Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Ack-Ack on January 19, 2006, 04:38:20 PM
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Vatican says Intelligent Design not science... (http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0600273.htm)
If the Vatican can realize that ID is nothing but dogma, why can't the others?
ack-ack
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wasnt there a thread about this already?:noid
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From the same article, AKAK. Maybe they could teach this in science class. :lol
What the church does insist upon is that the emergence of the human supposes a willful act of God, and that man cannot be seen as only the product of evolutionary processes, it said. The spiritual element of man is not something that could have developed from natural selection but required an "ontological leap," it said.
The article said that, unfortunately, what has helped fuel the intelligent design debate is a tendency among some Darwinian scientists to view evolution in absolute and ideological terms, as if everything -- including first causes -- can be attributed to chance.
"Science as such, with its methods, can neither demonstrate nor exclude that a superior design has been carried out," it said.
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I don't know Ack, possibly because the majority of ID scholars don't actually take their marching orders from liberal Christians in the Vatican?
For instance:
Darwin This (http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&program=News&id=3123&callingPage=discoMainPage)
and
Typical Objections to Intelligent Design (http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&program=News&id=3156&callingPage=discoMainPage)
From "Darwin This":
"Lipskar, a soft-spoken man with a thick charcoal beard and wire-rim spectacles, ranks among Miami's most influential rabbis. And like Tendler, he believes Jews should back the intelligent design movement. "The fundamental question the theory answers is, accidental or intentional?" he explains. "If it's accidental, then what's the point? But if there's design, we're here for a reason." Lipskar also advocates bringing intelligent design into Jewish classrooms. "It should be taught together with chemistry and physics," he says.
In fact much of the debate at Torah and Science turned to whether intelligent design should be integrated into Jewish-school science classes; Miami's Center for the Advancement of Jewish Education even signed on as a sponsor. The organization's president, Chaim Botwinick, says the event is a harbinger. "Many Jewish schools are beginning to discuss making intelligent design an integral part of their curriculum," he explains. Among them, he adds, are a handful of schools in Miami, a city that has long been a stronghold of traditional Judaism. "
- SEAGOON
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Seagoon, I don't read every post on this bbs but it seems you know what you are talking about, theological speaking.
My question is: do you believe, seriously, in Intelligent Design?
Why this question. Readers should know that this belief is almost exclusive to the USA. Religious from all other the world aren't found on it, most don't even know his existance.
I'm 50% protestant & 50% catholic but i'm agnostic since my teenage years. It doesn't mean that I know everything about Cahtolic or Protestant but i've been around quite a few religious from both side. Darwin isn't loved by them, mind you, even if I know one Catholic priest that believe in it.
But none of them, i mean not a single one, think that "Intelligent Design" is a science, or something we have to give credit for.
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It must be good science... A rabbi endorses it!
:aok
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There's a science industry in America? When did this happen? I've heard stories of such a thing....
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I heard a nice joke idea from some guest of John Stewart........
If you don't belive in evolution you shouldn't be allowed to get a flu shot...... because if there is no evolution, the flu doesn't evolve and your immune! So you don't need a shot, do you? :D
I can't belive people still try to debate science with guessing......
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Does intelligent design postulate that a supreme being created everything as it is now? Is it possible that the intelligent design was started, by the designer, with the idea that it follow a darwinian style path?
Seagoon, are you postulating that there are Christians in the Vatican that are Catholic, or that there are non Catholics in the Vatican thereby providing the Christian aspect to the statement you posted above?
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Originally posted by BluKitty
I heard a nice joke idea from some guest of John Stewart........
If you don't belive in evolution you shouldn't be allowed to get a flu shot...... because if there is no evolution, the flu doesn't evolve and your immune! So you don't need a shot, do you? :D
I can't belive people still try to debate science with guessing......
Not this one again. :rolleyes:
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Hi Maverick,
Originally posted by Maverick
Seagoon, are you postulating that there are Christians in the Vatican that are Catholic, or that there are non Catholics in the Vatican thereby providing the Christian aspect to the statement you posted above?
I'm sure you are aware of this, but there are Presbyterians, Methodists, and even Baptists who don't believe a word of the bible. There are even clergy in those denominations who fit into that category. In any denomination as vast as the Catholic Church, you have theological conservatives and then you have men in the Priesthood rather like the one who announced to the boys in my Catholic school class many years ago, "now even though we have advanced enough to know that most of the things in the bible didn't really happen, we still have a duty to good unto others, because in the end thats whats important." These men, who can be described as liberal Christians make up a very large and active bloc, even in the Vatican. Ratzinger (now Benedict) for the most part is a very traditional Roman Catholic, but the same cannot be said for every other Priest, Bishop, and Cardinal in Vatican City.
- SEAGOON
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Hi Ouaibe,
Originally posted by Ouaibe
Seagoon, I don't read every post on this bbs but it seems you know what you are talking about, theological speaking.
My question is: do you believe, seriously, in Intelligent Design?
Why this question. Readers should know that this belief is almost exclusive to the USA. Religious from all other the world aren't found on it, most don't even know his existance.
I'm 50% protestant & 50% catholic but i'm agnostic since my teenage years. It doesn't mean that I know everything about Cahtolic or Protestant but i've been around quite a few religious from both side. Darwin isn't loved by them, mind you, even if I know one Catholic priest that believe in it.
But none of them, i mean not a single one, think that "Intelligent Design" is a science, or something we have to give credit for.
I'm probably much too tired to be answering your question, but I'll give it a shot anyway, please forgive me if I'm unclear.
I am not personally a believer in Intelligent Design as it is propounded by scientists like Behe and Dembski, I am a Biblical creationist. In other words, while they would remain skeptical about the literal truth of Genesis 1 & 2, I am not. Some of the most heated arguments I've had on the subject of origins have actually been with ID proponents, one of whom angrily told me that it was guys like me who allow them to be so easily caricatured (then again he was already angry about my feelings about John 14:6). We do agree however on certain basic assumptions, such as the fact that from nothing, nothing comes (ex nihilo, nihil fit).
Being of European extraction myself, I understand the general feeling towards ID in Europe. Neo-Darwinism has been considered established fact there for so long, and atheism has been so long entrenched that to even suggest that organisms might have been designed by a creator (or creators) rather than being the products of time & chance is roughly the equivalent of suggesting that the earth orbited the Sun and not vice versa in the 1300s. Scientific Materialism, has long been the new priesthood of Europe (and the American intelligentsia) and their dogmas are considered well-nigh unquestionable. Even other Scientific Materialists who have questioned the ability of the Neo-Darwinian paradigm to contain the evidence are treated as heretics these days, so any IDer is bound to get run out on a rail (as happened recently at the Smithsonian).
[Oh, and having posted this, you will soon also get the chance to hear from others why this is all ridiculous. I'll save them at least a little time; the reason I believe all of this is because I am an intolerant, fanatical idiot, who has fallen from his previously enlightened understanding of the ultimate pointlessness of existence into silly and childish superstition. Cue the Spaghetti monster, Doonesbury cartoons, etc.]
- SEAGOON
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I don't think it's ridiculous Seagoon. Quite the opposite. I believe the best scientists innately understand God created all things, and work with the idea of knowing that there are many things in the Universe which man has no answer for, and which are beyond our ken. It is the mystery and acceptance of God's existence which inspires effort to try to find the answers (perhaps within reach, perhaps not), and in that process sometimes a discovery is made which may have nothing to do with the original research. This might be called a "happy mistake" or could even be solved by a dream.
It is not a coincidence that artists and creative people can be and often are excellent scientists if they join that field, but scientists rarely make good artists when they try their hand at it. I'm not sure why this is, but just about every artist I know is either religious or attributes their skills as a gift from God. Try this and ask an artist sometime and see what they say. Not all but I bet most would give much spiritual credence as a reason why they do what they do. This involves devotion and hard work without much worldly reward or recognition. Why continue if not for a sense of purpose? Because it is a search for meaning and truth...to make some sense of this world.
As for any who call it ridiculous. Seagoon, I wouldn't worry about that too much because it's not ridiculous at all. In any event, a serious scientific think tank would steer clear of saying that to someone's idea, or even remotely imply it in any form or fashion.
Les
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I'm just glad scientology is the only true religion and all this discussion is mute...
Tronsky
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Originally posted by Leslie
I don't think it's ridiculous Seagoon. Quite the opposite. I believe the best scientists innately understand God created all things, and work with the idea of knowing that there are many things in the Universe which man has no answer for, and which are beyond our ken.
ummm .... few hundred years ago, God let his "good" followers to burn people because they said, that there is no heaven in the sky, but there is a space with planets and stars.
