Try The Monkees, or Archaeopteryx on CNN. 
HEll, they can just watch “Mission to Mars”
Evolution makes a lot of sense! Let me give you an example. Right now I have on a nice watch. Let me take a hammer, break it into a million pieces, and then put it into a bag, shake it for millions, maybe even billions, of years and then remove it and it would be a watch. That is what evolution is saying. Like I said evolution makes a LOT OF SENSE. :rolleyes
I don’t know if this point has ever been brought to attention, but isn’t atheism, in some ways, a religion itself? Sure, atheists don’t go to a decorated building to talk about how they don’t believe in God but the belief system is somewhat there. So, wouldn’t teaching evolution be similar to teaching the beliefs of the atheists – that belief being that no God created the universe?
Don’t get me wrong, I am not Christian; I’m agnostic. As some might say, “I believe in a God but I’m don’t like His fan club.”
As for Creationism being taught in schools, teaching it would only leave out all the other religions and their beliefs, which would cause major upheaval (sp?) in every major interest group. Besides, I am a firm believer in the separation of church and state.
Wow. The whole of 150 years of scientific thought and observation summed up and debunked in a single 1-paragraph analogy. I’m convinced. :rolleyes:
CollegeStudent, I’ve seen this argument go around a few times here, and I highly recommend you spend plenty of time at the Talk.Origins archive. Otherwise, you really don’t want any of this.
Your analogy is seriously flawed. It would be improved (although still not remotely “good”) if:
–rather than one bag and one watch, you had millions and millions of bags and watches.
–there were forces and physical characteristics that made the pieces of the watch combine in various ways.
–there were some “advantage” to each more watch-like assembly of pieces.
As you may have read in my .sig line at the LBMB, “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.”
Dr. J
Actually, there was a huge thread on it a while back.
We teach that HIV causes AIDS. Some people believe that AIDS is the judgement of God against the evils of homosexuality. Are we teaching the beliefs of the atheists–that belief being that no God causes AIDS–when we teach about HIV?
I’d call you a Deist.
Dr. J
Actually any study of the origins of the earth, or even the universe, is not really “science” so much as it is “history” with all the incumbent discrepancies. Science is a testable thing, for example, I theorize that water turns to ice at 32 degrees f. I take some water and put it in the freezer and bingo! I demonstrate (or prove) my theory. If I do this 50 zillion times and it always freezes when set at 32 degrees but does not freeze when set at 40 degrees I have an accepted ‘theory’. After a bunch of other people test it and find the same thing, I have a ‘scientific law’. You can’t do that with evolution. Even if I devise an experiment where I put together the “building blocks of life” and run jolts of electricity thru them (or whatever TODAY’S theory of evolution says started it all) if I achieve some primitive life, I’ve only proven that a (reasonably) intelligent being can create life. I’d have to randomly combine elements billions and billions of times until I happen upon one that forms life to REALLY test the theory of evolution…and even then, I’d only be proving that a carefully controlled random experiment COULD produce life…not that a random series of reactions DID produce the specific forms of life on this planet.
People have been calling evolution science for 150 years since Darwin came up with the idea SPECIFICALLY because he denied the existence of God and stated “if I didn’t believe in evolution, I’d HAVE to believe in God.” But it doesn’t matter how often you call it science, it ISN’T. In fact, it actually violates Newton’s second law of thermodynamics (it’s a LAW, that means it was tested ad nauseum by Newton AND others) It basically states that everything is degenerating, breaking down. e.g. you can pile a heap of metal but it will never form into a car, however if you leave a car sitting there it will eventually degenerate into a heap of metal rusting away.
Nor can this be done with “Scientific Creationism”. Special Creation as Christian scientists refer to it, is holy (sic) non-reproducable.
Do you have a cite for Darwin specifically denying the existence of god? As for that quote, I would be interested in its context, because I think it is out of context here.
Newton studied evolution, eh? Not bad considering he died about 130 before Origin of Species was published. Funny, the same argument you supply here for evolution being not valid, was rejected out of hand when used to say that the earth was older than what the bible says.
felicia,
Induction is not the whole of proof. Induction is rarely the whole of anything.
Lab replicability is not the only requirement for scientific theory.
Gravity is also “just a theory.” And yet we don’t create gravity in labs. (Well, some do, kinda. But we don’t have to “create” gravity in order to establish its truth.)
