Evolution and creationism

Great Debates
61

What would it mean to you to personally verify something? With our minds already being very vulnurable to being confounded, sometimes logic is going to have to take precedence over personal experience.

So we can never absolutely prove that God didn’t create everything exactly how it is, but if we can see logical processes that explain it, then invoking God isn’t necessary. I find that the explanation of organisms evolving over time makes more sense than some thing called God (which they can never agree on what exactly this “God” thing is) magically controlling everything. Evolution is just a more satisfying explanation.

Is it faith? Only in the same way that you have faith that all textbooks are correct in saying that Bismark is the capital of North Dakota, or that North Dakota even exists. How about your great great grandparents? I doubt you ever met them. All those old photographs? The family tree? Stories from your grandparents? What if they’re all lies? What if your great great grandparents never existed? Well wait a minute, they must have existed to begat your great grandparents, who begat your grandparents, who begat your parents, who begat you. Well that sinks it doesn’t it. But wait, what if none of that happened, but instead you were just created by God? You never met your great great grandparents, therefore to say they existed is just as silly as saying a giant purple unicorn lives at the center of the Earth and controls all the world’s politicians. Even if you went back in time and met them, suppose it was all just an illusion, or a false memory. People can never remember things exactly, and it’s very easy to invent false memories. In fact, our memories are hardly reliable at all. How do you know you had a childhood? The fact that everyone else you know had a childhood doesn’t prove anything. Maybe you were created out of nothing last Tuesday with all these false memories. With the unreliablility of our mind, it seems that believing in anything at all, even if it’s right in front of us, is just delusional fantasy.

That’s of course ridiculous. Biologically, we know that all people come from other people (specifically female people). Even if you don’t know the first thing about biology, we know this because we have seen it happen before. Therefore, you must have had some sort of great great grandparents. Just generalize that to all species, and you pretty much have evolution right there.

I guess what you’re really looking for is, why believe the scientists over the creationists? Well, the scientists have given us television and vaccines and the internet. What have creationists given us? I think I’m going to trust the scientists on this one.

62

OK, I’ll accept that this was a mistake on my part and I offer you my humble apology.
By way of explanation, I frequent a number of boards where evolution and creationism are debated - what I’ve seen in the past is creationists purporting to be worried, doubtful scientists, presumably in the hope that this will weaken the case for evolution. The style and content of your posts looked a bit like that, but I can understand how insulting this will be when it turns out not to be the case. I was out of line to have made such an accusation. I’m sorry.

63

Just for clarity, is there another of my posts that you perceive as a personal attack in this or another thread? - the statement above appears to imply it - is there something else for which I need to provide an apology?

64

I kind of see your point, I think, although I don’t agree with you.

I trust the sources which tell me that the Earth is round. I trust the sources that tell me that evolution happens. I trust the sources that tell me that Portugal, polar bears, and photons, exist. I’ve not verified any of these claims myself, but I’ve read enough to understand the evidence, at least in part. I trust that, given enough time, money and effort, I could verify those claims personally.

Now, I’ve also seen sources which tell me that the first man and woman were created from driftwood by the aesir Odin, Vilje and Ve. If that made sense to me and I begun to trust those sources, my trust wouldn’t, from my point of view, feel any different than my trust in the existence of Portugal. But for everybody else, my trust in old myths about the origin of human beings would seem radically different from my trust in all the atlases, news reports, and testimonies from people who’ve been in Portugal.

Your word “blind” in the quote above is a key word. My trust in evolution (and Portugal, and polar bears) isn’t blind, it’s based on a lot of evidence which make internal sense. In order to trust in the literal truth of the Norse creation myths (or any other creation myth I’ve come across), I’d have to close my eyes to a lot of evidence, and ignore those aspects of the myths which don’t make sense. That trust wouldn’t only be blind, it would have to be wilfully blind.

To take another example: Compare these two sentences:
I believe that if I turn around now, I will see a pink unicorn reading over my shoulder.
I believe that if I turn around now, I will not see a pink unicorn reading over my shoulder.
The word “believe” has the same meaning in those sentences. But do you agree that the kind of belief described is not the same?

