What is the "Missing Link" in science versus evolution?

I sort of agree. That’s why I only copied and commented on the second part of that post. :wink: However, I don’t think you can compare the two and say one is better understood than the other. It’s apples and oranges, really. For instance, can we predict which species will go extinct, leaving no descendants 10M years from now? We can predict, with a pretty high certainty, what the earth’s orbit will be then.

Then you are willfully closing your eyes. Have you talked to scientists? Many/most profess to religious beliefs. But there’s no need for religion to have a problem with evolution. Major religions (like Roman Catholicism) don’t, so why would a scientist have a problem?

Science needn’t clash with religion over evolution, although it gets a little dicier when it comes to abiogenesis. But on a fundamental level, science and religion are two entirely different methods of acquiring knowledge. “Science” is really nothing more than the scientific method, and scientist use that method whether they are trying to understand how the planets move, how a cell divides, or how species change over time.

“Proof”, in it’s strictest meanning, is not something that scientists deal with-- that’s for math and logic. We can prove that 1 + 1 = 2 under a set or mathematical rules. What scientists do is hypothesize about how the works, and then test those hypotheses to see if they are correct. When a hypothesis has been tested over and over and found to be sound, it’s called a theory. That’s as good as it gets in science, and that’s why we talk about the Theory of Evolution-- that hypothesis has stood up to rigorous testing over decades, and has been about to make predictions about the world around us. Sure, there have been some adjustments made since Darwin’s day, and scientists generally now talk about The New Synthesis rather than “Darwinism”, but that’s true of every branch of science.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human evolutionary tree that didn’t include Homo erectus as a direct human ancestor. After all, the H. heidlebergensis fossils show enough “mixed tratirs” to be a clear transition state between H. erectus and H. sapiens/H. neanderthalensis.

It’s not uncommon for *heidlebergensis *to be considered a subspecies of erectus. Check out the Peabody museum link I gave above-- that’s little more updated. Note that they list something they call “after *erectus *and before sapiens”. Click on that link, too. Depends how much of a lumper or splitter you are.

I disagree. In my area, and from people I know in other countries, like my highly religious ex in England, people are taught evolution as knowledge, in school. The mechanism is taught (and absorbed, remembered and utilised alongside) other mechanisms, like gravitational pull, germology and such. This began, for me (at the current age of 18) at a rather young age (aproximately 9) where we had experiments demonstrating survival of the fittest. It became just a layer of knowledge we had accepted (though only later, sadly, were we instructed to start dissecting it).

Religion always came (to those which it did) as a layer on top of that. Since they knew, physically, and could reference numerous carbon dating experiments that proved items tens of thousands years old, a literal reading of the Bible wasn’t really natural. But everyone ‘knew’ that the Bible used figurative speech and metaphors, and I hardly think anyone lingered over the fact then (or now, before the only recently exposed ramashriek of creationism contra abiogenesis in the US).

Hell, my ex-girlfriend from England would have brained you with a stare if you’d drawn the conclusion that since she was tightly religious she must deny evolution.

So, what’s the deal then? They believe in evolution but hold on to the fairy tale to help them sleep at night or when Aunt Martha dies? A scientist or any person might believe in a “higher power” and or some unspecified source as that we may never understand, or that life may somehow go on, and count that as being religious.
But how can anyone believe in evolution and still
believe in the bible? And that doesn’t mean every aspect of it, but just the basic story. Doesn’t
evolution wipe the story out?

If the Bible’s internal contradictions don’t make it totally unbelievable, what makes you think that some piddling issues with geology and evolutionary biology are going to be a problem? Aside from people who reflexively cast aside anything that doesn’t fit in with Fundamentalist Christian dogma, most believers view the Bible as being allegory rather than literal dictum. You can certainly wedge your gods into the gaps in knowledge; when those gaps get filled they usually end up exposing more gaps into which to stuff your omnipotent Creator and so forth.

It’s all fun and games until someone puts an eye out.

Stranger

This Wikipedia page on Theistic evolution may interest you, Harri. As a non-believer myself I’m pretty skeptical about this doctrine, but the fact is a lot of people who are smarter and more knowledgable than me have reconciled their religious beliefs with modern science.

Do Creationists think that Holocaust deniers are stupid and vice versa?and do both groups tend to believe in conspiracy theories generally?

I think very few, if any, scientists accept a literal interpretation of the Bible, so define what you mean by “the basic story”? I have to say that I’m kinda with you on this, in that it doesn’t make sense to me. However, it’s an observation that many people do accept evolution as an explaination for the history of life on earth, and yet they still accept that there is a higher power and that there is some conitinuation of human life after death (ie, that concept of a soul). I can’t see it, myself, so I can’t really explain what it is that keeps people believing in that. Of course, there might the simple explanation that we evolved in such a way so as to be predisposed to a belief in some sort of religion. Our brains have trouble understanding an effect without a cause, so we have to assign some ultimate cause to at the first effect-- the fact that something exists instead of nothing.

The basic story being that God created man.

What do you think the “basic story” of the Bible is? The two contradictory creation myths found in the first chapter of Genesis? Surely most believers think there is more to the Bible than that one small part.

Evolution is only a problem for Biblical literalists; but then, a strictly literal reading of the Bible presents a whole host of other logical and factual problems as well.

How does evolution contradict that?

It can (and is) also be believed that God used evolution to create man and/or that the human souls are specially created and unevolved.

There are two separate creation stories at the beginning of Genesis, a point that has been recognized for a very long time.