Today, when sience beated all those stupid fanatics, and their list of mistries is getting smaller and smaller an the earth, they will teach us about Gods secrets in the space.
ummmm.... religion is easies form how to spoil people and all religion leaders realize it very well.
Since the start most of the religion have same goal.
Spread, and control as much power and resources as possible.
word God.... is excuse for most bloody killers of all times.
its so easy to imagine nothing after death. Just try it and get used to feeling of non existence.
anyway greeting from Kermanshah
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Originally posted by -tronski-
I'm just glad scientology is the only true religion and all this discussion is mute...
Tronsky
diference about the science and religion is, that religions are always right.
While science accept, that it might be wrong and is opened for discusion and new ideas.
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Originally posted by Maverick
Does intelligent design postulate that a supreme being created everything as it is now? Is it possible that the intelligent design was started, by the designer, with the idea that it follow a darwinian style path?
All of this make sense....until you ask yourself who (or what) designed the designer...
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Originally posted by deSelys
All of this make sense....until you ask yourself who (or what) designed the designer...
God dear boy, God. God is the creator. silly euros, always complicating things.
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one corection lala.... governments are the biggest killers of all time... mostly your-0-peean governments and eastern and african.
lazs
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Originally posted by Maverick
Does intelligent design postulate that a supreme being created everything as it is now? Is it possible that the intelligent design was started, by the designer, with the idea that it follow a darwinian style path?
Seagoon, are you postulating that there are Christians in the Vatican that are Catholic, or that there are non Catholics in the Vatican thereby providing the Christian aspect to the statement you posted above?
I'm quoting my own post here since of the questions I brought forward none were answered. The first section was totally ignored and the second received an answer to a question I did not ask.
I'd really like to see where the answers to the first question go. As to the second paragraph I seem to recall that it addresses a contradictory position from an earlier thread.
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Hi Maverick,
Sorry, I thought I'd at least answered question 2, it may just be that I don't understand what you are asking. I'll take another stab at it, please let me know where I'm going wrong.
Originally posted by Maverick
(1)Does intelligent design postulate that a supreme being created everything as it is now? Is it possible that the intelligent design was started, by the designer, with the idea that it follow a darwinian style path?
(2)Seagoon, are you postulating that there are Christians in the Vatican that are Catholic, or that there are non Catholics in the Vatican thereby providing the Christian aspect to the statement you posted above?
1) ID as it is understood by ID scientists, looks at the current scientific data and concludes that it cannot be explained by development via random mutation. It looks at biochemical processes and structures and concludes that there is an irreducible complexity to them that would lead one to conclude that they are designed. As to who designed them and to what ultimate ends, ID does not claim to be able to answer that.
So, for instance, their conclusion is that a Bacterium is a designed organism, however they concur that within the species, mutations occur. So that, for instance, when a potent antibiotic is introduced the bacterium population gradually develops a resistance. However, they look at the evidence and conclude that mutation is incapable of adding information to the DNA structure and thus allowing Bacteria to become something other than Bacteria.
ID accepts Evolution within the species, but concludes that Evolution from one species to another has been disproved by the evidence and that assuming as one Neo-Darwinist Paleontologist put it "That Evolution is something that is always going on somewhere else" is intellectually the equivalent of blind faith.
What you are describing: "that the intelligent design was started, by the designer, with the idea that it follow a darwinian style path? is not ID, it is called Theistic Evolution and is generally embraced by many modern Christians who believe evolution but want to hold on to some vestige of faith. Theistic Evolution is embraced by a few mainstream scientists, but rejected by consistent Neo-Darwinists like Dawkins et al (Darwin and T.H. Huxley both argued vigorously against it stating that any tinkering by a higher power would nullify the entire concept of "natural selection" and destroy the heart of the Evolutionary theory).
ID denies Theistic Evolution because it finds the evidence for evolution, to be lacking. In other words, why assert that organisms were gradually designed via evolution guided by a designer when you don't think that evolution as an engine can design a new organism or fundamentally modify an existing one.
2) Neither. I was pointing out that there are people and clergy who don't believe the Bible in every major denomination on earth.
- SEAGOON
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As long as we view things from different glasses we will continue to see things differently, even if we look at the same thing.
You can read the full write up here
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i1/creation.asp (http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i1/creation.asp)
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Past and present
We all exist in the present—and the facts all exist in the present. When one is trying to understand how the evidence came about (Where did the animals come from? How did the fossil layers form? etc.), what we are actually trying to do is to connect the past to the present.
However, if we weren’t there in the past to observe events, how can we know what happened so we can explain the present? It would be great to have a time machine so we could know for sure about past events.
Christians of course claim they do, in a sense, have a ‘time machine’. They have a book called the Bible which claims to be the Word of God who has always been there, and has revealed to us the major events of the past about which we need to know.
On the basis of these events (Creation, Fall, Flood, Babel, etc.), we have a set of presuppositions to build a way of thinking which enables us to interpret the evidence of the present.
Evolutionists have certain beliefs about the past/present that they presuppose, e.g. no God (or at least none who performed acts of special creation), so they build a different way of thinking to interpret the evidence of the present.
Thus, when Christians and non-Christians argue about the evidence, in reality they are arguing about their interpretations based on their presuppositions.
That’s why the argument often turns into something like:
‘Can’t you see what I’m talking about?’
‘No, I can’t. Don’t you see how wrong you are?’
‘No, I’m not wrong. It’s obvious that I’m right.’
‘No, it’s not obvious.’ And so on.
These two people are arguing about the same evidence, but they are looking at the evidence through different glasses.
It’s not until these two people recognize the argument is really about the presuppositions they have to start with, that they will begin to deal with the foundational reasons for their different beliefs. A person will not interpret the evidence differently until they put on a different set of glasses—which means to change one’s presuppositions.
I’ve found that a Christian who understands these things can actually put on the evolutionist’s glasses (without accepting the presuppositions as true) and understand how they look at evidence. However, for a number of reasons, including spiritual ones, a non-Christian usually can’t put on the Christian’s glasses—unless they recognize the presuppositional nature of the battle and are thus beginning to question their own presuppositions.
It is of course sometimes possible that just by presenting ‘evidence’, you can convince a person that a particular scientific argument for creation makes sense ‘on the facts’. But usually, if that person then hears a different interpretation of the same evidence that seems better than yours, that person will swing away from your argument, thinking they have found ‘stronger facts’.
However, if you had helped the person to understand this issue of presuppositions, then they will be better able to recognize this for what it is—a different interpretation based on differing presuppositions—i.e. starting beliefs.
As a teacher, I found that whenever I taught the students what I thought were the ‘facts’ for creation, then their other teacher would just re-interpret the facts. The students would then come back to me saying, ‘Well sir, you need to try again.’
However, when I learned to teach my students how we interpret facts, and how interpretations are based on our presuppositions, then when the other teacher tried to reinterpret the facts, the students would challenge the teacher’s basic assumptions. Then it wasn’t the students who came back to me, but the other teacher! This teacher was upset with me because the students wouldn’t accept her interpretation of the evidence and challenged the very basis of her thinking.
What was happening was that I had learned to teach the students how to think rather than just what to think. What a difference that made to my class! I have been overjoyed to find, sometimes decades later, some of those students telling me how they became active, solid Christians as a result.
Debate terms
If one agrees to a discussion without using the Bible as some people insist, then they have set the terms of the debate. In essence these terms are:
‘Facts’ are neutral. However, there are no such things as ‘brute facts’; all facts are interpreted. Once the Bible is eliminated in the argument, then the Christians’ presuppositions are gone, leaving them unable to effectively give an alternate interpretation of the facts. Their opponents then have the upper hand as they still have their presuppositions — see Naturalism, logic and reality.
Truth can/should be determined independent of God. However, the Bible states: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Psalm 111:10); ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge’ (Proverbs 1:7). ‘But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned’ (1 Corinthians 2:14).
A Christian cannot divorce the spiritual nature of the battle from the battle itself. A non-Christian is not neutral. The Bible makes this very clear: ‘The one who is not with Me is against Me, and the one who does not gather with Me scatters’ (Matthew 12:30); ‘And this is the condemnation, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the Light, because their deeds were evil’ (John 3:19).
Agreeing to such terms of debate also implicitly accepts their proposition that the Bible’s account of the universe’s history is irrelevant to understanding that history!
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BTW like Seagoon, I too am a creationist.