Evolution is not the same thing as abiogenesis (life from non-life). They are two very different things. Attacking evolution by attacking abiogenesis is silly.
The Second Law of thermodynamics states that entropy occurs in a closed system. That is, without continual input of energy, “things fall apart, the center cannot hold” (thanks, WBY). However, the Earth is not a closed system. A heap of metal will not become a car without an influx of energy. Specifically, heating the metal and bending it into neat shapes.
Any other aspects of science you would like to learn about? I’m happy to expand on any of the above as well. No sense in attacking something without first understanding it.
-andros-
And speaking of abiogenesis:
http://www.siu.edu/~protocell/
Proteinoid microspheres form spontaneously from hot proteinoids soaked in 1% saline solutions. They’re about the same size as bacteria, and they even grow and divide, although they contain no genetic material (RNA/DNA). The University of Southern Alabama has gone so far as to christen them “protocells”, although the matter of where the first cells came from is far from settled. Coacervates, for instance, are also possible candidates for an intermediary stage between proteins and cells.
felicia: A few comments on your thermodynamics.
The second law of thermodynamics is not one of Newton’s laws. The first studies in what later became known as thermodynamics were carried out in 1798 (71 years after Isaac Newton’s death) by Count Rumford. The second law of thermodynamics was formulated somewhere between 1850 and 1865 by Clausius (he published the first formal statement of the second law in 1865).
The second law of thermodynamics is indeed one of the most well-established and “inviolate laws” discovered by human scientists. However, it has almost nothing to say about evolution and has very little to say about how life may have originated.
The second law may be stated as “the total entropy of any closed system remains constant or increases”. As has already been pointed out, the Earth is not a closed system; the input of energy from the Sun cannot be ignored. The flow of energy from the Sun can be thought of as a flow of entropy from the Earth to the Sun; the Sun’s entropy increases far more than the existence of life decreases the entropy of the Earth.
The second law also does not prohibit rearrangement of entropy within a system (open or closed), so that entropy decreases in one portion of the system and increases (usually more) in some other part of the system. Therefore, there is no thermodynamic reason why life could not arise within a closed system without energy input from outside. All it takes is an appropriate “entropy pump” moving entropy around within the system.
Hey, felicia, it’s that long-rambling-answer guy again. I’ll try to keep this one briefer.
The essential thing to remember about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (or the rest of them for that matter) is that they only apply to closed systems. So if you took a primeval earth and completely isolated from everything else in the universe, life would indeed tend to stagnate and vanish–assuming it arose at all. That’s entropy: disorder increases in a system unless countered by outside forces. Now in a non-closed system, outside energy sources are available; these drive the evolutionary principle: subsystem develop increasingly complex forms of order at the expense of increasing entropy outside the subsystem.
Big (oversimplified) picture time:
The sun is busily churning away in the fission/fusion “Phoenix Cycle”. In doing so, it is radiating light and heat away. This leads to a more uniform distribution of energy, as the sun heads toward a “cooler” state while making the space around it “warmer”. Some of this “warmth” (energy in general, really) falls on Earth, providing the energy to allow evolutionary processes to occur. If you put a bigger box around that system and analyze the entropy levels in it, you’ll find that they increase overall.
On a more personal level: A person is conceived (no abortion hijacks, please). At this point, (s)he’s a single cell; obviously, his/her complexity must increase greatly before birth–that’s reverse entropy, right? This is accomplished by an energy supply from the mother, who is eating other complex organisms to get it. The food->energy conversion isn’t efficient; waste heat is generated and distributed to the environment (positive entropy) and complex organisms are reduced to the unpleasant stuff we flush down the toilet (again, positive entropy). If you put a box around this system–food, mother, baby–the total entropy would increase even as localized complexity increased in the embryo->fetus->baby sequence.
So much for keeping it short…on the OT, I firmly oppose teaching Creationism as science. After all, I’m not even remotely Christian, and thus regard it as wrong, if not outright silly. OTOH, I would have no objection to seeing it taught in a well-balanced comparative religions class–if the class is taught in an unbiased manner to students old enough to understand that not everything they are taught should be regarded as absolute Truth. Getting completely unbiased teachers would likely be a problem, though.
Actually, all the laws of thermodynamics apply to open systems. You just have to properly account for the fluxes across the boundaries.
