I could probably never explain to anyone else. But I have no doubt. So when I look at how we came to be, there's only one answer. We were Created, by the Creator. We can argue the details, but I can't argue how I know this for certain, just that I do. That doesn't mean I can't approach it logically and I'm not a literal creationist. I don't believe the universe, the earth and all its living creatures were created in 6 days. But as to whether or not a Creator exists? You either believe or you don't. It's that simple.

[Perd Hapley]

 

Intelligent Design,...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA  translation "We can't figure this out, so the Gods musta done it!"

Not quite.  Try, "We have figured out that this stuff is far too complex to have just happened, so someone must have done it."
Sounds fairly scientific.

See, I'm not a biologist, nor do I hold a degree in biology or science.  (A CS degree is closer to a divinity degree.)  Tis ok, neither do the folks that run the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.   From their own website:

Also from their website, showing that your assertion was based merely on prejudice and ignorance (i.e., bigotry):

Discovery's Center for Science and Culture has more than 40 Fellows, including biologists, biochemists, chemists, physicists, philosophers and historians of science, and public policy and legal experts, many of whom also have affiliations with colleges and universities.

The Center's Director is Dr. Stephen Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University.

The Center's Associate Director is Dr. John G. West, who holds a Ph.D. in Government from Claremont Graduate University and a B.A. in Communications from the University of Washington.

The fellows and their credentials are linked here: http://www.discovery.org/csc/fellows.php

Faith by its very definition is believing without logical proof or material evidence.

No, that's foolishness.  Blind faith, some call it.  Faith is belief in something that you know to be true, even when evidence temporarily appears to point the other way.

[Perd Hapley]

Still waiting.

Intelligent design derived from Christian mythos

I hear this charge repeated all the time, and I would like for someone to show me where the originators of ID, Demski, Behe, et al, have shown in their research that they were influenced by the Creation Science movement, or by Christian scripture.  I believe this is nothing more than a smear without basis in fact.  Prove me wrong.

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.

I was just quoting one of the major proponents of intelligent design and agreeing with his disclosure of a flaw in the process.

The flaw being an unwarranted aversion to the design inference?

[Perd Hapley]

Everything just being here without a creater or just popping out of... something else is just as viable as a creater existing for all of time.

The steady state universe might be a valid explanation for the existence of matter, but as I understand it, items like red shift and cosmic background radiation have made it unlikely.  Matter, energy, etc, just appearing for no reason?  Unpossible.  In any case, the argument from design is yet insurmountable.  Life cannot arise from non-life, so there must be some sort of God.  If God exists, He must always have existed.

But now I'm begging the question.

Still, if I decide to go on a search for God and yet tell you that I will not find God, not even in thunderbolts, wet fleeces or plagues of locusts and tell you that all these things have normal rational explanations, then I'm not really looking for God.

True, but how does that apply to creationism or ID? 

Why would Darwin look at minute changes in life forms and layers of increasingly complex life in fossil findings and posit that they arose through blind chance?  Wouldn't the natural result of such research be to hypothesize that God created more simple and then more complex forms and gave them the means to adapt?  Why make the leap that these things happened by chance and mutation?  It seems to me that Darwin and his immediate followers were the ones intent on finding an atheistic answer.

there's an even better arguement against ID and Creationism: "why?"...

 evolution doesn't require an answer to "why?", whereas ID and creationism DO...

That doesn't follow.  I have to go to bed, maybe I can elaborate in the morning.

[Iain]

Still, if I decide to go on a search for God and yet tell you that I will not find God, not even in thunderbolts, wet fleeces or plagues of locusts and tell you that all these things have normal rational explanations, then I'm not really looking for God.

True, but how does that apply to creationism or ID?

I cannot engage in a thought experiment or a scientific experiment if I already know the 'answer'. If I decide that God does not exist and deny all proofs that he may throw my way, or refuse to see God in creation no matter what scientific evidence is demolished, then I am not engaging in a valid thought experiment. I'm making a statement of faith (there is no God) and everything fits around that.

From what I can tell the young earth theorists rely heavily on the Bible being a factually historical record that can be relied upon. To accept that I have to accept divine inspiration, otherwise all the usual questioning of human history has to take place, and besides that there were at least a few days that even Adam missed out on. It becomes this argument - I believe in creation because I believe in Genesis which tells us that God made the earth, and I believe in Genesis because I believe God inspired its writing. That's all fine, if you believe in God, remove that and the argument falls to pieces, which I'm sure those theorists know.

To then claim that all scientific understanding of the age of the earth is wrong based on that claim is to conflict science with faith. It's no more scientific than that. I guess that'll need some sort of proof that natural processes (radioactive decay of carbon-14...) may have occured at varying rates, other than the proof that Genesis offers. Otherwise it is an unsubstantiated claim based on knowing the answer and looking for the method.

Why would Darwin look at minute changes in life forms and layers of increasingly complex life in fossil findings and posit that they arose through blind chance?  Wouldn't the natural result of such research be to hypothesize that God created more simple and then more complex forms and gave them the means to adapt?  Why make the leap that these things happened by chance and mutation?  It seems to me that Darwin and his immediate followers were the ones intent on finding an atheistic answer.

I've always had issues with the concept of mutation as a method of evolution, but perhaps I am coloured by my own experience of bad mutations. Natural selection through breeding over enormous timescales always made more sense, so perhaps all men will look like Brad Pitt and all women like Angelina Jolie if there are just too many centuries of vacuousness to come.