Lambo
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'scholars of intelligent design' = oxymoron
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Originally posted by lambo31
Past and present
Good read Lambo, thanks for posting it.
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I still don't get this debate. I happen to think that a system of physical laws which results in evolution is one hell of an intelligent design.
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ID Scientist = Oxymoron
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Hi Octavious, MT,
Originally posted by Octavius
'scholars of intelligent design' = oxymoron
I'm used to being treated like an idiot, I am after all an evangelical Pastor so it doesn't really offend me personally, so I'm just curious - doesn't this "anyone who doesn't believe in Neo-Darwinianism is an imbecile" ad hominem thing get old after a while?
I mean it's become such a standardized line of response, the poor schleps in the academy who do endorse ID have to respond to it first before they can ever even begin to tackle an argument. For instance:
Time and again, neo-Darwinists (the somewhat poor term I shall use to describe the defenders of the orthodox view) have accused Michael Behe and other IDers as completely ignorant and/or deceptive. Obviously I can’t speak for the entire movement – there are liars associated with every group of people – but from my limited investigations I don’t get the sense that Behe is either. Here is Behe himself responding to the charge of ignorance, leveled by posters at the talkorigins website:
"In this group of posts I am repeatedly said to be "ignorant." That may be true, but I think there is reason to give me the benefit of the doubt. I have a Ph. D. in biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania (received an award from Sigma Xi for "Best Thesis), postdoc'd for four years at the National Institutes of Health (as a Jane Coffin Childs Fund postdoctoral fellow), have been an academic biochemist for 14 years, have gained tenure at a reasonably rigorous university, have published a fair amount in the biochemical literature, and have continuously had my research funded by national agencies (including a five-year Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health) and currently have research funds.
Well, perhaps I am a real biochemist, but am simply "ignorant" of work on the evolution of irreducibly complex biochemical systems? Perhaps. But I am not unaware that evolution is a controversial subject, and certainly tried to cover all bases when researching and writing my book. I have no death wish. I do, after all, have to live with my departmental colleagues, a number of whom are Darwinists. So I searched the literature as thoroughly as I could for relevant information and tried to be as rigorous as possible. Perhaps there are step-by-step, Darwinian explanations in the literature for the complex systems I describe in my book, but if there are I haven't seen them, nor has anyone brought them to my attention.
My book has now been reviewed quite widely, including reviews by academic biochemists. Several of them were quite hostile to my idea of design, but all agreed that the systems I described are enormously complex and currently unexplained."
Now does the above sound like someone who is ignorant? Granted, I don’t have the background to verify the particular claims of ignorance; as an outsider, I can only evaluate things such as the character exhibited by the people in question. For what it’s worth, I think Behe’s response is probably how I would respond if a bunch of punks on an Internet site said I didn’t know the first thing about (say) international trade. (Ha ha, please don’t email me and say that that just proves I’m as ignorant as Behe. I can see that joke a mile away.)
Of course, there is another possibility. Maybe Behe isn’t an honest buffoon; maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing, and consciously preys on the naïveté of gullible Christians like me. Well, again, I don’t think so. For example, if you followed the news coverage of the Dover trial, you probably heard something to the effect of this: "Michael Behe, star witness for the defense, was forced to admit on the stand that Intelligent Design had the same scientific validity as astrology."
If you heard that at the time, weren’t you surprised? I know I was. Funny thing is, if you go to the actual transcript (use your Find feature to look for "astrology" and then back up a few sentences to get the context), you’ll see that the typical description is very misleading indeed. (When I debated ID on a blog, I was informed: "Now we have ID people who want to teach something they themselves admit is on the same scientific level as astrology.") Behe was explaining why he thought ID was a scientific theory (and hence, why it could be taught in a public school while not violating the separation of church and state). To put it very loosely, Behe said that a scientific theory explains numerous observations about the natural world by reference to some unifying principle, and that this indeed is what ID does in biology. Naturally Behe did not add the caveat, "To qualify as ‘scientific,’ a conjecture must first command the assent of at least 95% of the relevant scientists."
Of course the lawyer pounced and asked Behe if astrology would count as a scientific theory under this definition, to which Behe replied "yes." Now, Behe isn’t an idiot, at least when it comes to publicity, right? He knew full well why that question was being asked, and he knew his admission would be splashed all over the newspapers. So if he were truly intellectually dishonest, why wouldn’t he dodge the question? Why wouldn’t he act, say, as Bush or Kerry did during their debates?
From:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&program=News&id=3156&callingPage=discoMainPage
I wonder, was Darwin the first real "scholar" ever in the Scientific community? Was "smart" not a term we could apply to scientists until atheistic materialism and not some form of theism became the reigning orthodoxy in the Scientific community? What idiots Keppler and Newton were, thinking there was some sort of creator thingee who made everything whose wonderful handiwork they were discovering. Fnar, Fnar, scholars! Heh!
- SEAGOON
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I don't mean to nitpick (OK, that's just a lie), but I didn't notice either MT or Oct mention anything about Neo-Darwinianism one way or the other. Looked more like quips at the merits of ID.
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Let's ignore all the other rhetoric and consentrate on this for a minute:
"To qualify as ‘scientific,’ a conjecture must first command the assent of at least 95% of the relevant scientists."
No, but a new "discovery" must be published to be recognized, then it must be peer reviewed then it must be reproducable and then...only then... should we subject our kids to it.
Velicovski had a theory that was printed in a book with significant sales. He too is a scientist. He postulated that Venus broke off from Jupiter, and caused the Earth to stop spinning at precisly the same time that Joshua asked and the Sun stopped. Then it continued on by and parked itself in orbit between the Earth and Mercury.
Should we teach that one in school too?
Maybe you think I'm denying the possibility that "God did it". Hardly. I'm denying the fact that any experiment or evidence that ends with the conclusion that "God did it" is science. It is religion.
Or put it another way. Are you willing to place the fact of "God" on the scientific chopping block? If a chemist were to show that a particular protein could have naturally evolved... would you be willing to teach that "God didn't do it" in your school?
And please no "thats what we do now" dodges.
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Originally posted by midnight Target
No, but a new "discovery" must be published to be recognized, then it must be peer reviewed then it must be reproducable and then...only then... should we subject our kids to it.
I guess the big bang theory shouldn't be taught to the kids then.
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Why not?
Read this (regarding the fact that there was a big bang... lots of evidence for that, what came before is still up for grabs)
The Evidence
(1) General Relativity and Vacuum Energy Imply a Big Bang Inflation Event
When Einstein applied the equations of General Relativity to the entire universe, rather than just the solar system, he found they predicted either that the universe must expand from or collapse to a singularity. Einstein eliminated this result by arbitrarily adding a "cosmological constant" that balanced everything out. As Parker notes, "Einstein was reluctant to add the term. It destroyed the simplicity and beauty of his equations" (p. 51). As Einstein himself said, "If Hubble's expansion had been discovered at the time of the creation of the general theory of relativity, the cosmological member would never have been introduced. It seems now so much less justified to introduce such a member into the field equations" (Letter of 1932, quoted by Parker, p. 59).
When later scientists worked out all the possible solutions to this problem, it was found that the entire universe would inevitably have one of several particular shapes. Some of those shapes included a singularity at the beginning of time followed by an expansion: a Big Bang. As it happens, the known properties of the universe as presently observed entail that only one of those descriptions can be correct. So the universe had to have begun as a singularity. The only way this could not be correct is if General Relativity is false (and that is unlikely: it is very well corroborated) or if some as-yet unknown force or factor prevented it. Some theorists, like Stephen Hawking, argue that quantum theory is such a factor, that quantum uncertainty makes a singularity impossible, but this has not yet been proven. And even if that is correct, the Big Bang theory only changes in one minor detail--the observable universe still begins very, very small.
Much later it was noticed that such a Big Bang event would experience a very brief period of "supercooling" which would cause a rapid but brief period of "inflation," at least if we are right about currently-accepted physics. This in turn predicts many peculiar observations, like the near-perfect density, smootheness and flatness of the universe. Though Inflation Theory does not explain everything or fit all the facts, it has two things going for it: it appears to be independently predicted by other physical laws, and it explains a lot that otherwise would remain a mystery. Still, many physicists remain skeptical of Inflation Theory, even as they agree that the Big Bang theory is probably true.
(2) Expansion is Confirmed by Multiple Lines of Evidence.
