Creation vs. Evolution

  • Thread starter ledhed
  • 9,687 comments
  • 406,928 views
There is another article on the patheos website saying that many fundamentalist are moving to Russia because of the anti gay stance they have. Sounds good to me, send all those creationists, evangelists and other "radicals" to Russia, so America can get back on track.
BTW, sorry if you are Russian and reading this post. Unless you agree with Putin, in which case, go for a long walk down the short path to the cliff.
 
Rallywagon
There is another article on the patheos website saying that many fundamentalist are moving to Russia because of the anti gay stance they have. Sounds good to me, send all those creationists, evangelists and other "radicals" to Russia, so America can get back on track.
BTW, sorry if you are Russian and reading this post. Unless you agree with Putin, in which case, go for a long walk down the short path to the cliff.
Click to expand...

A lot of people don't realize that the christian coalition used to be part of the democratic party. When you think about it, it makes more sense for their platform - stricter state controls and it's very christian to give away worldly possessions to those in need. It was gay rights and abortion that drove them to the republicans - who didn't support those views at the time but were focused mostly on economics. The republicans allowed this huge block of voters to move in basically in exchange for not pushing the gay and abortion agenda. Eventually the republicans changed their mantra and became what they are today.

So when you look back on the history, it makes sense for the hardcore Christians to go to a place like Russia that offers strict state controls. Only problem with Russia is that they don't exactly stand for religious freedom or religious law. Not sure that it offers a better scenario for them.
 
I'm Catholic, but, I do believe that Evolution is a possibility. Like I don't believe that animals and plants were just plopped on the Earth. But I don't believe that the origin of every Animal was bacteria in an Ocean. I'm like half and half. I think every animal evolved from some type of ancestor(not one but several), but I don't believe humans evolved from monkeys/apes.

But you can combine the theories and say that there was a God(or an upper power) that assisted in the creation of the Earth and everything on it. For all I know God(or an upper power) could've said let there be evolution.

The reason I don't believe that humans evolved from apes is because the original ancestor is still alive. In all cases I believe the original ancestor is dead. Correct me on this because I may be wrong.

I also think humans are de-evolving. Animals in nature evolve because of selective breeding. The weak ones die and the strong ones strive and survive. But humans don't do this. We don't kill people with deformities. Its just plain wrong. People with cancer or diabetes or color blindness will have children, and their children have children, and it will just run in the blood lines. Unless they get lucky and it doesn't show up for generations.

It just looks like that there has been more deformities show up in the last hundred or so years. Or they just weren't reported often. IDK.
 
samurai8juice
I don't believe humans evolved from monkeys/apes.

The reason I don't believe that humans evolved from apes is because the original ancestor is still alive. In all cases I believe the original ancestor is dead. Correct me on this because I may be wrong.
Click to expand...

You are quite right that humans didn't evolve from monkeys or present day apes - they didn't. Rather, all primates (which includes humans and all currently-existing ape species) evolved from a common ancestor which no longer exists, but must have existed several million years ago. Further back in time than that - a few tens of millions of years ago - a common ancestor of all monkeys and primates must have existed too, but again, that ancestral species has not existed for many millions of years. The evidence is in our respective DNA - the degree of genetic similarity between humans and apes (and to a slightly lesser extent, monkeys) is such that it is beyond any reasonable doubt that we are (very) distant biological relations of these species.
 
samurai8juice
I'm Catholic, but, I do believe that Evolution is a possibility. Like I don't believe that animals and plants were just plopped on the Earth. But I don't believe that the origin of every Animal was bacteria in an Ocean. I'm like half and half. I think every animal evolved from some type of ancestor(not one but several), but I don't believe humans evolved from monkeys/apes.

But you can combine the theories and say that there was a God(or an upper power) that assisted in the creation of the Earth and everything on it. For all I know God(or an upper power) could've said let there be evolution.

The reason I don't believe that humans evolved from apes is because the original ancestor is still alive. In all cases I believe the original ancestor is dead. Correct me on this because I may be wrong.

I also think humans are de-evolving. Animals in nature evolve because of selective breeding. The weak ones die and the strong ones strive and survive. But humans don't do this. We don't kill people with deformities. Its just plain wrong. People with cancer or diabetes or color blindness will have children, and their children have children, and it will just run in the blood lines. Unless they get lucky and it doesn't show up for generations.

It just looks like that there has been more deformities show up in the last hundred or so years. Or they just weren't reported often. IDK.
Click to expand...

There is only one scientific theory. The other is unscientific. It's impossible to combine facts with non-facts.

I'll leave others misconceptions in your post for others to respond. :)
 
zzz_pt
There is only one scientific theory. The other is unscientific. It's impossible to combine facts with non-facts.

I'll leave others misconceptions in your post for others to respond. :)
Click to expand...

A theory is not fact. A theory is an idea or a guess of what may have happened. So I'm combining two theories. I'm combining a non-falsifiable with a theory that has some facts backing it up.

So I can't build one large theory with two separate theories?
 
samurai8juice
A theory is not fact. A theory is an idea or a guess of what may have happened.
Click to expand...
A theory is closer to a fact than a guess. A theory must explain facts and be verifiable. Aerodynamics is a theory, and we don't guess why it is that planes fly. Aerodynamic theory explains that momentum exchange with air provides an upwards force on the airplane.

Theory is confused with hypothesis which is confused with guess in common language.

So I can't build one large theory with two separate theories?
Click to expand...
You can, but religion isn't a theory. At best a God driven creation is a hypothesis, but it's pretty hard to test and that defeats the purpose of a hypothesis.
 
samurai8juice
A theory is not fact. A theory is an idea or a guess of what may have happened. So I'm combining two theories. I'm combining a non-falsifiable with a theory that has some facts backing it up.