65

Without any further research on my part, I know that many elements radioactively decay into other elements at a rate which allows us to gauge the age of the sample, following an exponential relation between the original and current amounts of parent isotope (standard physics question for 17 year-olds, that one). A useful example is Rubidium decaying to Strontium, with a half-life of many (60?) billions of years. I know that Strontium has two isotopes, only one of which is produced by Rubidium decay, which can become mixed and introduce larger error bars into the Least Mean Squares curve fitting. But all of this is easily refuted by the fact that these methods are not simply random: they all agree to a degree which random chance could simply never produce. I have seen many Creationist criticisms of various radioactive dating methods (not just isochron) and they all display a fundamental flaw in their understanding of statistics which in each case can be refuted by asking how the heck all such methods could agree to such an extent if they are anywhere near as “random” as creationists say they are.

Again, I put the question to you: Are you asking us to imagine a convincing creationist argument we haven’t heard yet, and suggesting that its hypothetical existence necessitates “faith” on our part?

I suggest that the word you are looking for is not “faith” but “working conclusion”. Every reasonable person educated in evolution and creationism is, after all the arguments and evidence they have heard to date, under the working conclusion that evolution is true and creationism is false. If every morning, we had to disregard all our education, reasoning and working conclusions to date and start again from scratch with an “open mind”, we simply could not function at all. That is not “faith” or “trust”. It is, perhaps, “belief” in the sense that it is a cognitive output (like “I believe it will rain later today”). But it is simply not like the “faith” of creationists, which require one to deny plain facts and deliberately misrepresent basic geology and physics.

Unless you are saying that everything involves “blind trust”, even the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, then your comparison is irretrievably flawed. That is all I am saying.

66

Well Tom, my God doesn’t condemn or punish His children. He just holds them safe and lets them make whatever mistakes they need to make to grow spiritually closer to His consciousness. Some take a while and make a lot of mistakes, others find the shorter distance. I have made a lot of mistakes. I was fifty-years-old before I really knew I was spiritual. But since then my progress has improved. On a scale of one to ten, I came into this world a three, I am now a seven. Still a ways to go yet, must be a ten to graduate from the wheel of physical life. Sometimes I do get off track arguing with the people on this board. I mistakenly think they can understand my position. I think the reason I have so much trouble communicating here is the way I think of words. I see them only as symbols of concepts, thoughts, or things. I type a small amount of words that to me say a great deal. But to the other posters the words are more literal, each meaning only a fraction of what I intended. I don’t have this problem when communicating with other spiritual people. I think this post will probably give the board another good laugh.

The only goal is unconditional love, how you get there is up to you. God is unconditional love.

67

If you think that the words “nobody has observed one animal changing into another” are true when you have categorically been shown that speciation has been observed, the trouble with your communication would stem from the fact that you keep telling lies. (The word “lies” just occured to me as a symbolic concept, you understand.)

68

Please tell me about the animals you have observed, one changing into another.

69

Your entire argument rests on the premise that your own personal ability to refute a specific creationist argument has led you to believe that evolution must be taken on faith. The point is that just because you can’t refute something doesn’t mean that other people take it on faith.

The main point that you don’t seem to be getting is that, unlike creationism, everything in evolutionary theory is verifiable. The EVIDENCE is available to you, not just the word of scientists, but the actual physical evidence, the journals, the research, etc. It’s all right there for you to check any time you want.

You can put me down as someone else who is not entirely convinced you’re not a covert creationist. This is a tactic I’ve seen before.

70

I think you’ve got one too many negatives in your first sentence there… But, I think that creationists can come up with all sorts of craziness, some of which simply cannot be refuted using the scientific method. The current formulation of so-called “intelligent design” is one. Because it relies on the existence - and intervention - of some undefined “intelligence” (although, the reality is that the ID movement equates that intelligence with the Judeo-Christian God), it cannot really be falsified. So, no, it cannot be easily refuted. What can be refuted are claims that any supposed “problem” within evolutionary biology translates to evidence of that intelligent designer.

