"I've learned there are three things you don't discuss with people: religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin. ..." Linus Van Pelt

Good point. It would be refreshing to see an origins study that took evolution and creation equally and let people decide for themselves.

It's likely that a preponderence of science leans toward evolution. I think that's where the hijack came from. Creationists probably go, "Here's another bone they've discovered that proves God does not exist." That may sound inflammatory, but please do not take it that way. Good science is greatly appreciated and respected. Science that sets out to prove God could not have created all things gets a little old sometimes. I learned that in grade school forty years ago, so I get the message.

I just believe that it takes less faith to accept creation and more faith to accept evolution. If everything started from single cells somewhere, where did the single cells come from? They had to have an origin; if they evolved, they were not created. If not created, then where did they start? I think that is just one unanswerable question that leads me to say it takes less faith to accept creation.

I believe the exact opposite. People do decide for themselves for whatever reasons they have, usually irrespective of facts and sentiments contrary to thier opinion. If you have true faith, then there is a possibility that the Earth really is 4 billion years old and there is God, and maybe the guy who wrote the passage in the Bible stating that the Earth is 6000 years old is incorrect.

I find it ironic that science is dismissed as baseless and zeolous yet the Bible is deemed the 'proof' of God. If you truly believe, then you don't need any proof. I, OTOH, want proof.

I believe we as humans could not possibly understand God. I believe the Bible is meant as a guide and that different factions of religions twist or interpet facts and words to create what they want them to. For instance, the Muslims that suicide bomb and believe they will go to heaven for it. They have taken Islamic beliefs and twisted them until they fit their needs.

This is why I don't like to go to Church a lot. Some of the messages are good and some I completely disagree with. I had a preacher tell the congregation that we do not deserve God's love. To me that is like saying I don't deserve my parents' love, for it's by their choice I exist. Now if it was like my wife's dog, I had no choice in the matter and he doesn't deserve my love and I hate him:)

Double quote, props Tom..

My thought was in reading this was that it has been done, it is the history of science and evolutionary theory.

Malthus and Darwin were devout Christians and they were very troubled in what the emperical facts they were uncovering said and what hypothesis covered this evidence. It underminded their whole world view but they forged ahead with the theory of evolution based on reality as they cataloged it.

Multitudes of evidence since validate the billions of years of our solar system's existence and millions of man's years walking the planet. Carbon dating is not a theory. Uranium lead dating is not a theory. Light wavelength and color shift to measure distance is not a theory. There is theory and proven laws.

The one thing science does very poorly is satiate the needs of a sentient being's arrogance and fear. Arrogance in being unable to accept their evolution from slime to chimp to man, that they were not created in the image of god himself. Fear in accepting no afterlife and wondering where is the moral compass for society to be derived from.

To get back to the original thread's intent (kinda).....religion that does not deny science can coexist. As soon as you start taking a group of gradeschool children to the local Nature Historical Museum and expaining to them dinasours and humans lived together ala Flintstones so you can shoehorn everything into a 4400 BC creation date, you have passed into myth building.

I have the episode on my DVR and will watch soon.
Thanks Alan.

I totally agree. I am personally very tired of this science versus religion boxing match. From all my personal research I have come to the absolute conclusion that both sides operate under seriously flawed convictions. Science in its self can be a religion since a lot of it is based on speculation or circular reasoning. Such as, the dinosaurs are 100 million years old because the rock the fossils where they were extracted are 100 million years old, followed by we know the rock is a 100 million years old because there were 100 million year old fossils found in it.


What I would like to see is a common line drawn down the middle where both points of view can coexist, So in recognition of this line in the sand, I hereby dub my self a “creative adaptationist”.

We have a fundemental epistomolgoical problem with your approach, Tom, and it is that you are postulating an argument without having read the other side's evidence to see if it conforms with your a priori assumption. You are assuming that "Journey of Man" is " 'another bone they've discovered that proves God does not exist.'" Ought you not to view the documentary or read the book first before making the argument predicated on an assumption?

By the way, it's not only the "anti-science" side but the pro science side that has made errors. Without the foundation of the particular example how does anyone know that this is good or bad science? Or that, as someone hinted above, one can rather easily make the argument back to first principals and ask where to the first primordial matter come from on which the Big Bang is based, or if it was really random chnace that caused atoms to combine and make life possible?

What ought not to be in doubt is the intellectual rigor and logical thought processes brought to an argument or question under discussion. One would think that the sine qua non of any discussion would be a working familiarity with the work being discussed. If that's true it's unnecessary to read the bible as my "feelings" or beliefs about what it says are sufficient to procede with an argument. I think even the most devout believer would agree that this was foolish. Is this good science or bad? How would you know if you are not open enough to give it a chance and test its evidence against your own "methodology" of true and false knowledge?

Alan

I don't know Malthus but Darwin didn't have a label of "devout Christian" in his later years.

Darwin himself was quoted as saying his own theory was so far out that no one in their right mind should believe it.

