Evolution vs. Creationism

[RadicalActor]

Well, I think the title says it all.

Cite your sources when you give your arguments!

:p

[curefiend]

Cite sources to prove your arguments?

Here are the sources you cite:
Evolution: the entire Scientific community that came to this opinion through research and experiments with empirical results.

Creationism: The bible....With no empirical evidence.

[Phenom]

yes, evolution is scientific, and can be proven.

and the bible. yes. it has been translated many thousand times, and was rewritten for understanding sake.

the odds of creationism to be the truth

who knows

[Vlad]

who the hell believes in creationism these days anyways?

[Phenom]

the christians, the religious fanatics. you name it they exist haha

[curefiend]

You actually would be amazed at how many Americans still believe in Creationism over Evolution, which particularly has to do with our educational system and a ceeeeertain group of people retarding our educational access to a certain controversial scientific theory.

The rest of the first world all think we are incredibly primitive for just having the creationism/evolution debate in our schools.

[FellowCitizen]

Why do we have so many idiots in the US anyways?

Too much freedom?

[curefiend]

Too much freedom?


Is that the punchline? ....I don't get it.
:cool: :cool:

[MarkVI]

Punchline? Maybe, lol. But name-calling isn't nice. :o

I say why not both?
I'm a Christian and I have my faith and for me, evolution makes some sense.

Evolution is, as with abortion, another touchy issue for many people.

There are those who believe that the world was created in 6 24-hour days and that was that. I was always confused with this when I was younger. If we had cavemen and dinosaurs, where do Adam and Eve come into the picture?

The way I try to understand it is that the 6 days were not days as we know them. They were billions of years, in my view.
That allows plenty of time for evolution (oh noes!!!1!!!one!!) to take place.

The dinosaurs came and went as did the first forms of life, like algaes and trilobites. Some remained and others died off. Then man came along sometime in history (and screwed up most everything since, but that's a whole other set of forum topics. :eek:)

I feel that these two work together, but don't need to be taught together. Evolution is fairly self explanatory, and frankly, natural selection makes a lot of sense to this Christian. There will probably always be controversy over the creationism/evolution issue, that can't be avoided.

You can accept one and not the other, but I think everyone should have the chance to hear both sides.
Public school is a government funded entity and as such the separation of church and state needs to remain.

Go to school for math and science. (not offensive if you don't let it be)
Go to church or not, it's still your choice, for religion. (not offensive either, if you don't let it be)

Evolution is still a theory, but it's the best scientific reasoning we have so far.
We're not meant to know and understand everything.
But hey, who knows? We still have the theory of gravity and that's been working fairly well for us. I haven't hit the ceiling yet. :rolleyes:

[saggyjones]

Punchline? Maybe, lol. But name-calling isn't nice. :o

I say why not both?
I'm a Christian and I have my faith and for me, evolution makes some sense.

Evolution is, as with abortion, another touchy issue for many people.

There are those who believe that the world was created in 6 24-hour days and that was that. I was always confused with this when I was younger. If we had cavemen and dinosaurs, where do Adam and Eve come into the picture?

The way I try to understand it is that the 6 days were not days as we know them. They were billions of years, in my view.
That allows plenty of time for evolution (oh noes!!!1!!!one!!) to take place.

The dinosaurs came and went as did the first forms of life, like algaes and trilobites. Some remained and others died off. Then man came along sometime in history (and screwed up most everything since, but that's a whole other set of forum topics. :eek:)

I feel that these two work together, but don't need to be taught together. Evolution is fairly self explanatory, and frankly, natural selection makes a lot of sense to this Christian. There will probably always be controversy over the creationism/evolution issue, that can't be avoided.

You can accept one and not the other, but I think everyone should have the chance to hear both sides.
Public school is a government funded entity and as such the separation of church and state needs to remain.

Go to school for math and science. (not offensive if you don't let it be)
Go to church or not, it's still your choice, for religion. (not offensive either, if you don't let it be)

Evolution is still a theory, but it's the best scientific reasoning we have so far.
We're not meant to know and understand everything.
But hey, who knows? We still have the theory of gravity and that's been working fairly well for us. I haven't hit the ceiling yet. :rolleyes:

You are probably the most enlightened Christian I've ever met! lol
That's a really good way to incorporate evolution into the Bible and I completely agree with you (except that I don't believe in Adam and Eve etc.) and your position on this.

who the hell believes in creationism these days anyways?

