Nolies, I’m afraid your reply made no sense to me whatsoever. The evidence supporting evolution is not supported by radiocarbon dating alone; indeed, there’s a great deal of evidence supporting it, including the pepper moths which were referred to earlier. Look at dogs, alone, which have been deliberately bred by man choosing which traits should be continued to have them suit various purposes. Look at the gene which causes sickle-cell anemia, a negative consequence, but which provides greater protection against malaria, a positive consequence and one which was far more necessary for the survival of mankind.
Also, please separate evolution from the age of the earth and the big bang. Those involve three seperate disciplines, biology, geology, and cosmology. The evolution of mankind has nothing to do with the formation of the Grand Canyon, and the formation of the Grand Canyon has nothing to do with the Big Bang, although I would say the same Deity set the forces in motion which led to all three.
I mentioned evolution is a topic which gets brought up here fairly regularly. Here are some threads we’ve had on the subject recently: [ul][li]Does Anyone Believe in Evolution? [/li][li]The earth is old man, old [/li][li]Meanwhile in Kansas. . .Return of the Scopes Monkey Trial [/ul][/li]I suggest you read through these, and think about what’s in them. We have people around here who are far more knowledgeable about the subject than I will ever be. I’ve learned a great deal from them, and I can assure you, it has not made me any less of a believer.
Please, speaking as a devout Christian who’s spent far too much time hanging around here over the past several years, reconsider what you’ve posted here and elsewhere. Right now, not only are you not gaining any converts to Christianity, by willfully espousing ignorance and poor data, you’re likely to worsen people’s opinion of it. If that’s what you have in mind, if you really want to turn people against Christ, go right ahead and continue what you’re doing. It’s nice to know who the opposition is.
I have a fundamental problem with this stance, and I think it’s at the crux of the evolution/creation debate. There is a level of this debate where it is one belief system vs another, and both are trying to invalidate the other, when they really are not incompatible.
We believe in science based upon faith. We have faith that the basic principles of science are in fact correct, that 1+1 = 2. 1+1 = 2 because it is defined as such, and we take this to be a fundamental principle that we build upon to figure out the world around us. However, there are gaps in our knowledge where we must take a leap of faith and just accept things for what they are. However, if we do not know the truth of the whole, then we must accept that many of the things we believe to be true require a certain bit of assumption, simply because we cannot go through the day knowing the answers to every question. We have to move forward given partial information, and this requires faith.
Science essentially asks “How?” and Religion essentially asks “Why?”. They have no need to diminish the importance of one another to validate the existence of each. Both How and Why are important questions to ask oneself. Not too many people dispute that we were in fact created. Whether you believe in Adam and Eve or the Big Bang, something created the universe in which we live. I personally lean toward the idea that it is eternal, and the moment of creation is eternal, that there is no real past creation point, you can go infinitely backward and infinitely forward in time. However, to do this requires evolution. Beings must adapt to their surroundings, and this debate is rather silly because evolution is obvious. It doesn’t require a dramatic instantaneous mutation. When two people breed their genetic code intermingles and a new type of creature is born. That is why we are all unique. That is evolution.
This debate is really a lot simpler than both sides make it, and both sides are pretty disingenuous about the way they approach it. Evolution is a combination of learning and growing. Everything in the universe adapts to it’s environment, it’s part of entropy, and as such the change to adapt, changes the environment, so it requires constant adaptation.
However, it is true, Creationists do not evolve, so it’s understandable why they would think evolution is false. They are incapable of assimilating new data that conflicts with the faery tales they were told as children. The truth is, the past is unknowable, we can put a flourish on the retelling, and hope to capture it’s essence, but we cannot truly know it in any real meaningful way, for we did not experience it directly. So any story about the past must be taken as allegory. If you cannot think of the ark story in the abstract, you’re going to lose so many levels of nuance. Bible stories, like any other fable have morals to them. It’s the moral that’s important, not the actual details of the event.
Many people who claim to purport science make the mistake of stating negatives when a positive cannot be proven. Like stating that Bigfoot does not exist, because it cannot be proven that Bigfoot exists. That is an unscientific stance.