My point is that it does not take faith to be able to say that whatever anti-evolution screed is coming from a creationist’s mouth or pen is crap. Whether they pose a valid problem with the theories of evolutionary biology or not, at the end of the day, any such problems do not validate creationism (in whatever guise). Creationists simply do not make valid pro-creation arguments; they only make (typically, invalid) anti-evolution arguments.

As a student of evolutionary biology, I do have a certain degree of trust that there is not some grand conspiracy afoot and that any supposed research done has, in fact, been done, and the consequences of that research have been, or are being, hammered out in the technical literature. That, however, does not, to me, equate to faith, in the same sense as what creationists have in their arguments. Granted, many creationists may have the same sort of trust in their “leaders” - that whatever they come up with is “true” - but they also have a very real component of faith, in that they believe that God exists and created life as we know it. And it is that faith that often results in blind trust, whereas my trust in the likes of Darwin, Gould, Mayr, Dobzhansky, Dawkins, etc. is not blind. The logic of their arguments follows, whereas the logic of pro-creation arguments all-too-often does not.

71

And hence is illustrated the prime method of Creationists in setting up a strawman and burning it down. :rolleyes:

Creatures don’t “[change] into another” like a dog siring a cat, or an iguana sprouting feathers and learning to fly; they evolve and eventually speciate. Species, as defined by taxonomists, aren’t absolutely rigorous divisions between classifications–there’s no single genetic switch one flips to go from a fruit fly to a mesquito–but are established by sufficient differentiation between groups which have diverged from a common origin that they are no longer able (whether gentically or behaviorially) to interbreed or (in the case of asexual or parthenogenetic animals) have acquired enough mutations to be cladistically or genetically distinct.

It would be theoretically possible (though extremely tedious) to take a dog genome and manually convert it to one identical to that of a cat; in nature this doesn’t occur (species changing into another existing species) because evolution isn’t guided by any kind of plan, goal, or conscious purpose; only by the selective pressures to best utilize the surrounding environment in order to successfully reproduce. Indeed, if this did occur, we’d be highly suspicious given the infinitesmal likelyhood of a complex genome just happening to roll out the same as a previously existant one.

It’s true we can’t observe speciation of complex animals in real time, owing to the long generational cycles and the (typically slow) rate change that results in a definable speciation; we can, however, observe populations which have recently and dramatically undergone speciation, especially in habitats in which selective pressures are extreme. If Darwin’s Finch will permit me to borrow his moniker for a second, I’ll point out that the various species of finches on the Galapagos islands, which are genetically related by a common ancestor and are extremely similar, save for feeding methods and beak shapes, represent a prime example of recent speciation. Although we weren’t on site to watch them evolve, we can track the changes through cladistic assessment, genetic analysis, and fossil evidence, each filling in and reinforcing the others to give us a comprehensive record of their evolutionary paths.

We can observe speciation directly in simple organisms; a classical experiment is exerting selective pressure on blue-green alge by controlling the wavelengths of light it receives so that it shifts its absorption spectrum. Observing this takes only weeks rather than the millenia required for observing speciation in more complex animals.

The fossil record, while necessarialy not an exhaustive record of all “transitional forms” (and all species, even currently identified ones, are “transitional forms”) give more than sufficient detail to identify the evolutionary paths of many animal lineages. Unless you are prepared to somehow factually undermine the entire field of paleontology in one fell blow, the evolution of life from common roots to divergence species is an irrefutable fact.

You might as well be arguing that World War II didn’t occur because you weren’t around to see it.

Stranger

72

But I was around to see World War II, I was very young, yet I helped by gathering papers, metal, aluminum foil, and collecting money for flowers when the telegrams “killed in action” came to the neighborhood. Youngsters grew up fast in those days.

You can talk about something all you want, but if you haven’t experienced it, you don’t know. No one experienced the evolution, it is a theory.

73

Obviously, in lekatt’s world, it was World War I that never happened.

74

If you wish to take the extreme skeptical position, you should accept that your memories might be false or mistaken as well.

75

lekatt: You can talk about something all you want, but if you haven’t experienced it, you don’t know. No one experienced the evolution, it is a theory.

By that reasoning, it is just a “theory” that the Civil War happened, because there’s nobody around any more who experienced it. Similarly, in another fifty years when you and all the other people who personally experienced World War II are dead, it will be just a “theory” too.