There are five independent lines of evidence that all converge on a common conclusion: the universe began between 14 and 15 billion years ago in a superheated state where even atoms could not form, and has rapidly expanded and cooled ever since.[5]
The first and most important piece of evidence is the observation of redshifts, which can only be explained by assuming that every galaxy cluster in the universe is moving away from every other: the more distant, the greater the speed. Though many scientists have shown or argued that some redshift has other causes, these explanations do not account for even a significant fraction of the observed objects, or of the observed redshift overall, which is simply too enormous to be accounted for by any other known means. The most obvious contrary explanation is that something to do with the space the light passes through causes the frequency to decay, but this has been soundly refuted by two observations. First, the expansion rate is accelerating, which only a change in velocity can explain (since the rate of a space-caused decay could not change but would have to be constant).[6] Second, many observations of redshifted objects have been made whose light is split by a gravitational lens. These studies show that even when light coming from the same object traverses different distances, the redshift remains the same.[7] So light is not decaying as it passes through space. The redshift must originate with the object, and only velocity can explain that.
The five independent lines of evidence for the universe's age are as follows:
First, taking into account all known factors, including the recently-confirmed acceleration of the cosmic expansion rate, scientists have shown that if you rewind the observed behavior of the known universe, it all comes together in a tiny, superheated state about 14.5 billion years ago.
Second, we have confirmed that the oldest stars in our own galaxy are between 12 and 13 billion years old. Though Pickrell (cf. n. 5) notes that these "were probably not among the universe's very first stars," they would have formed no more than a billion years after the cosmos itself began to form. Though this only proves an age for our galaxy, not necessarily the universe, the result of 14 billion years perfectly matches the most recent calculation of the projected start-point for the universe's observed expansion.
Third, the most distant galaxy yet observed, based on the most precise and accurate observations to date, lies between 12 and 13 billion lightyears away, and thus is just as old as ours.
Fourth, the observed interstellar abundance of certain radioactive elements, calculating backwards from their known rate of decay, entails that they must have been produced at least 12 to 13 billion years ago, about the time we would expect them to have formed if the universe began about 15 billion years ago.
Fifth, the current calculated age of various globular clusters beyond our galaxy is no more than 15 billion years. This corroborates an age of the universe of about 15 billion years.
These five facts, especially in combination with all the other "evidences" ennumerated in this essay, would be a remarkable coincidence if the universe didn't in fact originate between 14 and 15 billion years ago. So it probably did.
It must be noted that Lerner discusses experimental evidence that the pressure-action of light itself, upon galactic or stellar magnetic fields, would inevitably accelerate all objects away from each other: in other words, there is a possible explanation of expansion other than a Big Bang, indeed, an explanation of accelerating expansion. And despite critics who originally attacked this suggestion, intergalactic magnetic fields have recently been demonstrated to exist on a vast scale.[8] Many other theories could perhaps account for it, too. However, all the other evidence concurs with a Big Bang event, not any of these other theories.
Likewise, M-Theory has recently provided an alternative that is just as successful as Inflation Theory without any Big Bang as ordinarily conceived. Called the ekpyriotic or "brane" theory, developed by Dr. Paul Steinhardt and others, this theorizes a "Big Collision" instead of a Big Bang.[9] Or, as Boslough puts it, "Maybe the big bang was just a big bang, an explosion in our little neighborhood of the universe that was neither the beginning of time nor the creation of the cosmos. Nobody knows."[10] This fact should be kept in mind throughout this paper: Big Bang theory is consistent with many different interpretations of the originating event. It is not solely tied to Singularity or Inflation Theory, nor does it entail that nothing else exists apart from what we observe: there may be other universes, and even this universe is probably much larger than we will ever see.
(3) The Microwave Background Radiation is Consistent with a Big Bang Event
Not only did Big Bang Theory predict a microwave background glow, it exactly predicted its temperature. Though there are problems with the exact pattern of that radiation, and though there may yet be other causes for it,[11] no one has demonstrated any better explanation to be correct. In contrast, analysis of the microwave background as observed by numerous independent instruments confirms certain features that suggest the universe was indeed in a superheated state (indeed, the very state that "Inflation" would have ended with) about 14 billion years ago. The evidence is of sound waves that passed through the early superheated universe, in such a way that predicts the current existence of roughly 4.5% "baryonic matter," based on experimentally proven ratios in particle accelerators, which is almost exactly what we observe.[12] This is not a slam dunk proof, but it is very strong evidence that the universe was once in a superheated state 14 billion years ago, again corroborating the basic elements of the Big Bang Theory. No other theory can explain this acoustic peak, except theories already resembling the Big Bang, like Brane Theory..
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4) There are Too Many Light Elements to be Explained Any Other Way
I originally saw this as a failed evidence because we know too little to get anything like a precise ratio of light to heavy elements and thus could not base any argument on what that ratio was. However, on closer examination I found that this ambiguity does not matter so much. Even though a lot of matter remains unobserved, and the time and rate of star formation is not securely known so the actual ratio today is not securely known,[13] the vast quantity of key light elements that we do observe is far too great to be accounted for in any other way than by something like a Big Bang. Alternative theories are at present entirely speculative,[14] while Big Bang theory has experimental basis in particle physics.
This is most clear in the case of the verified presence of natural deuterium. Its quantity is not even important: its mere existence is inexplicable--except, so far, by the Big Bang theory. There is no other natural process known that can create stable deuterium. In fact, stars destroy this element. But the evidence doesn't end there: beginning at a superheated state entails a vast abundance of light elements over heavy, with more light elements in older epochs. Both observations are confirmed. The exact ratios are unknown, but everywhere (even in our own galaxy) older stars are comprised of more light elements than newer stars, and the vast scale of light elements is undeniable. There is simply way too much helium, for example, to explain by any other means. And no other theory can account for the precise kinds of light elements we observe in superabundance: not just any helium, for example, but only helium-3 and helium-4; not just any lithium, but lithium-7; and so on. Other light elements exist in only trace amounts. This is exactly what would be predicted if the universe began as a superheated mass of superhot protons and neutrons which then cooled, according to the experimental results of atomic physics.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/bigbangredux.shtml#intro1
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Seagoon, what SOB said. :) No attack intended...
I think it certainly has an oxymoron quality. If one subscribes to the basic premise of ID, one dismisses any drive to seek knowledge and understanding... much like waving a big white flag at the logos. "I strive to become content with what I know," is a bit strange.
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mt, in order for it to be taught, I thought you said it had to be reproducable?
Maybe someone has recreated the universe as it was before the big bang, then demonstrated how all the matter and energy was gathered into an infinitly small space, then decided to explode one day......... maybe I missed that experiment.
And yet this is what is being taught. How is that science?
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Nuke who cares whether it's "science" or not. It's the best explanation.
Do you have a better one? Is it any more reproducable?
Religion has no practical value.
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science has no explanation either. both require a leap of faith.
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So ID says there is no such thing as evolution and other than minor mutations everything is as it was set in motion bu the "Intelligent Designer". How does ID explain extinct species, like possibly the dinosaurs, or are those theories (fabrications) that haven't been proven to the satisfaction of adherants of ID?
As to question number 2. Nope you didn't answer that one. I didn't ask anything regarding bible or liberal. I just asked if now you are saying there are Catholics or Christians or are there Catholic Christians in the Vatican?
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Originally posted by NUKE
mt, in order for it to be taught, I thought you said it had to be reproducable?
Maybe someone has recreated the universe as it was before the big bang, then demonstrated how all the matter and energy was gathered into an infinitly small space, then decided to explode one day......... maybe I missed that experiment.
And yet this is what is being taught. How is that science?
Reproducable in this case refers to the evidence leading to the conclusion.
I'm guessing you didn't read the evidence.
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Originally posted by midnight Target
Reproducable in this case refers to the evidence leading to the conclusion.
I'm guessing you didn't read the evidence.
I'm guessing that you are ignoring the fact that the idea of all the energy and matter in our universe being concentrated into an infinetly small space is not scientific in any way.
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Why not?
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because an infenitly small space (think about it) containing all the matter in the universe is impossible.
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Nuke, first define why it is not scientific. Secondly your proof of your statement is?
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Hi Mav,
Originally posted by Maverick
So ID says there is no such thing as evolution and other than minor mutations everything is as it was set in motion bu the "Intelligent Designer". How does ID explain extinct species, like possibly the dinosaurs, or are those theories (fabrications) that haven't been proven to the satisfaction of adherants of ID?