So I can't build one large theory with two separate theories?
Click to expand...

Another person who doesn't know what Scientific Theory is. It is not an Idea or a Guess. It is regarded HIGHER than a fact.

Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
 
samurai8juice
A theory is not fact.
Click to expand...

As already stated, in science, it is. There is no higher level of acceptance of information or ideas.

As I've said several times in this thread, theory in this context is not like a detective's theory about a crime, something he think might have happened.

Let's see..... Gravity. Relativity. Electromagnetism. These are all Theories. Are you going to say you don't believe in gravity? Or radio?
 
DQuaN
Maybe we should put a sticky or a [READ THIS FIRST - COMMON MISTAKES PEOPLE MAKE WHEN DISCUSSING EVOLUTION]
Click to expand...

Yes, I think this thread could benefit from a quick punchlist of common heavily debunked myths that people often enter this thread spouting. The confusion of theory with guess is a great one, and there are many others on the creationist side of things (evolving from monkeys for example), but there are also a few that get spouted on the evolutionary side which are commonly debunked. Misunderstandings about the role of the old testament in Christianity would be a set. Also the distinction that creationists (particularly young earth creationists) draw between what they call "observational science" and "historical science", which is what allows them to think that the science behind your computer and smartphone is real but the science behind geology and evolution is not.

It could be an interesting reference, maybe save us a lot of time.
 
BobK
Well in the case of this "radio" thing, my WiFi (for example) works because tiny little angels carry the packets back and forth. Everybody knows that!
Click to expand...

That's just crazy. If that's true then explain how the magic tiny-hamsters inside computers talk to these so-called "angels"? Get a grip man.
 
samurai8juice
A theory is not fact. A theory is an idea or a guess of what may have happened. So I'm combining two theories. I'm combining a non-falsifiable with a theory that has some facts backing it up.
Click to expand...
Theories are not backed up by facts. Theories explain what the facts mean. A theory has to explain all existing evidence, including facts, data and laws - in many ways a theory is the highest peak of knowledge because it aggregates all knowledge.

You're talking about an hypothesis. And hypotheses have to be falsifiable, because that's how we test them.
samurai8juice
So I can't build one large theory with two separate theories?
Click to expand...
You can. That's how science works. But you can't build one large theory from two conflicting theories, because they contain data that conflicts and your large theory has to explain both.

Fortunately, you don't have to - we beat you to it. Every piece of evidence, every fact, every data point and all known laws governing evolution is explained by a single, large theory called "Evolutionary Theory" - and it leaves out no evidence, facts, laws or data points that don't fit, because otherwise it wouldn't be a theory any more.

Part of Evolutionary Theory covers the fact that humans, apes and monkeys all evolved from common ancestor species over the course of the last 30 million years (humans and apes more recently than apes and monkeys) and that these common ancestor species themselves evolved from other common ancestor species over the course of the last 3.5 billion years from single celled life. There is an amazing quantity of evidence for all of this and Evolutionary Theory includes and explains all of that evidence - and every other piece of evidence ever gathered in this area. I'm afraid that, like it or not, you don't get to ignore some bits of it for convenience.
 
I recently read Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief by Lewis Wolpert, and I recommend it. Here's a quote from page 202 of the paperback edition:

Why do scientists believe that science provides fundamental explanations for how the world works, particularly the nature of causes? An essential feature of science is that scientists contribute to a common body of knowledge, which is scrutinised by other scientists. All key science over the last hundred years has been reported in journals, and subjected to peer review. Unlike religion, contemporary science is almost entirely independent of the particular culture in which it is done: science is universal, and there is no Western or Eastern science. The belief that scientific ideas are continually changing is true mainly at the frontiers of investigation, but the core is largely solid. It is fundamental to science that even the most deeply held beliefs about science, from Einstein to Darwin, can in principle be shown to be faulty and so require modification. It is also important to realise that reliable scientific beliefs have no intrinsic ethical or moral content: they refer to how the world is. There are no ethics in Newton's laws, nor in the genetic code, nor in the fact that genes can affect our mental health.
Click to expand...

The paragraph immediately following that one is also very interesting, but I'm not sure how much I can quote before getting into trouble with respect to copyright laws. It talks about how unnatural a lot of scientific knowledge can seem and how it goes against "common sense", thus making it difficult for non-scientists to "believe" this stuff (at the beginning of chapter 2 he explains how he uses the word "belief" in the book, which might be different from the way some people use it in this thread).
 
I think this can go into the first post:

5misconceptionsaboutthetheoryofEvolution-67735.png
 
Dennisch
I think this can go into the first post:

5misconceptionsaboutthetheoryofEvolution-67735.png
Click to expand...

I agreed with 99.9%. But on the 1st point, comparing Theory and Law, there's an error. Theories don't explain "WHY" but "How" thing happen. In this case, Evolution.

Science doesn't answer to questions of purpose (why). :)

That aside, I support the inclusion of that info in the OP.
 
The people's Pope? Don't get me wrong, the Catholic Church is a monstrous organisation with a lot to answer for but Francis seems to be much more accepting and tolerant than his predecessors; especially the last one.
 
It's not anti-Catholic propaganda. It's about recognising that most religions change their stance as scientific knowledge develops. Whatever science discovers, religion will say "God did that" even though the religious texts describe nothing even close to the theories we have. I'm interested to see how the real creationists respond to the Pope's comments.

Evolution is pretty important, I'm just wondering why God didn't elaborate on it a bit more. Maybe a chapter, paragraph or a little footnote just briefly explaining our evolutionary history.

I'm also waiting for the day when the Pope recommends and promotes condom use.
 

Latest Posts

Back