The first story portrays a God who creates all things in an ordered fashion, indicating that the world/cosmos/universe is not accidental or chaotic and that God has created it all Himself. It is written in a poetic form that emphasizes the order in the cosmos without requiring that it actually describe the specific events of the formation of the cosmos.

The second story sort of accepts that there was “stuff” around that God imbued with His Spirit, and goes on to describe how humans were given dominion over the world they could see, but that they brought calamity down upon their heads through sin.

Neither of these stories (which contradict each other on a couple of key points) were written as scientific texts and each makes theological points about different issues. Why in the world would a person who recognized the theological/philosophical intents of the two stories have any problem accepting that the natural/physical development of the world and humanity (neither of which are actually claimed in either story) may have developed in far different ways than the tales that were never intended to provide a scientific description of events?

In the early fourth century, Augustine of Hippo addressed the whole issue of matching theology against science when he noted, in chapter 19 of de Genesis:

Under various social and religious pressures that arose in the nineteenth century, some number of Christians (who have drawn a certain amount of attention to themselves in recent years) have forgotten the advice of Augustine and conflated science and theology. It is neither accurate nor fair to attempt to view all believers through the lens of the beliefs of one or two groups. The simple way to recognize how believers can accept the science of evolution is to recognize that theology and science address different issues and do not have to support each other in the details of their stories.

Well, teleology can play a part. Humans are so constructed that they in general try to find reasons why things happen as they do – in short, that’s the whole idea behind science as a set of disciplines. It’s not enough to know that, e.g., watering a plant causes the somewhat droopy leaves and shoots to perk up and flesh out; we look at the process of transpiration and how the plant metabolizes the water it draws from the soil to identify why that happens.

When you get beyond biology, chemistry, physics, and cosmology, though, you enter the realm of metaphysics. But the question of why? is still prevalent. There’s a great deal of discomfort among many people in the idea of a purposeless universe, one that has interior causality but no exterior causality shaping why it is structured as it is. God as cause of the universe as a whole is a soothing answer to that question.

This does not, however, mean that the particular conception of God the defender of the Israelites, demander of obedience to an assortment of commandments, etc., is something that a modern person who accepts God’s existence must swallow whole hog. Even if one grants for the sake of argument the premise of a real god who made himself known to them, their understanding of him was, well, as limited as their understanding of parasitology. If people die of loathsome worms from eating (inadequately cooked) pork, one does not need to know modern helminthology to reason that it’s a bad idea to eat pork, and it becomes convenient to make it taboo, prohibited by divine command – whether or not he actually commanded that or not. For large quantities of early Hebrew stories and laws, a scholarly understanding of what may have underpinned them leads one to believe that they were in fact attributed to him.

So why not throw out the whole Bible? Well, for many people, a transcendent experience of some sort has led them to accept not only the philosophical premise of the existence of God but the further step of having faith in him – which absolutely requires to be understood not as an irrational, superstitious subscription to magical fairies in the garden but as accepting that there is a generally beneficient, loving relationship being offered by that god which they accept the reality of, the ablity to put one’s trust in his trustworthiness towards oneself. And the Bible, laden with folklore though it is, provides a treasury of knowledge about him as person (intermingled, to be sure, with great quantities of what somebody thought they knew about his will and ends).

Did he create man? This depends on how you look at things. I typed these words in the expectation that you would read them, and that other, third parties might read them as well, and understand my perspective on the issue. But it is the Chicago Reader who made the SDMB available to post them, Jelsoft Enterprises which wrote, compiled, and sold the VBB code and program on which the SDMB runs, Dell or Gateway or some other company who built your computer, you who decided to log onto the SDMB and read this post… I did not make these words appear on your screen – yet without my having written them in the first place, the entire panoply of causes that made them appear there would be pointless for the purpose of conveying my thinking to you.

So too if one assumes God’s detailed, thorough foreknowledge of how things will come to pass, it’s not beyond the realm of sensibility to suggest that he initiated the Big Bang in the expectation that Polycarp and Harri would several billion years later have this interchange on computers running a particular program and logged onto a particular website on one planet circling one star in the halo area of one galaxy among billions in the universe he created. It takes a huge amount of awareness to grasp the intricacies of all the events that led up to that – and to all the quintillions of other single events occurring in the universe. But he’s God; he’s capable of it, in just the same way as a limited human author is capable of conceiving complex characters and driving a plot through which they interact in a book he writes, keeping all the complex details of characterization and multiple plot strands in mind simultaneously.

I guess there’s great comfort in setting up a belief system where neither side can be wrong.
Talk about hedging your bets.

The understanding that the religious themes were not intended to be literal were known for hundreds of years before Darwin hypothesized his ideas concerning evolution. It is not a matter of “setting up” a belief system to match any particular scientific idea.

So how many of the “flock” believed that then or believe that now? Do religious leaders operate under the belief that the Bible isn’t literally true? I haven’t heard any. Do they and their followers base their beliefs that the Bible is just a fairy tale to make them feel good? Or what “God” really did was create apes so he could evolve into man? That’s what some here seem to want to believe. I’m not religious but I know the Bible said God created man in his own image. So
you can believe in evolution and still possibly have spirtual beliefs but it’s silly and wistful
thinking to say you can still believe in the Bible. That’s trying to cover too many bases and
take yourself off the hook. If the people who believe in evolution are right, the odds are the Bible is completely wrong. But if the creationists are right, you should get ready to apologize. I know I will. But don’t try to pretend you’re on both sides. That the Bible is all lies and yet still has a basic truth that fits in very well and easily with evolution.