Creation vs. Evolution

[redacted]

I suggest you read what they have said about God and the forming of this country, receiving a PHD is this field would make me more of an expert than you.

I can see where it might give you more credibility. But why do you assume "receiving a PHD is this field would make me more of an expert"? Is it like the C-card thing?

 

[caymaniac]

Sharks and primates shared a common ancestor way back when.

A theory you've obviously read somewhere, it is quite ridiculous actually.

A fact is that a recent poll states that 90% of Americans believe in God _ who created the world makes you and a few like you look ridiculous, and in a small minority.

 

[caymaniac]

For some light reading try "Signers of the Declaration of Independence" / Morris and how about "America's" by Federer

 

[rookers]

A fact is that a recent poll states that 90% of Americans believe in God _ who created the world makes you and a few like you look ridiculous, and in a small minority.

Kind of like those who originally discarded church sponsored geocentrism in favor of heliocentrism, or those who originally believed that none of our fellow evolved humans should live as slaves.
The 'majority' are fed on the intellectual equivilent of pablum through their media centers. Foisting the 'majority' as arbiters of truth seems a tad ridiculous to me. Most don't even take much genuine interest in their own governence, let alone something as weighty as the existence of an old dude with a white beard who created us all.

 

[Soggy]

You stated that the authors of the Bible were unknown...now you are asking a different question.

I was asking more specifically about the new testament, but since you brought it up...

In the answer to your first question we know that David wrote the Psalms...

Not really...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalms

73 of them are claimed to be written by David, but historical evidence shows that they weren't written down until nearly 500 years after David lived.

and that Song of Songs was written by Solomon, ...

Doing a quick search, I was unable to find any information about the authorship of the Song of Solomon, so I can't comment on this one.

did you need a list of more authors?

Yes...the *real* authors would be nice to know.

 

[Soggy]

A theory you've obviously read somewhere, it is quite ridiculous actually.

What is ridiculous about it?

A fact is that a recent poll states that 90% of Americans believe in God _ who created the world makes you and a few like you look ridiculous, and in a small minority.

Belief in God is completely separate from belief in traditional christian teachings. A lot of people believe in God, but do not believe in religion. And a lot of people believe in religions other than Christianity. And there are a lot of people that are just lemmings and believe what they believe because that's what they grew up with. My guess (and experience) is that only a very small minority have actually examined their belief systems critically.

 

[Soggy]

You made it very difficult to read your response, since you put it all in the quote tag. I almost missed it, but I would like to respond to a couple things:

Every time you catch a cold, you are experience evolution in action.

That statement is not evolution in action!

Oh, but it is...Generally speaking, we can only catch the same virus once. Each cold you get is a mutation of cold viruses. Random mutation and natural selection are how evolution functions.

Another example of a form of evolution that we witness frequently is when we take antibiotics. Some bacteria in an infection are going to be more resistent to antibiotics than others (due to mutations). When you stop taking an antibiotic before it has erradicated the infection, you are leaving behind the strongest and most resilient bacteria. They then go on to reproduce, along with their resistence, to make that antibiotic ineffective.

Of course we haven't *witnessed* an ape-like creature evolving into a human. Thank you, Captain Obvious. We haven't been observing long enough to see such a thing occur. Does that negate the incredible amounts of evidence we find in fossils, DNA, RNA, Genes, etc, along with observable evolution on a small scale? Of course not. Everything we have ever studied points to evolution being 'right.'

Faith in a Creator is a theory, do you dispute it?

Yes, I dispute it. There is no evidence to show that such a thing exists. The only evidence you or anyone else has used to support the theory of creation is from texts that have been shown over and over again to be incomplete, inconsistent, and incompatible with observable phenomenon.