One of the things that has thrown yet another Monkey wrench in the Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory is what is called the "Cambrian explosion." If one examines the fossil record, in the strata scientists assign to the Cambrian era, you suddenly have a myriad of new lifeforms that appear "out of no where." Darwinian Paleontologists initially speculated that the lifeforms that they evolved from where soft-bodied and thus left behind no fossil evidence, but new evidence, especially from the Chengjiang fossil beds shows that we have soft bodied fossils of sponge spores in the Pre-Cambrian strata. Moreover, from the Cambrian period onwards, we see the "tree of life" being whittled down to fewer lifeforms as various species became extinct rather than spreading out. ID proponents affirm that the fossil evidence states that many of the Cambrian species became extinct.
Extinction isn't doubted by the IDer, fossil evidence indicates that there are several species that no longer exist, Dinosaurs for instance. The origin of those species is what is debated. Where did that sudden "Big Bang" of lifeforms in the Cambrian strata come from? We go from hardly any life-forms to a boatload in one leap.
Anyway, please understand Maverick that ID scientists work off the same data that Neo-Darwinians do, find a fossil, date it as billions of years old, classify it and the IDer has no problem, they aren't going to argue the age or any of the other empirical evidence. These guys are not young earth creationists. The major difference is in "the gaps" - i.e. what the empirical evidence doesn't tell us. Neo-Darwinians have their own theories explaining the gap between say Dinosaurs and Birds, gradual mutation changed these Lizards into birds. Let me point out how that works in application:
Evidence: Dinosaur Fossils (earlier strata) Bird Fossils (later strata)
Neo-Darwinian (orthodox) - Natural Selection caused the mutation of Lizards into Birds. Someday we'll find fossils showing us how that transition occurred.
Neo-Darwinian (punctuated equilibrium) - Yes, Lizards became birds, but the time gap doesn't allow enough time for the gradual mutation you speculate about, also this "eventually we'll find the transitional fossils" thing is getting lame, we've had long enough to find them. Also, something between an arm and wing is actually less useful than either and thus natural selection would eliminate such a mutation. What happened is rapid mutation i.e. two lizards laid eggs and out popped a birds, who mated and whamo we have a bird population.
IDer Dinosaurs appeared, birds appeared. Birds are not the result of the mutation gradual or rapid of Dinosaurs, they are a new species.
As to question number 2. Nope you didn't answer that one. I didn't ask anything regarding bible or liberal. I just asked if now you are saying there are Catholics or Christians or are there Catholic Christians in the Vatican?
Just out of curiousity, why are you pressing me on this "are Catholics Christians" thing in this thread? Is this really the kind of forum where we can debate the merits of the Reformation or whether Justification by Faith Alone is really the article upon which the church stands or falls? Given that in this thread the majority of people posting don't accept that the Bible is literally the word of God, or even if there is a God, a debate on the meaning of the Bible which assumes that it is the Word of God would seem to me to be an absurdity. There are plenty of Christian Apologetics blogs and sites on the net where that argument can be constructively debated, but here all that is going to get generated is emotion and ad homs. As I said, here one has to fight for the most basic tenets of the Christian faith, let alone the more complex ones. "Is there a God and did He create the World?" is for instance far, far, more basic and fundamental a question than whether Peter was the first Pope and yet it's not something that one can establish here. Heck, here I'm pleasantly surprised when I encounter committed monotheists. So, you want a private opinion? Are there Catholic Christians? Yes. So can we close line of inquiry #2?
- SEAGOON
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Q: What came after the "Big Bang" ?
A: The "Big Cigarette"!
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Originally posted by NUKE
because an infenitly small space (think about it) containing all the matter in the universe is impossible.
See Maverick's reply.
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Originally posted by NUKE
because an infenitly small space (think about it) containing all the matter in the universe is impossible.
Relativity, which can be shown by experiment to be accurate to a high degree, and the expansion of the universe, which has been measured and verified, combine by the use of logic to imply the big bang.
When the universe shrinks to the point when quantum and relativity collide, the conjecture occurs. There is no theory which shows what really happened at the first moment (what is it, t+10e-40 seconds or so), but theory is pretty sound until that point.
Why is an infinitely small universe any more mind bending than an infintely large universe? I'll bet you can't get your mind around the thought that there is nothing before t=0, no space, no time... I know I can't.
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Before I go to bed, I must share one of my favorite sentences ever written by a Neo-Darwinist. I always get a chuckle from this 'un.
Due to the rarity of preservation and the likelihood that speciation occurs in small populations during geologically short periods of time, transitions between species are uncommon in the fossil record.
For the benefit of those who don't understand what's so funny. It's an explanation for why we still haven't found the transitional fossils. It's a breathtaking statement of unshakeable faith.
They existed, we know that because they must have existed, because evolution is true. You see they just weren't preserved, their preservation was therefore rare. And you see, evolution was always happening in places we haven't yet looked, you know small populations unlikely to produce fossil beds. That's why they are so uncommon.
I have a theory that depends on evidence that hasn't been discovered, the evidence is there, just not in the places you'd expect to find it. In fact, nowhere where you might look. I also have a theory that explains why that is. Both of these theories are facts. You can tell that because you learn them in school, and we wouldn't teach something unsupported or nonfactual in school. This is after all not a church. Can I get an Amen?
- SEAGOON
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Stephen Hawking might give someone a dollar if they can combine quantum mechanics with general relativity.. :)
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What I find amusing is that you got all that from that one little sentence.
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Lambo:These two people are arguing about the same evidence, but they are looking at the evidence through different glasses.
No they are not looking at the same evidence.
Only one is looking at evidence.
The scientist.
The religious person is looking to a book.
Nothing more and nothing less.
Faith/Cult/Religious beliefs are philosophical and not scientific.
Creationism passes not one scientific test. Not one.
Evolution passes thousands of real world tests.
The Theory of Evolution is accepted as fact based on scientific requirements no matter how much the Christian Fanatics want it to be otherwise.
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Originally posted by Seagoon
Before I go to bed, I must share one of my favorite sentences ever written by a Neo-Darwinist. I always get a chuckle from this 'un.
Due to the rarity of preservation and the likelihood that speciation occurs in small populations during geologically short periods of time, transitions between species are uncommon in the fossil record.
For the benefit of those who don't understand what's so funny. It's an explanation for why we still haven't found the transitional fossils. It's a breathtaking statement of unshakeable faith.
They existed, we know that because they must have existed, because evolution is true. You see they just weren't preserved, their preservation was therefore rare. And you see, evolution was always happening in places we haven't yet looked, you know small populations unlikely to produce fossil beds. That's why they are so uncommon.
I have a theory that depends on evidence that hasn't been discovered, the evidence is there, just not in the places you'd expect to find it. In fact, nowhere where you might look. I also have a theory that explains why that is. Both of these theories are facts. You can tell that because you learn them in school, and we wouldn't teach something unsupported or nonfactual in school. This is after all not a church. Can I get an Amen?
- SEAGOON
Seagoon the missing LINKS are few. Because a few links are missing does not mean that evolution isnt fact.
The evidence of evolution is vast and universally accepted in all reputable scientific circles as FACT.
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As FACT? Really?
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governments are the biggest killers of all time... mostly your-0-peean governments and eastern and african.
Influenza, malaria and cholera are usurped by governments? Are you sure about that?
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Hi SOB,
Originally posted by SOB
As FACT? Really?
Of course its a fact, what are you a heretic or something? ;)
(Lew illustrated my above point beautifully, albeit unintentionally. Clearly I'm not over-reading those sentences.)
- SEAGOON
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"no transitional fossils?"
BS Mr. Seagoon.
There are hundreds.
But here is just a small sample:
Transition from amphibians to amniotes (first reptiles)
Proterogyrinus or another early anthracosaur (late Mississippian) -- Classic labyrinthodont-amphibian skull and teeth, but with reptilian vertebrae, pelvis, humerus, and digits. Still has fish skull hinge. Amphibian ankle. 5-toed hand and a 2-3-4-5-3 (almost reptilian) phalangeal count.
Limnoscelis, Tseajaia (late Carboniferous) -- Amphibians apparently derived from the early anthracosaurs, but with additional reptilian features: structure of braincase, reptilian jaw muscle, expanded neural arches.
Solenodonsaurus (mid-Pennsylvanian) -- An incomplete fossil, apparently between the anthracosaurs and the cotylosaurs. Loss of palatal fangs, loss of lateral line on head, etc. Still just a single sacral vertebra, though.