There’s a lack of scientific method going all around here. Like the “Evolution is a theory not a fact” stickers. If the printer of those stickers understood science at all, they would not need to state that it is a theory, because that would be self-evident.
I’ve always found the creation vs evolution debate to be pretty stupid, because it’s like arguing which is true 1 or 0 when they are both needed for binary to make any sense at all.
What I’d like to see from both sides:
Creationists: take the bible with a grain of salt, the old testament is Judaic propaganda designed to ensure that the Jews wouldn’t lose their identity during the babylonian captivity, and the new testament is largely roman propaganda used to assimilate a proletarian movement into the system. You have to remember that it’s been translated, and transposed hundreds or thousands of times before your copy reaches you. So it’s authority as being the actual history is tenuous at best, and even if it is true, three paragraphs written about a person’s life doesn’t tell us anything about them. For instance, what color was Noah’s hair? Did Noah get along with his neighbors or did he avoid them becuase they were all villains destined to be killed in the flood?
Evolutionists: accept that faith plays a large part in your life. Acknowledge that you make decisions based upon partial information all the time, and to do so requires faith.
Faith without science begets a broad intuitive ignorance.
Science without faith begets a narrow intellectual ignorance.
To be this suggests that a person is confident in everything the scientists say. I am not. Scientists are humans and make mistakes. Science as a whole is better at describing the universe and how things work than any other method, but it has been proven wrong before and will be proven wrong again.
I trust science because it is logical and has provided plenty of material evidence for me to check on what they say.
I don’t believe in evolution because it is what the scientists say but because I can see the evidence for myself. I can take the fruit flies and do the experiments myself, I can go on archeological digs and look at the fossils first hand, etc.
I don’t need religion to answer the ‘Whys’ either. Why is there human life on earth and not on any other planet in our solar system? Why are humans so much more intelligent than any other species on earth? Why is the sky blue?
Science has been able to answer my “Whys” far better than religion ever did.
Incorrect. We make assumptions on which to base a hypothesis, and we define terms rigorously in order to clearly understand and explain the theories, but we don’t accept anything “on faith” in the manner that religions do. Just because Newton says that gravity is the attraction of two objects to each other in proportion to their masses and in inverse proportion to the square of the distance doesn’t make it so…it has to be demonstrated, validated (by repeat experiment), and a theory needs to be put forth for why that happens. Science says that there are not “gaps in our knowledge where we must take a leap of faith”; it says there are things we do not yet know which we must further strive to understand. Knowledge is infinite and ultimately incomplete (according to Gödel) but it doesn’t mean that any particular behavior is unknowable or must be taken “on faith”.
The “1+1=2” example you provide is disingenous as well. Mathematics is a construct of human creation that models the natural world but is not a result of it. 1+1 really does equal 2, because it is an underlying axiom of mathematics. In the real world, things like “1” and “0” are pretty nebulous. Even on the quantum level, where fundamental particles are nominally, well, quantized, objects actually exist as a probability function, not a discrete entity to be counted and measured.
Er, no. Science frequently asks the question, “Why?” It just doesn’t expect that the answer is going to be in the form of some supernatural cognition, but rather a result of unthinking physical rules.
Note that scientists do not refer to themselves as “evolutionists”. That aside, no, faith does not “play a large part” in my life. I make a lot of assumptions and base nearly every decision on incomplete information, and I accept that there are a vast number of things I do not and will not ever know, but that is not the same thing as what religious people regard as “faith”. I don’t expect anyone to accept any premise or argument I put forward strictly on the basis that someone else told me so or as some kind of personal, internal revelation, and I’m always willing to review my assumptions when presented with contrary evidence. But “the faithful” are just that, because they have accepted a dogma from which evidence should not sway them, be it the “false idols” of science or the competing dogma of another religion.
In short, I think you are conflating to semantically independent terms. Religious beliefs and scientific theories may not be directly in conflict with each other, particularly when the area in question is beyond our knowledge, but they aren’t genuinely comfortable together either, as we’ve seen often enough in history (Hello, Galelio!) Science and religion parted ways during Enlightenment specifically because of their competing approaches to the natural world, and attempts to reconcile them (a la Intelligent Design) are rife with compromises and misconstrual.
