A few years ago my parents church held a creationist Sunday school class for the youth (I was maybe in 9th grade at the time). It was utter crap, but our “textbook” was written by an Australian. I remember reading about other things written by or about the guy as well. Can’t comment on how big it is in Australia, but he must have gotten a following there before he went global.
The class and the book were really funny in its misreprentation of everything Scientific. When no logical argument could be made against a specific aspect of evolution, they had to rely on stupid cartoons with monkeys to mock scientists. I guess when you have no argument you have to rely on childish name calling and mockery if you want to win. The guy teaching the class had no uderstanding of science whatsoever and often would tell us things like man had one less rib then woman or that if the moon was billions of years olf Neil Armstrong would have fallen through hundreds of feet of dirt. I asked him if he had ever sunk to the bottom of a beach, but he didn’t seem to understand what I was trying to say. He also claimed dogmatically that Jesus died in AD 0, which was very funny concidering the man had a BA in Religious Studies and Masters in Divinity.
Dinosaurs were explained by the fact that before the flood everything lived a long time. Since lizards were so long lived, they would keep on growing, eventually becoming the size of dinosaurs. Now why don’t the bones of dinosaurs look like the bones of lizards, who knows. I have also heard the “god is testing us” theory as well. Nobody thought it was funny when I said this sounded like an argument out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
What was scarry was how everyone ate that crap up. This wasn’t a church in some rural town in the middle of nowhere. Most of the teenagers were the children of Doctors, Engineers, Geologists, and Business people. But nobody would challange anything. They would just get riled up about evolutionists and keep repeating the BS we were told. Everytime I would ask a question about how something that didn’t make sense, I was given a dirty look like I was some kind of devil worshipper. I could not beleive people could be so stupid. But thats groupthink for you I guess.
To this day (8 or so years later), if I would mention I beleived in evolution, my parents would probibly disown me. People are really strange. Thank god I don’t have to go to church anymore.
Um, yes. Exactly. If you recall your Bible, there were plenty of stories about how God tested the faith of one follower or another by asking them to do things that weren’t quite logical (sacrifice your son, wander in the desert, build an ark, etc.).
I’m pretty sure that this is the exact definition of “faith”.
How do you know “time is always in the Present for Him”? And how does that even remotely explain extinction? Are you implying that He doesn’t “know” it’s even happened, because it’s still “the Present”, so they’re all still alive or something?
Nor, apparently, do you care about how processes like taphonomy work, and why such a request is foolish. There are plenty of step-wise transitions in the fossil record. None of them will please folks like you because you want to see the “steps between the steps”. And then when shown them, you want to see the steps between the steps between the steps. And so on.
Most “creationists who know their science” only think they know about evolution. They especially have little concept of what micro-evolution or macro-evolution are really about. Such things, however, are for another thread (and there have been several which discuss both transitional fossils, as well as micro/macro-evolution, here).
It’s especially interesting to me, however, when folks come into these threads claiming this or that about evolution or creationism, and then back out with “it really doesn’t matter to me.” If it doesn’t matter, why get involved in the discussion?
It’s tough for us humans to make that determination. Everything we see and know about the processes around us looks natural to us because we’ve never seen anything else.
If some little green men arrived here from Omicron IV and saw apples growing on a tree for the first time, they might conclude that it was some kind of supernatural process causing food to spring forth from the branches of a plant.
Not for a God. The equivalent for us would be like waiting for a burrito to cook in a microwave. Besides, God could easily have control of time, like the FF button on a VCR.
Dunno. Perhaps it was trial and error. Or, perhaps like all artists, the fun is in creating the artwork and not in how fast you can do it.
While I remain skeptical about Creationism, I don’t worry much about it because it is not particularly inconsistant with Evolution–as long as those Biblical ideas are modified slightly to account for the obvious world that we see around us.
Universe in 6 days? Not literally, of course. But the Bible did correctly order the things that were created; Heaven, earth, plants, animal, and then man.
Flood? Probably. But not the whole world, just the region where Noah lived. And he only took two of each important farm animal.
Loaves and Fishes? Not exactly. I thought it was the custom back in those days to always be carrying your lunch or dinner with you. If that were the case, and people shared their lunches in the spirit of comradary after the sermon, a basket of bread and fish could probably be spread pretty thin without anyone starving.
And so on. Almost every amazing story in the Bible can make perfect sense if one or two things are tweeked just a little.
This process has been humorously named “Gish’s Law” after Duane Gish of the Institute For Creation Research, an assiduous gap finder.
Gish’s Law states that as the fossil record becomes more complete the number of gaps increases without limit.
For example, given the fossils A and B there is one gap. If intermediate fossil A’ is found there are now two gaps. If another, say B[sup]-[/sup]’ is found there are now three gaps. And so on, and so on.
It really doesn’t matter what science comes up with on evolution. Proving a process has no bearing on how the process really got started. When you believe in God, you do it knowing you’re not going to have all the answers. There’s definitely some human arrogance involved in believing that if evolution took so long, God had to somehow wait for the finished product. One, that assumes we believe we are the finished product, which I’m not that sure of and two, also assumes that we are God’s only interest or reason for being. As to why get involved in the discussion, there are probably several reasons. It’s interesting. We want to know all the answers we can, just like you do. We want to know if other people think like we do. We are always looking for new answers that validate what we “theorize”. And there’s some of us that although our belief is strong, still have that rational little voice that say’s, what if we’re wrong? Not big enough to be doubt, but still there. So we’re always looking for better answers to keep the voice quiet. Of course, the last answer is just my assumption that other people hear that “rational little voice” too. If not, forget I said that.