OK, I gather from ALL of your posts that my understanding of physics is lacking! I beg your pardon for delving into a subject (thermodynamics) that I know little about and admit to quoting from others who know more than I do. Unfortunately, (and I know this sounds really lame) the book from which I quoted from memory has been lent to a friend.
NOW…the topic was NOT teaching Creationism as SCIENCE, it was teaching it at all. My point was that evolution is no more science than creationism because it cannot be replicated. While we may not “create” gravity in a lab, we can experience it’s existence each day as we walk outside and don’t fall up! Evolution (and Creationism) both look at the same evidence, but have a different understanding of why it is there. My vote would be to teach children to observe the world around them, and ask questions, do experiments, read about scientists, and decide (based on all this as well as any spiritual beliefs they might have)
for themselves what they believe the origins of the universe are. Why must we force them to believe one or the other? What I’ve been hearing about lately are that even non-Christian teachers who teach their kids to QUESTION the theory of evolution are being canned! Now that’s not what America is supposed to be about.
For example, we both would find evidence of lots of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth. Even the narrator of an exhibit at our brand new Museum of Natural Science (the one with the dinosaur with a fossilized heart!) stated that fossils are made when a living creature is buried in water and mud rapidly deposited. If the creature died and just laid there, he would be picked apart by scavengers, and generally decay without being fossilized. They have even found fossils that were captured in the moment of giving birth…so we can both agree that this process happened quite quickly in terms of their death and burial. The difference is I look at fossils like this found in the desert regions of the US for example, and say, yeah, makes sense, God says there was a global flood. You may have reasons that evolution also explains such findings. But neither of us were there to record what actually happened. Now, I believe I have a record written by ONE who actually WAS there. If you don’t accept that record, fine.
The theory of evolution is constantly in flux. When I was in school we were taught that the peppered moth in England was a perfect example of evolution. The problem is, they never changed from being peppered moths. A change in a characteristic, like color, does not indicate any increase in genetic material which is essential for evolution to occur.
Several people mentioned abiogenesis not being synonymous with evolution, maybe not anymore, but it used to be. What happens is evolutionists keep changing their story…which I fully understand! They’re developing the theory and as they learn new things that contradict old thoughts, they have to revamp. Of course, the public generally doesn’t read the page 7 article where they realized “Nebraska Man” was based on a tooth that turned out to be from an extinct pig. Nor do they read the page 25 article when it is discovered that the variety of pig isn’t actually extinct after all.
The point is God’s Word doesn’t change.
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell if you have understanding!” Job 38:4
Felicia said:
And that point has already been explained as totally wrong.
Nobody is forcing anybody to “believe” anything. Evolution is not a “belief” – it is science. If a creationist doesn’t want to accept science, that’s his/her choice. But that doesn’t mean it should be avoided in school.
I don’t “believe” in imaginary numbers, but I had to learn about 'em and use them in math class. (Now I only use them in balancing my checkbook.)
Where have you been hearing this? Cites. Names. Dates. Places. I’m sorry, but we’re not just gonna accept statements like that at face value.
Exactly. And that’s what makes it completely antithetical to science. You start with a conclusion and try to mold the evidence to fit it, ignoring anything that doesn’t. Science doesn’t work that way. Science follows the evidence and sees where it leads. And whether you like it or not, it all leads to evolution.
felicia wrote:
Then why did the Gospels say things that were at odds with the Old Testament?
And just to jump on the pigpile:
This is exactly what makes evolution “more science than creationism is.” Creationists base their explanations on belief in an unchanging God’s Word, so they can never “revamp” them.
Kimstu
It really disheartens me to see all of these “creationists” using the same old pseudoscience arguments again and again. If we are talking about the actual word of God here, you really don’t need physical evidence to back it up, right? God is infallible, so he always wins the debate.
What we need as scientists (or in my case as scientist in training) is to approach it from the other end. Hey, “creationists” are going after creation from the science end – we can go after science from the creation end. What I’m talking about is pseudodivinity. That way, we can make a end-run for the claim of divine infallibility.
Let’s make one assumption here.
(1) And it was evening and it was morning, the sixth day. And the heavens and the earth and all their host were created and made. And God looked upon his work which he had created and made and he hallowed it. And on the seventh day, God rested.
(va-yhi erev va-yhi boker, yom ha-shishi.)