I must jump in and disagree. Science is a method through which we let observed facts drive us into inevitable conclusions. Scientists fight it tooth and nail, and grudgingly and temporarily accept conclusions that have survived this process. There are scientists who still spend their whole careers trying to disprove Einstein’s theories.
What’s an evolutionist anyway? I’m a scientist but I don’t have faith in evolution. I just accept some aspects of the evolution model as observed fact, and the rest as a theory that fits all observed facts.
Of course scientists make decisions based on partial information. But we don’t have faith in that decision; we always keep in mind that it is based on incomplete information, and subject to revision at any time. That’s the differene between religion and science.
I think the OP is the only one who has said this is so.
I refuse to accept that I’m an “evolutionist” in the first place. Your desire to make
this into an evenhanded thing is, I guess, admirable, but that just is not the case. I don’t think that faith as you define it is necessary for life either.
Twoflower was incorrect, in that radiocarbon dating is not useful for geologic time. However other forms of radioactive dating (which I assume he meant) are.
The above I don’t get at all. Perhaps the OP intended to write a response but was unable to for some reason?
Only the entire history of life. Again, how about a cite for your argument here?
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Y’know, you almost shattered my faith in Larry Gonick. Then I was able to find my copy of his book and discovered that pages 28 - 30 discuss the origins of the therapsids and he only mentions the later evolution of mammals in the last frame on the bottom of page 30.
David, you’re right that Nolies is not going to change his mind and it’s not worth getting worked up over. But in the name if fighting ignorance, I’m willing to invest a bit of effort in making sure he doesn’t mislead other more impressionable minds.
Nolies, your OP appears to claim that evolution is disproved by science. If you’re going to make such claim, you have to play by the rules of science. That means this is not just a Monty Python Argument Clinic. You made a whole lot of statments to the effect that “this it true” and “that’s a lie.” Not one of your statements is baked up by a single shred of evidence. Here in SDMB, such evidence is generally provide in controversial discussions by providing link to some sort of supporting documentation. Provide us with some cites and maybe there will be something to discuss. mswas, I have no problem with people choosing to believe in a creator. I don’t, personally, but that’s not the issue. But I have a big problem with people who claim that several centuries of accumlated knowledge is all a bunch of lies, just because it disagrees with their preferred theory of creation.
Science is not based on faith. It is based on evidence and logic. You are right that complete information is not always available. And this is what leads to a facet of science that creationists seem to have the hardest time understanding. You put together your best expanation for the existing evidence, then keep looking for new evidence. And if the new evidence does not match your theory, you change your theory to accomodate the new evidence.
Scientists are very good about distinguishing between those theories which are extremely well supported by evidence (such as evolution, the big bang, gravitation) and those which are still conjectural and in need of more evidence (such as string theory, or whether there ever was or might still be native martian bacteria). There’s no faith involved, just healthy scepticism.
There are many counterexamples to your claim. Newton’s Laws held equal status to the trinity as far as belief went - they had been tested and verified millions of times from 1687 until 1900. Yet when solid evidence arose that they were incomplete, they got dumped amazingly quickly. Consider how non-Euclidean geometry got used when it made sense. All science is provisional, and while we may not speak that way sometimes, but there is no faith involved.
Compare to this very thread, and the depressing poll numbers on how many Americans believe that god created man in his present form. Many of the religious (but not all, certainly) just can’t look facts in the face and change their faith accordingly.
Thanks, Voyager. I did indeed mean to refer to radioactive dating techiques in general, not any specific one. “Radiocarbon” is not the correct term here. :smack:
Science doesn’t answer “Why is the sky blue” it answers “How is the sky blue”. It tells you the mechanics that go into it, but doesn’t answer any of the questions about what blue is.
Humans AREN’T so much more intelligent than other species on Earth. That idea is predicated upon a notion of intelligence that uses humans as it’s bellwether and is not a logical conclusion.