A response such as “I don’t care”, or “It doesn’t matter” doesn’t sound like a search for knowledge. More like, “I don’t know, and I don’t care what you have to say about it. It’s a stupid subject anyway. Grump grump grump.” See, I do care what the answers are, even if I may never make practical use of them. I don’t care about politics, so I don’t get involved in those discussions. That’s what I am curious about: if one is truly apathetic about such things as evolution, or where the dinosaurs went, or how God may have created all of…creation, why pop into a thread such as this, voice an opinion, then say, “It doesn’t matter, anyway”?
If one means, “it doesn’t matter whether evolution or creation is true, I still love God”, then I can see your point.
That was my point. And it’s easier for me to believe that God created evolution. God “pulling a rabbit, right out of his hat”, I now have a tough time with. I care about what all the true answers are, whether they compliment or destroy some of my beliefs. The “grump attitude” comes from years of defending a position that is honestly indefensible. It’s not apathy, it’s “self-defense.”
“I don’t care” means that it has no palpable effect on my daily life. I DO care as a matter of scientific debate but it has no effect if it goes either way. It is not indefensible unless your opponent debates past you.
I made my position on Creation clear (God created everyting) and evolution (there has been evolution, but the mechanism we can discuss), I’m no YEC guy, at most I’m OEC.
Darwin’s Finch
you’re right that the transitional forms are for another thread. Thanks for insulting my knowledge. i thought 5 years of college-level biology helped, but I guess you know better. The thing about transitional forms is that they have to be really smooth with almost no difference between the P generation and F1, so that only by F50 you’d notice something. (you DO know what P and F means, don’t you)
You DO know that finches are MICROevolution, that they are still finches and that their adaptations are as different as different breedS of dogs.
I KNOW all time is present to Him because that’s the definition of God. It means that all action past, present and future are “now” to him. That’s part of being Christian.
Vanilla if it is not in your Bible it means you aren’t Catholic or Orthodox. Protestants call it “Apocrypha” we Catholics and orthodox call them “deuterocanonical”
If we creationists are SOOOOOO stupid, why to evolutionist leave their brides at the altar to discuss it? I never discuss people who think the blacks of jews are not people.
There comes a point where discussing with fools only makes a bigger fool of you.
Who holds the viewpoint that blacks or jews are not people?
Specifically, is there anyone whose views necessarily imply the non-human-ness of blacks or jews, and whose views which make that implication are held by evolutionists generally?
A) Yes, I do know what what P (parental) and F (filial) mean. B) Based on your current arguments, I’d have to say that you might need a few more years of college biology. Sorry. Some geology might help, too. C) I can play the “5 years of college-level biology” game, too, with those years having been spent specifically in evolutionary biology and paleontology. That, however, does not make me right and you wrong, or vice versa. Appeal to authority gets us nowhere. D) Your “smooth transitional forms” comment is irrelevant when it comes to fossils. And, it would seem, you have shown me to be correct in my assessment, as you apparently do require steps between steps between steps in order to be satisfied. As you surely realize, fossilization doesn’t operate with the fine precision that you demand. What we see are snapshots in geological time; yet even then, those snapshots can provide a clear picture of transforming lineages. Filling in the gaps can provide clearer resolution – which is certainly helpful in sorting out systematic relationships – but fossils such as Dromaeosaurus, Archaeopteryx, Confuciusornis, Icthyornis, and several others, still give us a pretty clear picture of the transition of birds from dinosaurs, just as one example. Those transitional fossils allow us to see Darwin’s “descent with modification” at work (so to speak).
And…? You are aware that microevolution includes all changes up to, and including, speciation, right? Speciation is the expected result of the aforementioned “descent with modification”. And we see that, despite the Galapagos finches still being “only” finches, they are 13 different species of finch, descended from a single species from the South American mainland, with several of those species still close to the branching point.
And you are also aware that different breeds of dogs aren’t “adapted”, right? And that adaptation is dependent on natural, not artificial, selection?
Based on my layman’s reading, “finches” isn’t a really scientific way to classify birds.
According to what I read finches are “any of numerous songbirds (esp. families Fringillidae, Estrildidae, and Emberizidae) having a short stout usu. conical bill adapted for crushing seeds.” (Merriam-Webster Collegiate) The same source puts the birds bunting, crossbill, goldfinch, grosbeak, linnet and sparrow, in the category of “finches” even though they are in different taxonomic families, genera and species.
So to say that “they are still finches” as Rodrigo did doesn’t make any scientific sense at all that I can see.
And I didn’t take 5 years of biology to learn this. Only a few minutes with a dictionary.
Eve broke the law, I wouldn’t care if IWLN would have been(?) punished for vivisecting his classmates.
I’m on a similar opinion (I don’t believe, I know He doesn’t exist), but I’m here to find out other opinions and this place is great for that. BTW, I searched, but wasn’t convinced.
Ah, so your switching to another God? (I mean other than the christian one) Which?