Hylonomus, Paleothyris (early Pennsylvanian) -- These are protorothyrids, very early cotylosaurs (primitive reptiles). They were quite little, lizard-sized animals with amphibian-like skulls (amphibian pineal opening, dermal bone, etc.), shoulder, pelvis, & limbs, and intermediate teeth and vertebrae. Rest of skeleton reptilian, with reptilian jaw muscle, no palatal fangs, and spool-shaped vertebral centra. Probably no eardrum yet. Many of these new "reptilian" features are also seen in little amphibians (which also sometimes have direct-developing eggs laid on land), so perhaps these features just came along with the small body size of the first reptiles.
from http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part1b.html
- There is no theory of evolution, just a list of creatures Chuck Norris allows to live
:)
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Silat, I hope we can agree to disagree and still count one another as friends, even if it is an online friendship. Both were looking at the same evidence, but both are using different presuppositions to study the evidence. Unless a person believes in the Creator it would be really hard for them to see where Creationists have a leg to stand on. As my prior post states, it goes back to our presuppositions. Before I became a Christian Creationist didn't make sense to me either. But then neither did Evelutionist bacause they were constantly changing their "facts". Now that I am a Christian and look at things from a biblical stand point these things make sense to me. I would like to go into this further but my little girl needs some attention :)
Lambo
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Seagoon,
Am I reading this right?
IDer Dinosaurs appeared, birds appeared. Birds are not the result of the mutation gradual or rapid of Dinosaurs, they are a new species.
The ID adherant does not have empirical evidence to their satisfaction, (I am assuming fossiles that have both reptilian features and feathers like birds are unacceptable), and therefore postulates an "Intelligent Designer" just "made" a new species. A lack of suitable evidence is therefor explained in a theological manner?
I'm not trying to denigrate this. I want to understand where the IDer is coming from, if there is another source of their impetus other than a biblical one. I state that as I cannot accept a biblical reference as a "scientifically based proof" just a theological one.
As to question number 2 it is a carry over from a previous thread where you declined to give a specific answer. Here you did, thank you.
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Originally posted by Seagoon
Hi SOB,
Of course its a fact, what are you a heretic or something? ;)
(Lew illustrated my above point beautifully, albeit unintentionally. Clearly I'm not over-reading those sentences.)
- SEAGOON
I think you are overreading those sentences...unless you have more insight into the individual who is being quoted. Was it a quote from Silat?! ;)
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OK, my little girl is asleep for the moment and I'll try to add a little. I'm not trying to get into the Creation vs Evolution debate. Infact I will avoid it. I realize every individual has their own beliefs and I will respect those beliefs regardless even if I don't agree with them. I have been on both sides of this fence and have made some of the same arguments for evolution that I see here in this thread. Since getting a different pair of glasses, so to speak, I have made the same arguments for Creation.I have found that instead of winning this argument I tend to lose a friend. Now, I will not try to make you or anyone else swallow my beliefs and my "facts" as I see them. Must I swallow yours??
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I think you should find some better friends.
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Originally posted by SOB
I think you should find some better friends.
Wow! You must have a short list of friends... Only Christians and Creationists will do? But scientists are out...
Ill remind you that Christians are just Jews gone bad:)
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I think he means "friends who won't leave due to a debate over origins".
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What MT said ^
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Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory
August 17, 2005 | Issue 41•33
"my favorite quote"
Rev. Gabriel Burdett explains Intelligent Falling.
"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
Read the full article...so i guess nothing can turn the world upside down except...the big Kahuna
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512
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Intelligent grappling!!!!
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there are no "transitional fossils" in the fossil record and unless another Charles Dawson comes onto the scene there never will be any either. in any event you incredibly sharpened pinheads should continue to practice your faith. after all it's guaranteed you in the bill of rights. evolutionists and people who prescribe to that rubbish "science"are living proof that there are indeed people on earth who can look through a keyhole with both eyes simultaneously. they are also generally good for any evidence one would need in a "the ends justifies the means" case one wanted to present.
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Originally posted by storch
there are no "transitional fossils" in the fossil record and unless another Charles Dawson comes onto the scene there never will be any either.
Which tune do you hum when you stick your fingers in your ears?
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Originally posted by midnight Target
"no transitional fossils?"
BS Mr. Seagoon.
There are hundreds.
Hi MT,
Actually not to upset you, but I first found this point from reading popular books by evolutionists prior to becoming a Christian or believing in Creation. These days only the most vociferous of Darwinian Apologists (those for whom it really is a religion) are actually still trying to maintain that there are (barely) enough transitional lifeforms in the fossil data to demonstrate the origins of new species. Most of what is going on is backwards inference, in other words, this life-form could be related to the other because we see some apparently similar structures and we have to find something. But what we don't see is the clear and overwhelming evidence of progressive development that Darwin and Huxley were confident would be found and which was vital to the original theory. I could give some devastationg quotes from Gould or Eldrege on this point (nowhere near enough transitional fossils) but since they are punctuated equilibrium proponents and I quote them too often anyway, let me appeal to a piece by Phillip Skell which appeared in The Scientist on 8/29/2005. Not only does he make the point simply, he also does so in a piece which made the point that Darwinism has (as this thread demonstrates) become the fiercely defended but increasingly obsolete and irrelevant faith of Scientific materialism (which point Stephen J. Gould also made in his famous "Darwinian Fundamentalism" essay.)
Phillips S. Skell is is Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His research has included work on reactive intermediates in chemistry, free-atom reactions, and reactions of free carbonium ions. His full article is available online here:
http://www.the-scientist.com/2005/8/29/10/1/
Darwin's theory of evolution offers a sweeping explanation of the history of life, from the earliest microscopic organisms billions of years ago to all the plants and animals around us today. Much of the evidence that might have established the theory on an unshakable empirical foundation, however, remains lost in the distant past. For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since then we have found many ancient fossils – even exquisitely preserved soft-bodied creatures – but none are credible ancestors to the Cambrian animals.
Despite this and other difficulties, the modern form of Darwin's theory has been raised to its present high status because it's said to be the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. But is that correct? "While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky's dictum that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas," A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, wrote in 2000.[1] "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."
I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.
I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.
In the peer-reviewed literature, the word "evolution" often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for "evolution" some other word – "Buddhism," "Aztec cosmology," or even "creationism." I found that the substitution never touched the paper's core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.
In other words, Skell had the bad taste to point out that everyone who hopes to work in the Academy has to genuflect at the altar of Darwinism, but in reality this "cornerstone" theory has become so outmoded it isn't really relevant or helpful to disciplines like modern Biochemistry. The reasons however that Darwinism has to be defended and held on to long past its scientific "sell-by" date are philosophical and religious rather than Scientific as Neo-Darwinian defender Richard Dawkins pointed out:
"An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
So there is no way its going to be discarded until we have another credible paradigm that also supports atheism to take its place. Problem is, those trying to find such a paradigm are immediately accused of heresy whenever they publish, which rather slows down development.
- SEAGOON
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link (http://www.accessexcellence.org/WN/SUA12/dinobird398.html)
Washington, DC (3/20/98)- New prehistoric finds in Madagascar and the Mongolian desert provide valuable new evidence for the dinosaur-bird link hypothesis.
In Madagascar, a team of researchers led by paleontologist/anatomist Catherine Forster of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook found fossil remains of a sickle-clawed bird bearing a close relationship to therapod dinosaur anatomy.
The discovery of the new raven-sized fossil bird "is a wonderful example of how the fossil record provides the basic data for formulating, testing, and revising ideas about life through time," says Chris Maples, director of National Science Foundation's geology and paleontology program, which funded the research.
The fossil bird, dubbed Rahona ostromi (Ostrom's menace from the clouds), is 65 to 70 million years old, dating from the Late Cretaceous period.
A team of researchers from the American Museum of Natural History and George Washington University made another very important find in Mongolia- the first known skulls of an unusual group of prehistoric creatures called the Alvarezsauridae. This find provides further evidence in support of the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs, revealing an advanced stage in this transition. Numerous physical characteristics in the fossil skulls show that these strange creatures were actually early birds. Their unusual appearance also challenges the traditional view that all primitive birds looked similar to their modern-day cousins.
lucy link (http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/australopithecusafarensis.htm)
The Hadar sample (Australopithecus afarensis) is relatively extensive, and shows important differences with earlier samples from Laetoli. This species is also extremely important in that there is good evidence (from both the Laetoli footprints and examination of the lower limbs of the afarensis material) that the species was bipedal in a human-like manner (though this view is not shared by all.) This information for early bipedality "shook up" many complacent views about the origins of bipedality, but is less important (with regards to the earliest bipedal hominid) with the findings of earlier ramidus material that is also bipedal, and the idea that the ancestors of chimpanzees and gorillas was also likely bipedal.
