I have been talking to a lot of people lately who take an ‘agnostic’ view of the debate, ie they take stock in neither creationism nor evolution. So I was wondering, if you don’t favor one over the other, what choice is there? (besides suspension of judegment)
Im not interested in a debate, I was wondering if there was a “third way”. Guess i should have posted in General.
Tom weller, in his book Science Made Stupid, proposes a third way – God creates Adam and Eve, but who knows where Cain and Abel got their wives? Evolution suggests a way for humans to develop without direct Divine Creation.
So, just combine the two – God creates Adam and Eve, and Evolution creates their wives, and we are the descendants of this double-barreled family tree.
It’s theory designed to piss everyone off equally, which is MY definition of a compromise*.
Note the title of the book.
*I call it the Schadenfreude Theory of Compromise – the best and most stable compromoise isn’t one where everyone’s equally satisfied, but one where everyone’s equally miserable. People want to maximize their own happiness, but don’t really care so much about the happiness of others – especially their enemies. But everyone wants to be sure that their enemies are suffering at least as much as they are.
There really isn’t a debate. All the evidence ever collected by man supports evolution and the book written by the guys who didn’t know to wash their hands after they shit supports creationism.
But you didn’t want a debate, right? :smack:
I dunno, third option, “The Matrix”. We’re in a big simulation and plants and animals just got booted up with the rest of us.
The third option is “creationism, plus handwaving”, as demonstrated by the people who claim that microevolution exists but not macroevolution.
Several people have already said this and at least 20 more will post it after I do, but there really isn’t a third option. Evolution is a theory supported by science and ID-style creationism isn’t, so whenever you mix evolution and creationism, you get creationism. Maybe if you define creationism as only the hardcore Christian view, other creation notions (we were made by aliens) would count as third theories. But I think that’s a stretch.
When I say ID-style creationism, by the way, I mean the hardcore fundamentalist variety that has been marketed as under the ID name. The oldfashioned, borderline-Deist view of ‘God made everything and then everything followed natural laws’ doesn’t necessarily conflict with evolution, but that’s not really the topic.
Pause here also to note that creationism is largely about the origin of the universe and evolution isn’t, at all.
This would’ve been moved to GD anyway.
Not that I believe it, but there is always the “Alien seeding” option, although that could be
seen as a variant on creationism. Replace god with alien.
Or a variant on evolution, as presumably the aliens would have had to evolve on their own planets before coming here to kickstart evolution on ours.
You’re clever, but it’s aliens all the way down!
In a sense there are a lot more than two options. There is evolution, backed by evidence, and every creation myth backed by any religion at any time in history. None of these are backed by any evidence, and all are equally (in)valid.
If the evidence pointed to something besides evolution, there would be only one valid option still - that which the evidence points to.
It is nonsensical to take an “agnostic” view of this debate. You might do that with God, because of lack of evidence and the inability to prove that no god exists, but evolution is extremely falsifiable, and as everyone has said, there are libraries and museum-fuls of evidence.
Are your friends agnostic because they haven’t read about evolution?
This characterization shows your general ignorance of Southeast Asian religion, which is very big on washing in general.
:Ahem:
I think there are multiple alternatives; at least in that there are still some different possible timelines & certainly different conceivable mechanics for evolution over Deep Time, & then different creation stories & mythic traditions to consider on the theistic side. It shouldn’t be as simple as Darwin versus Genesis 1.
One of them is a Harvard Law School grad. None of the others is stupid or religious.
Or is the “theistic evolution” paradigm what you’re wondering about?
OK, put it this way. Young Earth Creationism isn’t well supported geologically, but that doesn’t mean that creative gods don’t exist. Maybe creation has taken place over Deep Time instead of all in a shot. Maybe the evolution of genera is more an evolution in design, like the evolution of automobile design. Hence, both divine creation (but not six-day, all-at-once creation) & evolution (but not godless evolution) could be real.
And while many people deplore for this paradigm for being a “compromise” & therefore hateful, or because it “needlessly multiplies entities”, it’s not really discounted by the fossil record.
I’d suppose evolution and creationism are at both end of the spectrum but there are probably options in between that some people go with.
Like God created life in it’s most basic form and from that man evolved from it over millions of years.
Or that life evolved on it’s own and at some point God took a neadrathal like animal, gave him the human “spark” or soul if you will and that was him creating man.
Lots of options inbetween.
How could it be?
One of the most important intellectual objections to ID theory is that – just like the Omphalos Hypothesis – it is nonfalsifiable, therefore unscientific. See this thread.
Taking theistic evolution to new levels of crackpottery, I’ve even postulated that there could be multiple intelligent designers in competition with each other. So for example, while one god is making the species he’s working on more venomous, another is making the critters they prey upon more immune to venom, as well as programming their instinct software to better recognize the threat, etc.
Squeaky Wheels on CREATION
I didn’t realize biology was on the Harvard Law school curriculum. Or on a pre-law or political science curriculum either. Lack of information says nothing about intelligence.
What people might pick up randomly in the culture or in many newspapers about evolution is woefully inaccurate. If that is all the information he has, I can understand why he’s confused.
(My new son-in-law just entered law school, so I’m holding back the lawyer jokes. But it’s hard. 
)
Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes): A good compromise leaves everybody mad.
I’m solid on Evolution as How We Got Where We Are Today. I am, however, a bit more agnostic on the idea of Abiogenesis. Not that I think ID-style Creationism is the answer there, either.
You could also suppose that everything has always been the way it is now. That doesn’t require a creator or evolution.
If “creationism” is considered equivalent to “intelligent design,” then I believe there are a number of alternative possibilities.
The Cosmic Egg. All life on Earth is akin to an egg, and the Creator is the cosmic chicken. Just as an egg starts out simply and develops according to a set plan, so too does life itself pass through predetermined stages. However, the chicken’s intelligence does not contribute to the formation of the egg in any way! Similarly, it is not necessary to invoke intelligent design to explain the product of the Cosmic Chicken.
The Beehive. This idea proposes that life was shaped by a mental process; however, that process is not intelligence, but rather instinct. In a beehive, spiderweb or ant colony, the intelligence of the individual organism is negligible, yet highly organized structures are nevertheless reliably produced by instinct. In general, complex instinctive behavior is more common in nature than complex intelligent behavior; therefore, it is far more likely that the Creator is also driven by instinct, like a bug or swarm of bugs.
Absolute Determinism. This is the only possible world. There is no element of chance. Everything is inevitable; choice is an illusion. It is senseless to speak of random mutation or natural selection, since all creatures that survive to reproduce were fated to from the beginning. It is likewise senseless to hypothesize a Creator, since this implies that our existence requires further explanation. Life exists because it was inevitable. The preconditions necessary for life were also inevitable. The universe was inevitable. It exists because nothing else could have.
You could take the position that species are immutable and don’t change at all over time.
Sure, that’s at odds with the physical evidence. But creationism is at odds with the physical evidence as well. Once you decide your theory doesn’t have to sync up with the real world you can believe virtually anything about anything!