OK. We have some basic information here:
(a) God created us in his image.
(b) We were presumably the pinnacle of His Creation.
© His Creation was perfect, and he hallowed it.
Next lets make a Talmudic argument:
conjures the ghost of Rambam
(i) God made man as the pinnacle of his perfect creation.
(ii) By understanding God’s Creation (ourselves and the world around us), we can gain a closer understanding of God.
So how do we resolve the obvious contradiction : (1) shows the earth to be 6000 years old, and (ii) to be 4.2 billion, etc ad nauseum?
Heresy of the Day :
It doesn’t matter what God did 6000 years ago anyway – he gave us a natural world to understand, and only by doing so can we glimpse unto the glory of God.
What we fall back upon is not really acceptable to either side – an unproveable hypothesis (God created us 6000 years ago, with the fossils and rocks and the photons en route from the Andromeda Galaxy) on one side, and a bastardization of the Word of God on the other. But at least it says exactly the same thing.
felicia,
Anyone who attempts to use thermodynamics to disprove evolution does not know more about either subject than you. It is a simple matter to observe one’s surroundings and see examples of entropy decreasing. Water freezes into ice, crystalline structures form diamonds, and acorns slowly become trees. All that is required is an energy flux.
This is blatantly false. Evolution is duplicated in laboratories and in nature on a daily basis. Insects evolve a resistance to certain pesticides, and bacteria evolve an immunity to antibiotics. Likewise, see my 06-21-2000 01:38 PM response to edwino for references to observed instances of speciation. The only reason you cannot see the evidence for evolution is because someone taught you to cover your eyes.
Postulating a global flood to produce the geological record is a theory riddled with inconsistencies. For example, what about the sorting of the layers? Why are evolutionary ancestors always in lower levels than their descendants? If humans populated the earth at the time of a global flood, why are their artifacts and bones not found mixed in with the dinosaurs and trilobites? These are but a few of the Problems with a Global Flood.
You obviously haven’t studied biology any more than physics. Evolution is simply defined as a change in the frequency of alleles in the gene pool of a population. No increase in genetic material is necessary. As such, the peppered moth is a fine example of evolution.
I am not quite sure what you think this illustrates. This knowledge is not hidden from anyone, so if the public doesn’t read about it, apathy can be the only logical conclusion. Furthermore, “Nebraska Man” never had any scientific impact whatsoever. Osborn discovered the tooth in 1922, and by 1924 the scientific community had yet to be convinced of its authenticity. Further exploration of the original site in 1925 and subsequent seasons led Osborn and his colleague Gregory to the realization that the tooth was from an extinct peccary. A retraction was announced in Science by 1927, and this made front-page news in The New York Times and was picked up by The Times of London.
Now you may view this process as some type of grand conspiracy to defraud the public into accepting a flawed premise. I see something far more honorable – the advancement of Science by correcting error. Perhaps if you remove the blinders from your eyes the same could be seen by you.
That is just one of several means of fossil formation. Perhaps you misunderstood, perhaps the narrator was oversimplifying, perhaps the narrrator was just plain wrong.
[quote]
The difference is I look at fossils like this found in the desert regions of the US for example, and say, yeah, makes sense, God says there was a global flood. You may have reasons that evolution also explains such findings. But neither of us were there to record what actually happened.
[quote]
A superficial examination of the evidence might lead one to believe that it indicates there was a global flood. Unfortunately, “creation scientists” are satisfied with a superficial examination as long as it supports their dogma, Real scientists dig deeper, and find that the evidence does not indicate a global flood and that key evidence that would have to be left by a global flood is missing. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps are still there (they almost certainly wouldn’t if there were a global flood within the last 20,000 years or so) and bear no imprint of such a flood (which they would if they survived the flood somehow). We have a continuous record of climate over about the last 10,000 years from tree rings, and there’s no hinit of a flood in them. Ocean floor sediments show no evidence of a flood.
OK, and it’s also fine if you choose to believe that record for non-scientific reasons. But it’s not fine when “creation scientists” seize on the few results that can be interpreted as supporting their dogma, ignore evidence that contradicts their dogma, refuse to even acknowledge new findings, refuse to submit their results for review by anyone other than fellow dogmatists, and claim that they are doing science. I’m not accusing you of these things personally, but the sad fact is that’s what the vast majority of “creation scientists” do.