Darwin may not have believed that God created so much as the hairs on his feet, and his theory may reflect that. But also Darwin's theory represented the best he could answer those questions when relying solely on what could be known, what can be hypothesised about with the hope of establishing a way of proving that at least elements of that hypothesis are correct. Can we answer scientific questions by incorporating and relying on non-scientific 'fact'?

What I'm left with here (when discussing young earth theory) is two arguments - one is that this is the best that is understood by humans, it's not perfect (and shouldn't be treated or taught as such). And the other is that all human understanding is wrong (dating techniques etc) because it doesn't fit with a book written several thousand years ago, which is factually correct. Maybe I'm parodying a little. The sky is clear blue today, I should be safe from thunderbolts, at least on the basis of my understanding of the mechanics of thunderstorms and there being no God, I should be safe.

[Perd Hapley]

Why would you assume that God wouldn't work within those forces and laws to create what we see and instead used some sort of hocus-pocus to create everything in a week? I don't see anything much in the Bible that conflicts with it except the one verse I mentioned, although I'll admit not to being a Biblical literalist.

If we take Genesis literally, where would any forces and laws be broken?  How are natural laws violated by the hand of God creating everything in six weeks?  Is there a natural law that prevents a Creator God from forming a universe or from forming a creature and breathing life into it?  

What about the Tree of Life,which I would presume means when we became Homo Sapiens, and when our heads got large enough that it caused pain for women to give birth.

So by your understanding, the greater intellect of the homo sapien is linked to the loss of paradise?  In any case, the Bible clearly states that this pain in childbirth was a punishment for sin.  If you will not recognize that, then why pay any attention to the Bible at all?  I am confused, though, what this has to do with the Tree of Life.

If you take the Bible literally and believe the earth and all its creatures were created in 6 earthly days and that the world was populated by Adam and Eve, who the heck lived in Nod that God had to mark Cain against?

Do you believe God created zillions of dinosaurs, packed them on the ark, let them loose, killed them off and then arranged their fossils to appear to be millions of years old? Is this one of those Miracles that Only God Can Understand and some how large ugly reptiles are some sacred secret that all died out 5800 years ago and turned to stone, while writing from UR still exists.

Nearly everything in the Bible can be scientifically explained. Why would you argue that it shouldn't be?

Everything in the Bible can be scientifically explained.  Who argued that it shouldn't be?  The first topic is a common question, but an easy one to explain.  The second seems more like a Mormon understanding of the topic, though some Christians have also thought that way.  I'll see if I can't get to that later.

Or you could just go here:    http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/qa.asp

[Marnoot]

The second seems more like a Mormon understanding of the topic, though some Christians have also thought that way.

Are you referring to Barbara's comment about dinosaurs? We (Mormons) don't teach anything of the sort. I think ideas that God planted dinosaur bones just to fool people, that they were turned to stone to make them seem older, etc., etc., are preposterous. There is no official Mormon doctrine surrounding dinosaurs, actual age of the earth, howGod created life, etc., etc. Regarding dinosaurs, when they lived, etc., that's one of those things that I'll be interested to learn about in the next life. Among individual Mormons you'll find any of a big range of personal opinions ranging from strict interpretation of the Genesis account (God created the earth in 6 literal days) to looser interpretations (day = an un-quantified period of time). The LDS church has never taken an official stance on evolution. Individual leaders of the church have expressed varying opinion from time to time, but that's about it.
Relevant things we do believe are that Adam & Eve were two actual people from whom all people on the earth have descended. That God created/"organized" the Earth from pre-existing matter, that is that the Earth was not created ex nihilo. Opinions on evolution (that is the whole topic of how God created life) have really been left to personal judgment, belief, etc. While many elements of evolution are certainly evident, I have serious problems with it as explaining the origin of life.

[Guest]

How are natural laws violated by the hand of God creating everything in six weeks?  Is there a natural law that prevents a Creator God from forming a universe or from forming a creature and breathing life into it?

If the universe had been created in six weeks a few millenia ago, we would not see EM radiation that's billions of years old coming from other parts of the universe.  We'd see a nearby portion of our own galaxy, and the rest of the stars and other astronomical objects would flicker on light lighbulbs in the millenia and eons to come as they entered our light cone.

ID is a pathetic theory for people who like to hear themselves talk.  Either the "creator" is God, in which case ID is a stalking-horse for religion, or else the "creator" is an alien, and the origin of that alien is subject to the same debate as our own origin.

You deites keep believing.  The rest of us may tentatively believe, or may tentatively disbelieve, but at least we're not holding up progress.  You don't burn heretics at the stake anymore, but you do a good job polluting the public sphere with disputes over the definition of "marriage," complaints about certain types of research, and demands for the teaching of creationism in science classes.  Imagine if all that effort were directed toward more pressing problems like environmental stability, stable fusion, and real, experimental cosmology.

You want to know why we don't want creationism taught as part of biology?  There's nothing to disprove, so it's not science.  You should be begging schools to spend more time teaching evolution along with the scientific method, with the hope that some bright student will grow up and conclusively disprove it.  I don't know about your schools, but the gaps in evolutionary theory were clearly laid out in my highschool biology class.  Strangely enough, that didn't cause any of the class atheists/agnostics to take up religion.

Everything in the Bible can be scientifically explained.

Show me an apple that will teach me what evil is.