Ok, I don’t want tempers to fly about this so lets be civilized human beings. I believe that we evolved from apes. I believe this because I can see solid evidence that we did in such discoverys as Lucy and the Turkana Boy. To me the bible proves nothing. I can’t see solid evidence in my hands that there is a God. I’m not saying that you are stupid if you believe in God but only stating my opinion. If diseases such as AIDs can evolve to be resistant to medications and everyone knows this, hopefully, then way can’t they beleive that we evovled? It’s not like it’s an insult to say you’ve evovled from apes, in fact I’d say it was a compliment. So what do you think, was I an ape or was I created by some all powerful being? If I was created by God, then where did he come from? Did he just appear?
And these are mutually exclusive how? 
Just a clarification before this gets rolling off into weirdness:
Evolution does not posit that man descended from apes. (That is an anti-evolutionist distortion.)
The currently accepted neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution notes that modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens) and modern apes all descended from a common ancestor species.
Frankly, the entire debate over evolution is foolish. A relatively tiny majority of christians who feel that their entire faith is challenged by viewing Genesis as less than a scientific textbook is responsible for the whole ruckus.
There are no buddist, hindu, muslim, shinto, or taoist creationists. There are no reputable scientists who effectively argue the fact of evolution (as opposed to the mechanisms).
If we excised the first two chapters of the Bible and replaced them with “Only through the will of God does man remain firmly rooted to the earth” this would be an srgument brought by the fundamerntalist christians over the “theory of gravity.”
Not such a tiny minority, B. Gardner, at least in the US. Something like 40% of Americans believe the human beings were created in their present form by God sometime in the last 10,000 years.
I meant worldwide but that doesn’t mean your figures are any less frightening.
The fact seems to be that the average Amerixan is fairly poorly educated, most especially in fields of science. Though human beings historically have been known to favor cherished superstition over reality.
Actually, there is a sizable contingent of hindu creationists- I believe their main book is Forbidden Archaeology or The Mysterious History of Man or somesuch. I think there was even a Hindu creationism special on Fox (so it must be true!)
Plenty of Muslims are creationists- I think we’ve even had some of them here on SDMB.
The real problem with this kind of debate is that while there are a number of believers in creationist pseudoscience on the SDMB, they generally don’t present detailed arguments and just make occasional snipes in unrelated threads.
-Ben
I didn’t mean to imply that there were none on an individual basis, just as organized groups - though the hindu book, and the oraganized resistence it implies, are news to me (sorry, I don’t watch much TV!) so I stand corrected.
There is definitely a well-organized Islamic creationist movement–the “Harun Yahya” organization is one of the more important centers of Islamic creationism. Interestingly, Islamic creationists have borrowed liberally from well-known American Christian creationists.
It is of course true that many theists do not seem to have a problem with reconciling belief in God with the acceptance of scientific facts and well-supported theories.
The only religious text that I am aware of that evolution and related disciplines (geology, paleontology, etc.) seem to directly contradict are a literal meaning (at least as interpreted by some) of the book of Genesis.
What do the hindus and muslims find so threatening?
Tom~, one of the hazards of having a married episcopacy is that you have a small percentage of the population who are indisputably descended from Primates.
Seriously, the overwhelming majority of Christians and Jews seem to have the belief that God created the universe and all that is therein, but did so in a way compatible with the findings of science, including evolution. Needless to say, there are those who strain at gnats but swallow camels in an effort to refute “Godless evil-yution” and prove that the first eleven chapters of Genesis were Moses’s efforts to do a Reader’s Digest Condensed cosmogony, geology, oceanography, and paleontology. (Ben can, if he chooses, link you to some of the more bizarre discussions he’s had under another name in a forum devoted to such questions on another board.)
The OP suffers from the fallacy of the excluded middle. Evolution is not a be and end all.
That is the main problem: some who are pro-evolution attack a belief of one of the faithful, and that faithful person turns around and conclude that evolution itself is an attack on her faith.
One of the real problems with any religion is that having accepted certain precepts on the basis of “faith,” all subsequent information is judged on the basis of fidelity to those precepts without regard to the actual merit of the information. The christian fundamentalist rejection of the theory of evolution is a classic example. It has nothing to do with evolution as a scientific theory, it has to do with the fact that it violates religious convictions adopted on the basis of faith.
The evolution vs creationism debate is the most unnecessary and most-easily resolved debate on Earth.
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Evolution only contradicts the bible if the bible is taken 100 percent literally.
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A document that contradicts itself cannot be taken 100 percent literally.
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The bible is full of self-contradictions.
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Therefore, the bible cannot to be taken 100 percent literally.
