Subject:
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Re: One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 5 Jul 2002 15:38:33 GMT
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Viewed:
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4538 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Koudys writes:
>
> > This is a totally different topic, but showing your bias against creationism
> > by saying it isn't reality, is as bigoted as those Bible thumpers who say
> > that the world came into existence on October 4, 6006 BC and dumbly adhere
> > to that date.
>
> Then let's restate it this way: Of the explanations currently on the
> table for how we arrived where we are today, evolution provides more
> complete, explanatory answers and makes more accurate, testable predictions
> than Creationism, and understanding of evolution has led to greater advances
> in biology and medicine than 100 centuries of pre-Darwin understanding.
> Therefore, by the criteria employed by the Western world for at least
> several centuries, evolution is a better rational, explanatory model of
> reality than Creationism, and acceptance of evolution as an explanation
> requires fewer (and smaller) leaps of faith than does belief in Creationism.
> Since evolution is a testable model that can be falsified, modified, and
> corrected to correspond to newly-acquired information, I would say that it
> is inherently less dogmatic than Creationism based on faith and on
> irreproducible revelation. "Bigoted" is an odd word to use there, since
> Creationists are not necessarily bigoted, but if they adhere to The Word in
> the face of all rational evidence, then I would say at the very least that
> their criteria for judgment are incomplete.
>
> > We today don't know what happened back then for certain. We can make
> > educated guesses but they would be guesses, or theories. Theories are *not*
> > laws and, as such, should not be stated as such to be Reality.
>
> Well, that's not a helpful explanation of anything, is it? We might as
> well say "we don't know what Reality *really* is, so we might as well say
> it's anything." I expect you'll accuse me of "slippery slope" reasoning
> once again, but I'm not doing that at all--my conclusion isn't even a single
> step removed from your assertion; it's simply a restating of it.
>
> Dave!
We have the law of gravity, which has yet to be disproven--when I let go of
a hammer it will fall. We see that today. We can test that today. How do
we prove 'evolution', which happened millions and/or billions of yeara ago?
There have been papers about the differences between micro evolution and
macro evolution.
Micro evolution can be best explained this way: There was this white moth
in Brazil. Every 1 in 1000 of these moths were 'born' grey and stood out
from the rest and was eaten by predators. Then industry hit Brazil and
everything became sooty. Therefore it was the white moths which stood out
and were then eaten by the predators, and it was the grey moths that
survived to propagate the species. Now, 50 years later, the moths are
mostly grey, and 1 in a 1000 are born white. If you get rid of the soot, it
would take 50 years to get back to the white majority ;)
The reason why our wisdom teeth are redundant now is 'cause we don't rip
flesh off bones for eating and therefore don't need the strong teeth and/or
jaws for that kinda eating. Take away our eating habits and throw us back
to the 'old' way of food gathering and eating, it'll be a few generations
but sooner or later we would have the big jaws and sharp incissors.
In the 1400's people were considered tall at 4 foot 6. Now it's considered
short. Micro evolution. We were human in the 1400's even though, on the
average, we were 1.5 feet shorter than we are now. We were human many many
years ago, even though we had bigger jawbones than we do now.
There have been fossilized remains of fish discovered dated to milloins of
years ago that were thought to be extinct, until a fisherman caught a live
one off the coast of Madagascar a few years back.
Macro evolution is the 'jumping' of some species to some other species.
This is where the 'theory' of evolution is completely conjecture. Lucy is
not a 'missing link' In this world where both Physics and Chemistry both
talk about entropy--that every reaction loses something that cannot be
gained back, that everything naturally tends towards disorder (like my
bedroom), that how can something become more complex and structured which
goes completely against chaos and entropy.
If I were to have a dump truck full of all the parts for a house, and I
drove to an empty field and dumped it, in my life all those parts would
never form a house on their own--it takes an intelligence, a rationale,
something smart, to assemble them into a structure. Yes, in theory, you can
say if you have an infinite number of moneys sitting at an infinite number
of typewriters, that one would bang out the complete works of shakespeare.
However, in our reality, the universe is not infinite and does tend towards
chaos if left on its own. Therefore something intelligent must have casued
that to happen. Causation is something I should have pursued :)
The blind watchmaker is somehting that Christian scientists talk about, as
well as other things. Whatever...
I personally believe that the world was not created in 6 24 hr. days. My
Old Testament professor went on about this in some depth, that in the
ancient hebrew the word for days in these passages does not mean our days,
but that's getting into semantics. If we read the Genesis creation story,
it follows the evolution model pretty much to the letter--nothing to
something, water, plants, lower life forms, then man--except the instigator
in the Bible is God, and he saw that it was good. Evolution--it just
happened that way. Isn't it amazing that a book written by Moses, and
passed down to him via story telling for many generations, closely adheres
to what scientists say today? To me that is waaay to coincidental--how did
these unscientifically educated people come up with a parallel to the
evolution theory 5000+ years before Darwin?
There are no absolutes when it comes to this. Saying that Creationism takes
more faith than Evolution is also farcical. One you have to accept God, an
intelligent being who made the heavens and hte earth, and made us in his
image, the other you have to accept a theory that has so many holes.
Why only 2 forms of life? (sure people can say 3+ with bacteria, viruses and
whatever...) but only plants and animals--why not more? If the universe is
prone to chaos we should have lotsa different things going on (at least ,
lots more than the millions we have now ;) ) Why do we have distinct
differences between the species? I mean niches are not absolute so why are
the species? Why no 'missing links'--If this evolution thing took place
over millions/billions of years, there should be evidence *everywhere*. We
have the dinosaurs, a distinct species in their own right. Dinosaurs fit
into my theory just as well as they fit into yours. Except mine says they
died out, not evolved into something 'new and improved' when the climate
changed.
I also have this little pet theory that dragons and dinosaurs are pretty
much the same thing--every legend and/or myth has some grain of truth in it.
Mayhaps, passed down from story telling thru the ages was the story of the
big beasts which roamed the earth, and eventually the creature in the story
evolved into the dragon--y'know, to scare kids at night. God even mentions
in Job about the Behomoth and the Leviathan, and the descriptions of said
creatures are pretty much the same descriptions we have for dinosaurs. I'm
just saying.
Yes scientific knowledge is great for helping us achieve greater things.
And if the theory of evolution helps in this regard, so much the better. As
long as the pursuit of knowledge is tempered with the respect of all things
that God mandated to us in Genesis--that we be stewarts and caretakers of
the planet.
I'm not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination--I took my science
classes in university and did my readings, and know a bit about a bit.
In the end I'll take my (and not some religious or scientific zealot)
interpretation of Creationism/evolution (my usual 'middle of the road'
approach :) )
Dave
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