 

[H2Andy]

we know that David wrote the Psalms and that Song of Songs was written by Solomon, these are an example, did you need a list of more authors?

unfortunately, it's not that easy.

the Psalms were written down after centuries of being transmitted orally. Most authorities agree that they weren't written down for about 500 years after the time around which David *might* have lived (there's no proof he in fact lived, though there are three independent sources in antiquity that mention the House of David as ruling Israel).

as to Solomon, alas ... there's not a single shred of mention of him and his great Kingdom, nor of his riches, nor of anything whatsover. people have been digging around for his monuments and Solomon's temple, and simply have not found them.

the song of solomon shows little Greek influence, so it's dated before Hellenistic intrusion into Israel around 300 or 400 BC. but there's little evidence when it was actually written.

sadly, the archeological strata flatly contradicts the Biblical chronology as to David and Solomon, and the contemporary records mention a House of David, but no David nor Solomon.

so... while certainly characters in historical fiction, they were probably not real authors.

 

[AlexMDiver]

A good article on the matter of why creationists are not understanding evolution in the first place and argue falsly:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html

I copy it here for your reading pleasure, sorry if this is long:



A large part of the reason why Creationist arguments against evolution can sound so persuasive is because they don't address evolution, but rather argue against a set of misunderstandings that people are right to consider ludicrous. The Creationists wrongly believe that their understanding of evolution is what the theory of evolution really says, and declare evolution banished. In fact, they haven't even addressed the topic of evolution. (The situation isn't helped by poor science education generally. Even most beginning college biology students don't understand the theory of evolution.)

The five propositions below seem to be the most common misconceptions based on a Creationist straw-man version of evolution. If you hear anyone making any of them, chances are excellent that they don't know enough about the real theory of evolution to make informed opinions about it.

1. Evolution has never been observed.
2. Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
3. There are no transitional fossils.
4. The theory of evolution says that life originated, and evolution proceeds, by random chance.
5. Evolution is only a theory; it hasn't been proved.

Explanations of why these statements are wrong are given below. They are brief and therefore somewhat simplified; consult the references at the end for more thorough explanations.


"Evolution has never been observed."

Biologists define evolution as a change in the gene pool of a population over time. One example is insects developing a resistance to pesticides over the period of a few years. Even most Creationists recognize that evolution at this level is a fact. What they don't appreciate is that this rate of evolution is all that is required to produce the diversity of all living things from a common ancestor.

The origin of new species by evolution has also been observed, both in the laboratory and in the wild. See, for example, (Weinberg, J.R., V.R. Starczak, and D. Jorg, 1992, "Evidence for rapid speciation following a founder event in the laboratory." Evolution 46: 1214-1220). The "Observed Instances of Speciation" FAQ in the talk.origins archives gives several additional examples.

Even without these direct observations, it would be wrong to say that evolution hasn't been observed. Evidence isn't limited to seeing something happen before your eyes. Evolution makes predictions about what we would expect to see in the fossil record, comparative anatomy, genetic sequences, geographical distribution of species, etc., and these predictions have been verified many times over. The number of observations supporting evolution is overwhelming.

What hasn't been observed is one animal abruptly changing into a radically different one, such as a frog changing into a cow. This is not a problem for evolution because evolution doesn't propose occurrences even remotely like that. In fact, if we ever observed a frog turn into a cow, it would be very strong evidence against evolution.



"Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics."

This shows more a misconception about thermodynamics than about evolution. The second law of thermodynamics says, "No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body." [Atkins, 1984, The Second Law, pg. 25] Now you may be scratching your head wondering what this has to do with evolution. The confusion arises when the 2nd law is phrased in another equivalent way, "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." Entropy is an indication of unusable energy and often (but not always!) corresponds to intuitive notions of disorder or randomness. Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.

However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can't have more usable energy still? Creationists sometimes try to get around this by claiming that the information carried by living things lets them create order. However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order from disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?