Our president to name one person

[Enlightened One]

Evolution vs Creationism, jeeze.. tough subject to tackle. Personally I find it hard to have "faith" and devote my life to the teachings of a book that was written by 40+ authors over a period of 1500 years or more. And not to mention how religious affliations claim the earth is much younger than Science proves it is. It's proven science that there was a early form of man, (cro-magna) long before Modern man. That alone shows there was something before "Adam and Eve." I think it is good for people to believe in something, Having faith helps keep people headed down the right path. But at the same time, the cold hard facts show that evolution played and still does play a major role in how we got here. It's a mystery that we will always have to study, argue, and ponder over, If someone knows something that I don't I would love to hear it.

[palerider]

Well, I think the title says it all.

Cite your sources when you give your arguments!

:p

Your poll is too restrictive. I lean more towards intelligent design and most of those "religious wackos" that you like to make fun of would lean in that direction as well if you ever considered asking the question.

Evolution, that is macro evolution, is hardly a provable science. In fact, Sir Arthur Keith, he man who wrote the foreward for the 100th edition of Origin of the Species said: "Evolution is unproved and unprovable."

Those who make the claim that evolution is a fact are speaking from a terribly misinformed position. If you believe that you can prove evolution to be a fact, I can direct you to several places that have prizes upto a quarter of a million dollars available to anyone who can prove evolution to be true.

In the broadest sense, evolution simply means change. The and animals that we see around us didn't always exist and some that used to exist no longer exist. In that sense, evolution is true and I can't think of any religious person who would disagree. That is not the sort of evolution that is the topic of this poll though, is it?

A second, and more narrow meaning of evolution would be the idea that all living things decended over a long period of time from one, or a very few common ancestors. Any "evidence" for common ancestry is much more debatable than evidence for simple change. Even this more narrow meaning of evolution does not create an insurmountable problem for most religious people as intelligent design fits very nicely within these boundries.

Evolution with a capital "E" however, the evolution that some demand be taught in school as if it were a fact is the notion that species evolve over time through random variations and natural selection. Darwin cited domestic breeding as an example of evolution. Modifications in domestic crops or livestock can be produced by appropriately selecting small variations. Since about 1859 scientists have observed a similar process in the wild. For example, when mosquitoes are exposed to insecticides, subsequent generations become more resistant to the insecticide as the more susceptible organisms die off, when moths are exposed to predatory birds, subsequent generations tend to be better camouflaged as the more visible ones are eaten. There is a considerable body of evidence that supports the idea that change occurs through the natural selection of random variations.

But how much change? In Darwin's examples no new species appear and no new features appear within the species that are changing. Domestic breeding can't turn a sheep into a goat, much less a lizzard or a fish. And bird predation does not change moths into butterflies. Biologists have long recognized a distinction between relatively minor changes within a species, which is defined as "microevolution," and the much larger changes necessary to produce significant new features or entirely new species which they call "macroevolution." It is entirely possible and even probable that evolution in its third sense (change through random variations and natural selection) is true when it is applied to microevolution, but completely untrue when it is applied to macroevolution.

So evolution in the broadest sense, that being, change over time is a fact. We can see it if we look around the world. Evolution in the second sense, that being, decendency from common ancestors is thoroughly debatable and evolution in the third sense, that being change due to random variations and natural selection is a fact when applied to microevolution, but what about macro evolution which lies at the heart of this debate?

As molecular biologist Michael Denton wrote in 1985, "However attractive the extrapolation, it does not follow that, because a certain degree of evolution has been shown to occur, therefore any degree of evolution is possible."

In fact, not one single empirical discovery or scientific advance since 1859 has validated the idea of macro evolution. In other words, of the several different meanings of "evolution," Darwinian macroevolution is the least supported by the evidence.

Those who adhere to the religion of evolution tell us all the time and very passionately that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming and it is, if by evolution, you mean change over time. But if you mean macro evolution via natural selection and random variation, then the body of evidence that you have to present is underwhelming at best.

Fossils establish beyond a reasonable doubt that change has happened over time, but the fossil record is an embarrassment to anyone who is attempting to use it to support the Darwinian theory of macroevolution. It is possilble to directly observe microevolution through random variations and natural selection but that observation shows that such change occurs rather gradually and there are no radical discontinuities from one generation to the next. Darwin acknowledged that if his theory were true, then one would expect to find any number of transitional forms of any animal in the fossil record. Such is not the case.

Over a century and a half of fossil-collecting has happened since Darwin, and it has become painfully clear that fossil species tend to appear suddenly and exist essentially unchanged for long periods of time before they go extinct. These sudden appearances and disappearances, separated by absence of change, have been termed "punctuated equilibria" Punctuated equilibria are most evident where the fossil record is the most complete. Marine invertebrates for example. The most striking example of punctuated equilibria is the geological period known as the Cambrian. It is conspicuously marked by the rather sudden appearance of all the basic forms of animals now in existence. There are no transitional forms between them, and no new basic forms have appeared since then.