It took about 3 minutes in Google to find information about possible evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds and another about our possible ancestors and ape ancestors.
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Well I went to your link, but you obviously didn't go to mine. And therein lies the entire point against teaching ID in science class. I would have no problem accepting scientific proof that evolution did not happen. You cannot and may not accept a non-directed universe. It would bring everything you believe crashing down on you. I have no problem with that, just don't teach it to my kids in science class.
By the way, the article you posted was very misleading. The author listed numerous studies in biology that did not consider Darwin; therefore Darwin cannot be the basic tenant of biology.
Clever but wrong. Einstein's special relativity rewrites Newton's law of gravity. Basically it covers those instances where Newton breaks down, like in a black hole. But people designing things on Earth can ignore Einstein and use Newton all they want. Does that make Einstein wrong? Does that reduce the significance of the Theory of Relativity? Hardly.
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Hi Holden,
Originally posted by Holden McGroin
It took about 3 minutes in Google to find information about possible evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds and another about our possible ancestors and ape ancestors.
This will probably be my last response on the BB tonight, as tomorrow is obviously the busiest day of the week for me. Anyway, unfortunately what you're doing above is precisely what I was referring to in a previous post. A few species are found that resemble another species and then there are speculations that this is an "ancestor." Scientifically its the equivalent of finding a Camaro in the junk yard at one level in a stack, and a Corvette beneath it and speculating that the Camaro developed from the Corvette based on functional similarities between the two.
I wish I could cram several years of reading on this subject into one thread, but it's not going to be possible. Look let me oversimplify and say that if evolution were working according to the traditional hypothesis referred to as "phyletic gradualism" presupposed by Darwin, we would see an easily discernable pattern of chains in the fossil beds, as species clearly "mutated" into other species. This however is not what we find. Eldredge and his late Colleague Stephen J. Gould have written reams on this subject alone:
"No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It seems never to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of changeover millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the organisms did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on someplace else. Yet that's how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution." (Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate, 1996)
"It is, indeed, a very curious state of affairs, I think, that paleontologists have been insisting that their record is consistent with slow, steady, gradual evolution where I think that privately, they’ve known for over a hundred years that such is not the case." (Eldredge, "Did Darwin Get It Wrong?" Nova 11/1/81))
"Paleontologists have paid an enormous price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study. ...The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change I usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.’" (Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, 1980)
"Most families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking evolutionarily derived descendant taxa with their presumed ancestors." (Eldredge, Macro-Evolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peaks, 1989)
Then there is the infamous Cambrian Explosion, the Biological Big Bang, that totally knackers phyletic gradualism:
"The “Cambrian explosion” refers to the geologically sudden appearance of many new animal body plans about 530 million years ago. At this time, at least nineteen, and perhaps as many as thirty-five phyla of forty total (Meyer et al. 2003), made their first appearance on earth within a narrow five- to ten-million-year window of geologic time (Bowring et al. 1993, 1998a:1, 1998b:40; Kerr 1993; Monastersky 1993; Aris-Brosou & Yang 2003). Many new subphyla, between 32 and 48 of 56 total (Meyer et al. 2003), and classes of animals also arose at this time with representatives of these new higher taxa manifesting significant morphological innovations. The Cambrian explosion thus marked a major episode of morphogenesis in which many new and disparate organismal forms arose in a geologically brief period of time.
To say that the fauna of the Cambrian period appeared in a geologically sudden manner also implies the absence of clear transitional intermediate forms connecting Cambrian animals with simpler pre-Cambrian forms. And, indeed, in almost all cases, the Cambrian animals have no clear morphological antecedents in earlier Vendian or Precambrian fauna (Miklos 1993, Erwin et al. 1997:132, Steiner & Reitner 2001, Conway Morris 2003b:510, Valentine et al. 2003:519-520). Further, several recent discoveries and analyses suggest that these morphological gaps may not be merely an artifact of incomplete sampling of the fossil record (Foote 1997, Foote et al. 1999, Benton & Ayala 2003, Meyer et al. 2003), suggesting that the fossil record is at least approximately reliable (Conway Morris 2003b:505)." (Meyer, PROCEEDINGS OF THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON, 117(2):213-239. 2004, "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories")
As Gould pointed out:
"Stepping way back and looking at too broad a scale, one might discern some sort of progress in life’s history. ...But the pattern dissolves upon close inspection. Most structural complexity entered in a grand burst at the Cambrian explosion, and the history of Phanerozoic life since then has largely been a tale of endless variation upon a set Bauplane. We may discern a few ‘vectors’ of directional change - thickening and ornamentation of shells...--but these are scarcely the stuff of progress in its usual sense." (Gould, "The Paradox of the First Tier: an Agenda for Paleobiology," Paleobiology, 1985)
- SEAGOON
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They grow them smart up at Penn State. :D
Anyway, what Seagoon and all of his quotes are saying is that we assume the connections. We don't actually have them.
Pretend for a second that the fossil record of development from Dinosaurs to Birds is the alphabet.
We have Dinosaur "A"
We have Bird "Z"
We have some species that share similar traits of both inbetween. If my memory of paleontology is still good (I used to be a huge dinosaur nerd), we have roughly F, M, and T.
Through assumption, we assume that there are different species "BCDE" that led into the development of "F" because we have "FMT" that (could) have led to the development of "Z."
However, these are all assumptions (for now). Because we have one, does that make the other true?
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Yep, Gould is a good one to quote....
Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution.
- Stephen J. Gould, " Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981
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Hi MT,
Originally posted by midnight Target
Yep, Gould is a good one to quote....
Yes, but today in High School biology textbooks, phyletic gradualism and natural selection are still taught as facts. In other words, even Darwin's mechanism may not be questioned at the institutional level. Gould's own alternate mechanism (punctuated equilibrium) which has now been around for over a quarter of a century doesn't even get a mention in them. We go on teaching as if the data that hasn't been found exists, and that the evidence that has been more recently compiled didn't exist. All of this thanks largely to the NCSE which insists on rigid adherence to the original components.
"What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection—when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality. Population genetics has worked out in theory, and validated in practice, an elegant, mathematical account of the large role that neutral, and therefore nonadaptive, changes play in the evolution of nucleotides, or individual units of DNA programs. Eyes may be adaptations, but most substitutions of one nucleotide for another within populations may not be adaptive.
...
My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life's major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection. The extended stability of most species, and the branching off of new species in geological moments (however slow by the irrelevant scale of a human life)—the pattern known as punctuated equilibrium—requires that long-term evolutionary trends be explained as the distinctive success of some species versus others, and not as a gradual accumulation of adaptations generated by organisms within a continuously evolving population. A trend may be set by high rates of branching in certain species within a larger group. But individual organisms do not branch; only populations do—and the causes of a population's branching can rarely be reduced to the adaptive improvement of its individuals.
...
Why then should Darwinian fundamentalism be expressing itself so stridently when most evolutionary biologists have become more pluralistic in the light of these new discoveries and theories? I am no psychologist, but I suppose that the devotees of any superficially attractive cult must dig in when a general threat arises. "That old time religion; it's good enough for me." There is something immensely beguiling about strict adaptationism—the dream of an underpinning simplicity for an enormously complex and various world. If evolution were powered by a single force producing one kind of result, and if life's long and messy history could therefore be explained by extending small and orderly increments of adaptation through the immensity of geological time, then an explanatory simplicity might descend upon evolution's overt richness. Evolution then might become "algorithmic," a surefire logical procedure, as in Daniel Dennett's reverie. But what is wrong with messy richness, so long as we can construct an equally rich texture of satisfying explanation?" (Gould, Darwinian Fundamentalism, Volume 44, Number 10 · June 12, 1997)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1151
Now I really must go to bed...
- SEAGOON
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Originally posted by Holden McGroin
Why is an infinitely small universe any more mind bending than an infintely large universe? I'll bet you can't get your mind around the thought that there is nothing before t=0, no space, no time... I know I can't.
The universe has never been descibed by science to be inifinitely large, only infinitetly small, which is rediculess and impossible......yet is taught as science.
I do not think that the universe is infinitely large. I also do not believe that all of the matter in the universe was ever gathered into an infinitely small space.
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Originally posted by Silat
The evidence of evolution is vast and universally accepted in all reputable scientific circles as FACT.
You don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about Silat.
The empirical evidence for evolution is weak, hence the controversy. It is the only materialist theory we can wrap our little minds around, so it's attraction in scientific circles is inescapable. But to call it a universally accepted scientific "fact" betrays serious ignorance of the scientific method.