We have yet to determine if there is life on other planets in the solar system or not.
You go through every day with faith. When you make plans to meet someone in a week, you do it with the faith that you are going to be able to complete your plans. Otherwise you wouldn’t even bother with the plans.
Conflating the meaning of faith based upon an emotional prejudice one has toward people that bandy the word faith about, is not scientific in any way.
The idea of “Supernatural” is rather silly. We go through our every day surrounded by what would have been supernatural to someone living 500 years ago. Supernatural is a word like “ultramodern” just because you add a prefix meaning “extra” to add emphasis it doesn’t really make it so.
Intuition has validity, and just because someone hasn’t tested something they have intuited, that doesn’t make it false. Something can be true without a person being able to relate all the data that they have, to make them believe it is true. Just because something HASN’T been tested doesn’t mean that it CANNOT be tested.
It’s not so much that science is a religion, but many people, and I think everyone that responded to me is included in this, treats it as one. To say you’re too smart or too “scientifically minded” for faith, is just a pretentious lie.
Every time you accept what a scientist says because he SEEMS reputable, that is faith. Every time you hear about a new discovery do you try to replicate the results? Do you read through all of their methodology for every single thing that you accept as being true? Do you read everything they used in their bibliography? If not then how do you know that it’s true? If you, yourself did not perform the experiment, how do you know it’s true? I’ve never seen a nuclear bomb explode, but I don’t doubt that they exist. I have FAITH that the history being passed to me through the grapevine is at least somewhat accurate. I have never been to Europe, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know some of it’s history.
So as I said, don’t conflate the meaning of faith in order to set yourself above the “religious yokels” and call it scientific, it plainly isn’t. Everyone needs faith, it’s a fundamental part of the human experience, one that cannot be extricated. Hell, you have to have faith that you even exist at all, let alone your faith in your ability to understand scientific principles.
Isaac Newton was an alchemist. He was pursuing many metaphysical pursuits, and would be considered a crackpot by today’s standards, yet his work is the fundamental basis for the physics we teach our children.
It wasn’t until recently that this artificial schism between science and religion happened. Mysticism draws upon Euclid, Pythagoras, Newton and many others. The “Science religion” is populated by people that think if you rename metaphysics to physics, and alchemy to chemistry that the old thing is somehow less valid. Science comes from a venerable tradition, one that deserves more respect than I believe it gets. Throughout history it was religion that made much of the leaps and bounds in understand that makes modern science even possible. We have updated methodology from those old times, but we still draw from the discovery of those who did not use all of that same methodology.
Intuition is like radar. It catches everything in a field and then helps us analyze it and make a picture. Logic is like a laser that gives us information about the minute details of that overall picture. Neither is superior to the other, they both serve a function.
In otherwords to all of those “Scientists” that lack faith I say “Stop being such a snob.”
No, Cecil answers why is the sky blue?. Anyway, I think you’ve explained this poorly. This is science telling us why we see the sky as blue. Science can also tell us what we see ‘blue’ as, what the visible spectrum is, what the atmosphere is composed of, etc. It’s not a “how” question, although science can also tell us how our eyes work, how the atmosphere was formed,
Does religion?
This has nothing to do with the kind of faith this thread was started about. I can make plans with someone on the assumption that I can complete those plans, yes. Because I know my own schedule, my own life, and in general I know what is likely to happen and what is not. That strikes me as more of a matter of common sense than faith.
I think your post is either a lie or a bad attempt at equivocating.
Faith is believing in something irrespective of evidence. That has no place in science. I do not need faith to tell me that the Earth will still be here tomorrow because in my experience it has always been there the next day, and I have no reason to think otherwise. Same thing goes for accepting the existence of things I haven’t seen (in the cases where I accept them).
We believe in science based on P values. I have to do an experiment a minimum of three times, with a P value below 0.01 before I can claim that the experiment was a success. That means that there is a .0001% chance that the experiment showed a positive result based on chance alone.