The fossil record of sudden appearances supports the idea of intelligent design far better than the painfully underwhelming evidence for macro evolution. Even the few examples of transitional fossils don't support Darwinian macro evolution because it simply can't be demonstrated that the transitions were the result of random variation and natural selection.

The fields of molecular biology and biochemistry are producing scientists that say simply that Darwin's mechanism is simply incapable of producing the mechanisms by which organisms would use energy, move around, detect light, heal wounds, etc. The theory of macro evolution becomes less supportable the more we learn about the "biomechanical machinery" of living cells.

Allow me to make a prediction if I may. Today, this very minute, scientists are at work, all over the world performing experiments on mixtures that they believe was the primordial soup at the beginning of the world in an attempt to learn how life came into being. Some day, they may happen upon the secret and actually create life. My prediction is that if that life continues to exist and somehow after a billion years is manipulated into some sort of intelligent life, the liberal faction of that life will howl to the heavens that intelligent design is heresy and has no place within civilized discussion.

[saggyjones]

If anyone is interested, read this:

http://www.unm.edu/~humanism/socvsjes.htm

It's a great read.

[Lilly Marlene]

I agree with saggyjones Mark ...very fine post on your part and I think the name-calling is totally lame on a debate board.

As it happens, more people in the US are creationists than not; this was well known anyway but confirmed again somewhat recently in the book The End of Faith by Sam Harris.

I think evolution makes a lot of sense; for me there is no conflict in religious terms because Catholic teaching does not have a problem with it.
A truly awesome reconciliation was done by Fr. Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man in the mid-twentieth century ...not light reading but worth the trouble.

[MarkVI]

Thanks, Lilly.
Hopefully I'll have time to look into it eventually.

[Justinian]

Yes. Evolutionist people did spring out of a rock.

[Justinian]

I agree with saggyjones Mark ...very fine post on your part and I think the name-calling is totally lame on a debate board.

As it happens, more people in the US are creationists than not; this was well known anyway but confirmed again somewhat recently in the book The End of Faith by Sam Harris.

I think evolution makes a lot of sense; for me there is no conflict in religious terms because Catholic teaching does not have a problem with it.
A truly awesome reconciliation was done by Fr. Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man in the mid-twentieth century ...not light reading but worth the trouble.

Catholic teaching? You are aware that all Catholicism is is an institutional organization that's purpose was created and built around the words in a single book...The Bible. The Catholic Priests may not have a problem with it, but just who the hell were they again? Any person that can read and is a true christian does have a problem with evolution especially when they are trying to consolidate and dominate the Goddamn education system.

[Justinian]

If anyone is interested, read this:

http://www.unm.edu/~humanism/socvsjes.htm

It's a great read.

It's more one-sided secular entertainment than a real discussion or debate on science vs christianity. A lot of it is untrue, innacurate or dishonest and it's quite clear it was purposely made by an atheist who was looking to comically denounce and belittle christianity. In truth, Christianity can make a whole lot of science too except that science is theoretically based on fact-finding and research without any agenda-driven will like religion is.

[Sadistic Savior]

This thread is actually based on a false analogy. The theory of Evolution does not attempt to explain how life began, only how one form of life changes into another form over time.

The debate should actually be Creationism vs Abiogenesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis). Not Evolution.

Therefore Evolution and Creationism are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as is often assumed by Evolutionists.

Cite sources to prove your arguments?

Here are the sources you cite:
Evolution: the entire Scientific community that came to this opinion through research and experiments with empirical results.

Creationism: The bible....With no empirical evidence.

That is inaccurate. Many cultures outside Christianity believe in creationism. Many people who are not Christian at all believe that existence was created by a higher power.

yes, evolution is scientific, and can be proven.

Natural Selection can be proven. Evolution has never been observed.

You actually would be amazed at how many Americans still believe in Creationism over Evolution, which particularly has to do with our educational system and a ceeeeertain group of people retarding our educational access to a certain controversial scientific theory.

Since the theory of Evolution make so much sense, I am not afraid of what the Creationsists have to say. My argument is not weak.

To be honest, even though I am an atheist, I dislike being around other atheists. They're such know-it-alls. The whole point of science is to question. Evolution is not a religion. There's no reason to defend it like one.

Why do we have so many idiots in the US anyways? Too much freedom?

Only a liberal would complain that people have too much freedom of thought.

Evolution with a capital "E" however, the evolution that some demand be taught in school as if it were a fact is the notion that species evolve over time through random variations and natural selection.