I dunno anything about Hindu creationism. As far as Islamic creationism, I think what Muslims find threatening about Darwinian evolution is the same fundamental uneasiness that Christians do. With Christian Biblical inerrantists, they of course have the issue of the contradiction between modern science and a literal reading of the creation accounts in Genesis. But I think a perhaps more fundamental problem they have with modern science in general, and evolutionary biology in general, is that it seems to paint a picture of a Universe without purpose or direction, in which humans arose not by the will of God, but by random chance mediated by a purposeless and amoral process of natural selection. Muslims don’t have the Genesis issues Christians do–AFAIK (though I could certainly be wrong), the Qur’an has no detailed creation story to contradict; and while Muslims believe most or all of the Judeo-Christian scriptures to be divinely inspired, they also believe they have been corrupted and only the Qur’an has been preserved free of error. However, Muslims do share the uneasiness at anything which implies the world and everything in it lack a moral purpose, and at the notion that humans are “mere” animals rather than beings created in the image of God. (I don’t know if Islam has the particular “image of God” formulation, but I think it pretty clearly teaches that humans are unique in having souls and a special relationship to God as opposed to other animals.)
Interestingly, although Islamic creationists have borrowed many concepts and arguments from Protestant Christian creationists, they apparently aren’t big on the “Flood geology” which is so important to Christian creationists. Instead, they do rely on many of the same alleged flaws of evolutionary biology and on arguments for a Universe of intelligent design created by a perfectly wise and benevolent creator, in opposition to what they perceive as theories of amoral and purposeless materialism.
(NOTE: I am not an expert on this topic by any means. This is all pretty much based on a lecture I recently heard by Taner Edis, a Turkish-American physics professor at Truman State University in Missouri who has made something of an avocation of studying these issues. I linked to a paper by him above; there is also that Islamic creationist site in that post, which he discussed in the lecture I heard.)
Most Christians distinguish the religious nature of the Bible from science, and if they give the science of biology any thought at all do not find any inconsistencies between their religion and scientific understanding.
There are, however, a significant number of Christians, and others, who do not accept science. That is their right. I feel that a lot of it has to do with the complexity of science and the massive amounts of data needed to just scratch the surface to have an intelligent discussion on the matter. Statements like “the Bible says it and I believe it and that’s it” seem to me to be giving up on trying to understand God’s creation through the marvelous analytical tool called science.
I don’t care much for evolution debates, but to be honest… I don’t find the “Lucy” evidence to be very compelling. We don’t even know that these bones came from the same type of organism, much less the same individual.
The knee bones were discovered about 2-3 kilometers away, for example, and a year before the other partial skeletal remains. (See http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0714_Lucy_fails_test.html.)
Mind you, I’m not arguing against evolution here. However, I do think that the Lucy case isn’t exactly compelling.
I would like a much less biased source than infidels.org, Revtim.
The problem with attacking Lucy is demonstrated in the opening paragraph of your link, Jubilation. The press conferences are, indeed, called for the hype value. However, the scientific investigation does not rest on single specimen finds. To portray the discovery of Lucy as fraud (as Lane Andserson implies and as the later quote by Tom Willis states openly), is, itself a lie.
As noted on the Australopithecus afarensis page of the In Hand Museum site, there are over 200 examples of Lucy and her cousins, (most of them partials, of course), and earlier reconstructions based on partial evidence have continually been proven accurate when later, more complete examples have been found.
Andserson’s article has to have been written sometime after 1986 (and seems to be more recent), yet it discusses the Lucy situation as though Lucy was the only example for this species–and explicitly claims that Lucy is the “latest” example of a find, even though several examples had been found by 1986 and numerous examples have been found throughout the ensuing years. I see nothing in Andserson’s essay to seriously challenge Australopithecus afarensis without some factual information. (And where do the footnotes on that page lead?)
The funny thing about the Bible is:
Why should any Christian care whether it “happened” or not?
Proof denies faith. If I can prove God’s existence or the invalidity of evolution, as the OP asks me to do, then I have no more need for faith, and faith is thus removed from the equation. Since the basis of religion is faith, in a certain sense you don’t have a religion any more. In any case, logically proving creationism means legitimizing logical proofs for evolution. I say don’t bother.
I like the Bible to the extent that it provides a coherent ethical code. As for trying to establish that the Genesis stuff actually happened, I think Christians waste their time worrying about stuff like that. It’s entirely irrelevant to the question of whether Christian ethics is a good way to live one’s life, which is the heart of Christianity.
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Was this a well-known phrase before Douglas Adams used it in his famous Babel Fish passage?
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