The thermodynamics argument against evolution displays a misconception about evolution as well as about thermodynamics, since a clear understanding of how evolution works should reveal major flaws in the argument. Evolution says that organisms reproduce with only small changes between generations (after their own kind, so to speak). For example, animals might have appendages which are longer or shorter, thicker or flatter, lighter or darker than their parents. Occasionally, a change might be on the order of having four or six fingers instead of five. Once the differences appear, the theory of evolution calls for differential reproductive success. For example, maybe the animals with longer appendages survive to have more offspring than short-appendaged ones. All of these processes can be observed today. They obviously don't violate any physical laws.


"There are no transitional fossils." (paragraph cut due to length restriction, see URL link instead)



"Evolution is only a theory; it hasn't been proved."

First, we should clarify what "evolution" means. Like so many other words, it has more than one meaning. Its strict biological definition is "a change in allele frequencies over time." By that definition, evolution is an indisputable fact. Most people seem to associate the word "evolution" mainly with common descent, the theory that all life arose from one common ancestor. Many people believe that there is enough evidence to call this a fact, too. However, common descent is still not the theory of evolution, but just a fraction of it (and a part of several quite different theories as well). The theory of evolution not only says that life evolved, it also includes mechanisms, like mutations, natural selection, and genetic drift, which go a long way towards explaining how life evolved.

Calling the theory of evolution "only a theory" is, strictly speaking, true, but the idea it tries to convey is completely wrong. The argument rests on a confusion between what "theory" means in informal usage and in a scientific context. A theory, in the scientific sense, is "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena" [Random House American College Dictionary]. The term does not imply tentativeness or lack of certainty. Generally speaking, scientific theories differ from scientific laws only in that laws can be expressed more tersely. Being a theory implies self-consistency, agreement with observations, and usefulness. (Creationism fails to be a theory mainly because of the last point; it makes few or no specific claims about what we would expect to find, so it can't be used for anything. When it does make falsifiable predictions, they prove to be false.)

Lack of proof isn't a weakness, either. On the contrary, claiming infallibility for one's conclusions is a sign of hubris. Nothing in the real world has ever been rigorously proved, or ever will be. Proof, in the mathematical sense, is possible only if you have the luxury of defining the universe you're operating in. In the real world, we must deal with levels of certainty based on observed evidence. The more and better evidence we have for something, the more certainty we assign to it; when there is enough evidence, we label the something a fact, even though it still isn't 100% certain.

What evolution has is what any good scientific claim has--evidence, and lots of it. Evolution is supported by a wide range of observations throughout the fields of genetics, anatomy, ecology, animal behavior, paleontology, and others. If you wish to challenge the theory of evolution, you must address that evidence. You must show that the evidence is either wrong or irrelevant or that it fits another theory better. Of course, to do this, you must know both the theory and the evidence.



Conclusion

These are not the only misconceptions about evolution by any means. Other common misunderstandings include how geological dating techniques work, implications to morality and religion, the meaning of "uniformitarianism," and many more. To address all these objections here would be impossible.

But consider: About a hundred years ago, scientists, who were then mostly creationists, looked at the world to figure out how God did things. These creationists came to the conclusions of an old earth and species originating by evolution. Since then, thousands of scientists have been studying evolution with increasingly more sophisticated tools. Many of these scientists have excellent understandings of the laws of thermodynamics, how fossil finds are interpreted, etc., and finding a better alternative to evolution would win them fame and fortune. Sometimes their work has changed our understanding of significant details of how evolution operates, but the theory of evolution still has essentially unanimous agreement from the people who work on it.

 

[Kevrumbo]

Excellent Summation! Thanks for the link AlexMDiver!

This thread was starting to degenerate (de-evolve?) into the usual esoteric dry lectures from the Evolutionary Biologist types; the Bible-Thumping Pronouncements of the Fundamentalists; the depressive Nihilism of the Atheists & Religion Nay-sayers; and the Pop-Culture Pollyanna’s such as myself.

Now let’s get on to more useful topics like why you’re gonna go to Scuba Hell if you don’t dive DIR. . .