The theory states that organisms, via mutation, will adapt to their environment over time. Evolution makes no value judgement as to what is superior or inferior...everything is relative to whatever environment the organism exists in.

For example, there is a species of parrot that exists on an Island that has lost the ability to fly. If there were predators on the Island, the Parrot would be an easy target...it is clearly inferior to it's own ancestors by our judgement. But it has evolved into a flightless bird because flight is no longer necessary to exist in it's environment.

Evolution says that organisms change in this way over time. They dont necessarily change into something better or worse...they just adapt to whatever environment they exist in.

Over a century and a half of fossil-collecting has happened since Darwin, and it has become painfully clear that fossil species tend to appear suddenly and exist essentially unchanged for long periods of time before they go extinct.

If the animal is already well adapted to it's environment, there may be no need to change. Sharks are a good example of this. Evolution is sporadic because it is based on mutations, and mutations are random. There are other variables as well, such as natural catastrophies. The fact that the fossil record is not smooth and even does not necessarily mean evolution is not taking place.

The fossil record of sudden appearances supports the idea of intelligent design far better than the painfully underwhelming evidence for macro evolution. Even the few examples of transitional fossils don't support Darwinian macro evolution because it simply can't be demonstrated that the transitions were the result of random variation and natural selection.

There are fossil records of transitional species and even living examples:

Archaeopteryx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx) - A feathered dinosaur with both dinosaur and bird-like features.

Platypus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus) - A venomous mammal that lays eggs.

The Flying Squirrel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_squirrel) - A squirrel with bat-like features.

Allow me to make a prediction if I may. Today, this very minute, scientists are at work, all over the world performing experiments on mixtures that they believe was the primordial soup at the beginning of the world in an attempt to learn how life came into being. Some day, they may happen upon the secret and actually create life. My prediction is that if that life continues to exist and somehow after a billion years is manipulated into some sort of intelligent life, the liberal faction of that life will howl to the heavens that intelligent design is heresy and has no place within civilized discussion.

Heh heh

[9sublime]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/images/bievolutionhorse.gif

Here's what they teach kids over here. Are you trying to tell them that it just so happened all these species lived one after each other by chance, despite all looking so similair, and died out after the next one came along, just by chace. And that they look like a better developed version of their predecessor, just by chance?

We all know genetic mutations happen, and that two stronger horses breeding together will likely have a more muscular, larger horse. I don't see how anyone can argue with evolution.

Sure, it doesn't explain how life began, and its got holes in the fossil record, but most of the time you can see whats going to fill that hole.

I remember someone else on the forum pointed out that an insect that breeds at an astoundingly fast rate was monitored in a lab for hundrerds of generations (maybe more) and there was no evolution. If there is no need for evolution, then the mutations will not be useful and will not be kept for long in the gene pool and spread. That is something I can actually agree on with Sadistic Saviour.

[top gun]

Of course... Religion and Evolution can be compatible. ;)

All one has to do is become a Creationist. Then when little things like no dinosaurs in the Bible come up you can just insert them. Where the Bible says the world is flat you just say... they mean flat in a circular sort of way... and all is explained.

Personally I'd consider going with the Scientology explanation. Adding the space creatures makes the whole religion thing really POP with excitement! :D

Seriously some type of a creating force... call it God if you like is not an impossibility. But any of our man made religions having anything to do with that possible truth is in my opinion not really very possible at all.

[Justinian]

who the hell believes in creationism these days anyways?

I do. And most people who don't were only conditioned by the secular system and would have believed it in the secular's absense anyway. We live today in a secular America. People seem to forget that when they discuss the decline of the church in America. In other words, I don't buy for one second the theory that people don't believe in our Lord today because they are any wiser or smarter than the people before them but they have been raised and conditioned by the secular system to denounce Christianity and turn away from God. I don't believe people ever voluntarily gave up the practices from every generation of their family traced back hundreds of years before now because they thought they rightfully were making a smarter, more accurate choice [to NOT do something as opposed to REPLACING something] but they were severely disenfranchised since they were young to give-up their practicing of religion through convenience and satisfaction of themselves and the many. Even if you are an admirer of science and research, you cannot profess there is a titanic amount of irrefutable evidence that stands directly in crushing creationism when creationism itself has much evidence of its own as well as reasoning against evolution. Besides all of this, it is much easier, always has been and especially today to renounce God and be an Atheist. It is harder and obviously more involving to be a practicing Christian than sit on your arse and upchuck there is no God. So regardless, religion (mono religion anyway) is better for the nation and keeps the government small. It is scary for people to be the architects of society who do not fear God.