This is as dumb as people claiming you don’t know that Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota unless you’ve physically been there. The distinction between “fact” and “non-fact” is not determined solely by personal experience.

76

Even according to your absurd criterion of requiring personal experience to accept something as fact, this is false. Scientists have seen one species of animal turning into two different species which were no longer able to breed with each other.

For example, consider the example from one of the speciation links above that discusses a decades-long experiment on populations of the polychaete worm. Scientists in California took some wild specimens whose descendants were bred in a laboratory on the East Coast for decades. Nearly 30 years after the test population was originally isolated, scientists tried to breed them with descendants of the original California population. The two populations could no longer breed with one another. They had become separate species.

Due to separate evolution in isolated environments, one species of worm had turned into two different species of worm, and scientists saw it happen. There you go.

77

Actually, by your own admission, you didn’t experience World War II; your entire knowledge of it is hearsay. For all you know, the recyling programs and money collections were just an enormous sham to present the image of a war, but in Wag The Dog-like fashion no actual fighting need ever have taken place.

Again, are you prepared to factually disprove the entire body of evidence that makes up the field of paleontology, or are you just going to sit around and make absurd solipsitic claims that anything not verified firsthand is automatically untrue?

Stranger

78

For what it’s worth…

g_under_p has made a point that is true, i.e. a measure of faith is necessary for proponents of evolution and creation alike - in that at some point conclusions will be based on observations/studies of someone other than ones own.

I concur with others who have said evolution is a fact, and I do this on the “faith” that the things I’ve read were not deceitful, were accurately reported, etc. Never have I launched an empirical study of my own. Unless there’s some grand conspiracy cooking up all this evidence, I’m secure in my faith.

It appears, though, a further point you’re trying to make is: Having reached their respective conclusions each are predisposed against the arguments of the other side, i.e. an evolutionist, convinced he’s right, will presume a creationist’s argument is false and refutable. You call this predisposition “faith” when it’s perhaps better labelled “skepticism” (or, too often, just being tired of some of the kookiness).

I think I can see why g_under_p got upset (although not to the degree displayed) after trying to argue this one thing and perceiving a hijack.

If I may be so bold g_under_p, you shot yourself in the foot twice. Once was with the title “Evolution and creationism” (unless the mod renamed it for you) and twice was using the word “faith” Loaded words all, and an invitation to the debate you didn’t want, as well as the framework for that debate.

Further, if I’ve correctly identified your point(s), they’re not very debateable (I know you didn’t post to GD, but here we are). Do evolutionists have “faith”? Yes (see tomndebb’s excellent “levels of faith/trust” post). Do they “believe” all creationist arguments are refutable? Yes. If new verifiable evidence appeared that contradicted evolution would an evolutionist recant? Yes, after some initial resistence though (well-placed skepticism and plain ol’ human nature).
where I use “evolutionist” I mean “proponent of evolution”, not evolutionary scientist working in the field)

79

Simply put, once you claim there are irrefutable arguments for creation and against evolution, you have very much opened the door to an evolution-creation debate. Like others here, I’m suspicious of the intentions of the thread, if g_under_p wasn’t hoping for evolutionists to agree that they were stumped by creationist dogma and then do a gotcha.

80

Very funny, as usual the point is missed. In all the examples you give, someone did experience the example, while in evolution no one experienced it. Nor could have experienced it. Science is full of contradictions. On one hand they don’t except personal experience, on another they do. Come to understand it matters whether they want to believe it or not. It is fine to talk about what happened millions of years ago and speculate. The same things may or may not be happening today. There is no way we can know for sure. Therefor evolution is a theory, to call it fact is dishonest.

When I read the Bible clear through for the first time, I became angry because many of the things I was taught in Church were not there. But as I grew older I understood those people were not lying to me. They were only passing on what they were taught. They didn’t know any better.

The same with science, when people try to tell me they know the unknowable, I understand where they are coming from. They have been taught to say that, and have yet to study it in its widest form.

Try to break away from the formulas, methods, and doctrine. Study your subject from every angle possible. Read the con and dilligently as the pro, if you would be knowledgeable and wise,