Then in chapter 14: "On the...view of the independent creation of each being, we can only say that so it is; that it has pleased the Creator to construct all the animals and plants in each great class on a uniform plan.."

He didn't believe that it was all chance.

The 2nd law of thermodynamics says that things always progress from order to disorder, i.e. they decay and decline:

"Second Law of Thermodynamics

Heat can never pass spontaneously from a colder to a hotter body. As a result of this fact, natural processes that involve energy transfer must have one direction, and all natural processes are irreversible. This law also predicts that the entropy of an isolated system always increases with time. Entropy is the measure of the disorder or randomness of energy and matter in a system. Because of the second law of thermodynamics both energy and matter in the Universe are becoming less useful as time goes on. Perfect order in the Universe occurred the instance after the Big Bang when energy and matter and all of the forces of the Universe were unified."

That's science written by a non-creationist (see the Big Bang). Evolution states the exact opposite, that a single cell became progressively more orderly and all the magnificent subsystems that make up the human body gradually developed. Here science supports creation.

I know this won't change anyone's mind and I'm not pushing any of you. We all start with a belief and tend to support it by grabbing the facts we like and ignoring those we don't. I've mentioned this to Alan more than once and I believe that it is borne out in most of us.

Good debate, thanks for all your input.

Big Papa, I'm going to come back to you. You ask some great questions.

Well, if you read my post, either you didn't catch my drift or I did not explain it well. I meant to say that usually the "newest documentary" is another attempt to discredit creation, so I don't bother to go there.

As long as people are doing the science, there will be errors, sometimes by oversight, sometimes purposefully.


I think murder is not for me but to be sure I'm going to dig in deeply and get to know more about it, maybe even do it.

I know that's stupid, but I don't agree 100% with your statement.

The Law and the Prophets stand on their own without you or me having to read a bunch of contrary opinions. How many times would you have to read about history foretold in Isaiah before you would believe that it is an unparalleled book; not simple writings of a man with imagination, but a message from God? Could you have foretold (hundreds of years before it happened) the carrying off to Babylon and the raising up of Cyrus the great (a non-Jew) to aid and assist the return? A statistician would say that one or two instances could occur where such "prophecy" could have accidentally occurred, but to pile one upon another and have them be true is a statistical impossibility. Statistics are part of good science, right? Let me repeat, statistics are part of good science, right?

Then the question becomes, "will you believe it?" That's where men depart - they most often cling to their presuppostions and fall back on the old support theories that cover them. I have maintained that to you several times over. Aaah, human nature is such.

My Bible and your Law and Prophets are unparalleled books. Men decide whether they will believe or not.

It's not as if there was once created a perfect snowflake, and it has been melting ever since. Nor is the world progressing towards ever more perfect snowflakes, although this thread might indicate that as a population grows, so grows the number of flakes.

How does complex organization spontaneously emerge in our universe?

Stu Kaufman has a pretty good idea, and a very interesting "creation myth" coming out of a hard-core scientific perspective. He casts the phenomenon of organized life not as an improbable and nearly impossible matter of chance, but as an almost inevitable emergent property of complex systems.

Check out Stu's book, At Home in the Universe
The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity .

There is room for faith and doubt in the universe of the mind. A God who wanted to create a world where faith could be tested on a constant basis may have set it up that way.

Why anyone would chose to play by the rules given by such a trifling deity is another matter.

Human frailty and fallibility are beyond doubt. A belief in the persistance of these human qualities is shared by people of both faith and reason.

Clearly, when comparing 2nd law with cellular evolution, it does not support creation. It only does if you ignore the fact that cellular evolution happened in a chaotic state; the entropy of the greater environment impacted the evolution of cells.

It's not a closed system devout of influence from the greater environment.

A Propos this debate, we have " Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason " being broadcast Friday, June 23 at 9PM EST, but you should check to see if your local PBS is carrying the program. Hopefully, before the broadcast is critiqued it will be viewed. It's interviews with individuals so it may be interesting or not but it is facinating how topics of interest seem to find unforseen outlets.

Alan

I didn't say it supported creation - sorry if I implied it. What I meant to point out is that if everything around us consistently breaks down and becomes less complex, the prospects of an entire system gradually becoming more and more complex and orderly is really hard to believe. That is unless you have faith (in evolution). :)


Not sure what you mean - the environment with hot and cold, wet and dry are consistent contributors to the breakdown of about anything I can think of - plant matter, flesh, anything man has built - it all breaks down.

Not sure if I was entirely clear here, but this distills into a chicken or egg argument. Everything (energy and matter) is in a constant state of flux between chaos and order. In ecological terms, we are in some kind of ordered state when you look at Darwin. Yet, this system didn't happen in a vacuum. Believers think the current order was caused by God, scientists and atheists believe it was caused by other chaotic influences. Either way, you could look at the current state of Darwin's evolution and see chaos or order, depending on how you look at it.

In the end, we'll end up where we started.