But wait. The experiment could be flawed. Yes. Yes it could. You know what scientists like to do more than run experiments? Scientists like to tear down the experimental design of other scientists. I swear. Go to a journal club some day. You will see people frothing at the mouth to disprove an assertion that another scientist came up with. If you get to the point where you have a “theory”, you can bet that the best and brightest have tried to find flaw and have failed.
We don’t blindly believe each other. If there were flaws in the data analysis or the scientific thinking behind evolution as a whole, there would be 1000 evolutionary biologists and molecular geneticists lining up to get their whack at it. While there are debates amongst scientists about HOW evolution occured (infamously by Dawkins Vs. the late Gould) none is saying that natural selection is not correct.
Oh, you are right and I was wrong. I presumed that you were right when you corrected me. I just noted that my error was based on a faulty memory of Gonick’s History of the Universe and that I was relieved to discover that it was bad memory and not bad source material that led me astray.
Nolies, the “evolution” that you are arguing against exists only in the minds of its detractors. The version of evolutionary theory that they sneer at and deride is far, far different from the scientific version that has been through every imaginable scientific verification. With this in mind, I’m going to rip off the blinds and show you what people who actually discuss evolution mean when they discuss it. I’ll take it in three parts: evolution, natural selection, and evolutionary theory.
Evolution, when divorced from evolutionary theory, says only this: populations change over time. It doesn’t say whether they get simpler or more complex, whether they are growing more or less adapted to their environment: it only states that over time, populations change. In other words: children are different from their parents. Are you, Nolies, exactly the same as either of your parents? Without agreement on this point, there can be no progress in the debate, but it’s a trivial point, really. Please reply to this with either, “Yes, children are different from their parents,” or “No, children are exactly the same as their parents.” This is evolution. It’s not exactly the radical idea your preacher rails against, I’m sure, but it’s the scientific meaning of evolution. Once we have agreed on this (or you have pointed out where you disagree with the idea that children are different from their parents), we can proceed to natural selection.
I spent 9 years as a born-again Christian and enthusiastic Creationist, jumping back and forth between young-earth, old-earth, ID, you name it…including belief in the Noachian flood. Although a decent chunk of my life was devoted to dinosaurs and dinosaur art (and should therefore have broken me of my creationist ideas, or vice versa) it wasn’t until I got away from the pervasive Christian influences in my life and allowed myself to question the validity of my beliefs that I bothered to actually learn about evolution from something other than Creationist propaganda. After I did that, it seemed like a light switch had been turned on somewhere; I sometimes have a hard time remembering why in the world I once believed so strongly in creationism…but I do remember why.
It wasn’t because I believed that the science behind evolution was faulty, although much of the creationist literature makes that claim. It was because if evolution was a truth of history, and fish and reptiles and mammals and all the rest evolved over the vast eons of time, then the inescapable conclusion one must reach is that humans also evolved, including their brains, their bodies, their behaviors, etc., and we’re “just another brick in the wall.” Not only that, but it also means that, contrary to Genesis, humans are not the “goal” of creation or evolution or the “culmination” of anything. In other words, acceptance of evolution means acknowledging that the world wasn’t made just for man, and man wasn’t created to rule over it and subdue it.
The Catholic church has officially “accepted” evolution as a biological reality, but maintains that Catholics should believe that at some point God infused man with an immortal soul, presumably meaning that other animals do not have souls, or at least souls that are like human souls. Again, the real issue here is maintaining the belief that Humans are not just special – one can easily argue that bats are just as “special” – but that Humans alone are specially loved by God.
I believe that is the real issue with Creationism versus Evolution arguments. Attempts to reconcile creationism with evolution almost always rely on reassuring the creationist that God still has a special kind of love for humans that surpasses His love for dogs and cats and fish and insects and trees. That’s why I’ve pretty much stopped trying to engage in scientific arguments with creationists. Presenting scientific evidence to counter creationist arguments is, for the most part, fruitless; science isn’t the issue. If it was, then all it would take is to point to a handful of books or web sites and the creationists would say, “oh, I see now. Yes, I guess it does make sense after all.” You can post links to talkorgins.org all you want, but none of the scientific arguments address the concerns of most creationists, in my opinion.