The word "fact" does not appear in a science dictionary.
Mullah
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Originally posted by midnight Target
Which tune do you hum when you stick your fingers in your ears?
do you mean do I close my eyes when I read your drivel?
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Originally posted by NUKE
The universe has never been descibed by science to be inifinitely large, only infinitetly small, which is rediculess and impossible......yet is taught as science.
I do not think that the universe is infinitely large. I also do not believe that all of the matter in the universe was ever gathered into an infinitely small space.
As negative space and negative time are undefined (at least to my knowledge) infinitely small is a misnomer.
Zero being a finite number, a universe of zero spacetime would be finite.
"Infintely small" is not really a physical possibility, it is just a language device.
String theory shrinks the universe (not just the matter and energy but the empty space as well) to the planck length, a very small but finite number. (1.6 x 10E-35 m) Theory holds it is the quantum unit of length, the smallest unit which has meaning.
The universe being a finite volume yet unbounded, but so vast as to not really be comprehendable allows for "infinitely large" to be a similar language device.
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Originally posted by Seagoon
Hi Holden,
This will probably be my last response on the BB tonight, as tomorrow is obviously the busiest day of the week for me. Anyway, unfortunately what you're doing above is precisely what I was referring to in a previous post. A few species are found that resemble another species and then there are speculations that this is an "ancestor." ...Edit...
I posted two transition species, one not really human but not simian either, one not rally dinosaur but not really bird either, in response to your claim in an earlier post that
Originally posted by Seagoon
(quoting others)"Due to the rarity of preservation and the likelihood that speciation occurs in small populations during geologically short periods of time, transitions between species are uncommon in the fossil record."
For the benefit of those who don't understand what's so funny. It's an explanation for why we still haven't found the transitional fossils. It's a breathtaking statement of unshakeable faith.[/B]
Yet transitional fossils have been found, and evidence exists that suggests evolution as the (forgive me) Origin of Species.
No evidence exists for divine intervention, only faith.
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There is nothing in my body that suggests it was intelligent design.
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no offense, but only your brain needs not to be for you to conclude that.
It makes for a good show to see people debate irrationalities.
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Originally posted by Tuomio
There is nothing in my body that suggests it was intelligent design.
LOL
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Originally posted by Holden McGroin
I posted two transition species, one not really human but not simian either, one not rally dinosaur but not really bird either, in response to your claim in an earlier post that
Yet transitional fossils have been found, and evidence exists that suggests evolution as the (forgive me) Origin of Species.
No evidence exists for divine intervention, only faith.
Holden, just giving you an update on the "Transitional Fossil" thing. I don't think you've heard the latest concerning them.
Lucy (http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v12/i3/lucy.asp)
According to Richard Leakey, who along with Johanson is probably the best-known fossil-anthropologist in the world, Lucy’s skull is so incomplete that most of it is ‘imagination made of plaster of paris’.1 Leakey even said in 1983 that no firm conclusion could be drawn about what species Lucy belonged to.
Archaeoraptor (http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4208news2-3-2000.asp)
Since Dr Olsen wrote that scathing critique of NG, even more disturbing news has surfaced. An eminent paleontologist in Beijing, Xu Xing, now claims that the fossil is not even genuine. Rather, ‘Archaeoraptor liaoningensis’ was really combined from the body and head of a birdlike creature and the tail of a different dinosaur. Dr Xu said that a fossil in a private collection in China contains the mirror image of the tail of the alleged Archaeoraptor.
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Originally posted by lambo31
Holden, just giving you an update on the "Transitional Fossil" thing. I don't think you've heard the latest concerning them.
quote:
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According to Richard Leakey, who along with Johanson is probably the best-known fossil-anthropologist in the world, Lucy’s skull is so incomplete that most of it is ‘imagination made of plaster of paris’.1 Leakey even said in 1983 that no firm conclusion could be drawn about what species Lucy belonged to.
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Lucy's fossilized skeleton however is one of the most complete ever found. The pelvis is what suggests bipedal locomotion, and that is the big clue that makes that example special. The theory of Lucy's skull is that the brain capacity was quite small, yet she walked on two legs. Not quite human, but not an ape ancestor either.
If we were to surmise that the skull model were wrong and the brain were quite large, that would not take awya from the construction of the skeleton, and that Lucy is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) bipedal examples in existance.
Lucy is not the only example, there are many "transitional" finds that show the human family tree, and the holes in the pattern are much smaller than they once were.
Again, we are talking of evidence which one can hold in one's hand and we can argue about that evidence. Where is the evidence of ID?
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Evolutionists place great importance in walking upright and use it to define man’s ancestors, although the origin of bipedalism is shrouded in mystery:
‘Bipedalism has traditionally been regarded as the fundamental adaptation that sets hominids apart from other primates. Fossil evidence demonstrates that by 4.1 million years ago, and perhaps earlier, hominids exhibited adaptations to bipedal walking. At present, however, the fossil record offers little information about the origin of bipedalism … .’3
So it is important to know whether some fossil ape-like creature was bipedal or not.
Regardless of the status of Lucy’s knee joint, new evidence has come forth that Lucy has the morphology of a knuckle-walker,4 which is a distinctly quadrupedal specialization characteristic of some living apes and is quite different than walking upright. Richmond and Strait identify four skeletal features of the distal radius of the living knuckle-walking apes, chimpanzees and gorillas. They also identify similar morphological features on two early ‘hominids’, including Lucy:
‘A UPGMA clustering diagram … illustrates the similarity between the radii of A. anamensis and A. afarensis and those of the knuckle-walking African apes, indicating that these hominids retain the derived wrist morphology of knuckle-walkers.’5:
once again (http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/i2/lucy.asp)
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AnswersInGenesis is your source of scientific information? wow
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Originally posted by Booz
AnswersInGenesis is your source of scientific information? wow
see my keyhole reference cyclopes.
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Yay! Another science vs holy magic thread!
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Originally posted by RDSaustinTX
The word "fact" does not appear in a science dictionary.
Thats what these people don't seem to understand.... science requires you keep an open mind. Proveing something in science is very hard for a reason... heance you have Theories, "a logical connection of hypothesises based on data".
You can have a hypothesis, which is just a guess. Intelligant design is a hypothosis, at best. There is no data to support a theory.
Theories are pretty concreate, if you understand the meaning of the word.... but they allow for differing intepretations if contrary data is found.
Also.... you will find many more fossils of successful species as opposed to the laregly unsucsesful mutants that lead to a successful population. Fossilzation happens by chance, and this chance increases when a large sucessuful speacies evolves. If the 'mutants' were abundant they wouldn't mutate, or have need to. Mutation happens quicker in small populations.
And don't confuse Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis) with Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory) .... it makes you look .... uneducated.
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From your quote Lambo...
Originally posted by lambo31
'Bipedalism has traditionally been regarded as the fundamental adaptation that sets hominids apart from other primates. Fossil evidence demonstrates that by 4.1 million years ago, and perhaps earlier, hominids exhibited adaptations to bipedal walking. At present, however, the fossil record offers little information about the origin of bipedalism
So "Fossil evidence demonstrates that by 4.1 million years ago, and perhaps earlier, hominids exhibited adaptations to bipedal walking."
a 2001 articleFrom Bartleby's (http://www.bartleby.com/67/19.html)
Australopithecus Ramidus, from Hadar {Ethiopia}, was a small, upright-walking primate who displayed many apelike features and might have been the ancestor of later hominids. Another small primate, which Johanson and White nicknamed “Lucy,” lived during a somewhat later time than Ramidus. She was between three and a half and four feet tall and was 19 to 21 years old when she died. A gracile, lightly built hominid, she was fully bipedal, with arms slightly longer than the arms of modern humans. Johanson and White also recovered the remains of other contemporary hominids. All had ape-shaped heads, brains the size of chimpanzees, and forward-thrusting jaws. Potassium-argon dates for the Hadar fossil beds are between 3.75 and 3 million years ago. Johanson and White believe that all the Hadar specimens are members of the species Australopithecus Afarensis (“southern ape-man of the Afar”) and that they are the common ancestor of all later hominids, including the first humans.
My source, Bartleby's Encyclopedia of World History is subject to revision as new information is uncovered.
Your source, "Answers in Genisis: Upholding the Authority of the Bible from the Very First Verse" may have predisposition to show that evolution theory is incorrect. That is just a hunch however.
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Lambo:As long as we view things from different glasses we will continue to see things differently, even if we look at the same thing.
You can read the full write up here
http://www.answersingenesis.org/cre...i1/creation.asp
Past and present
We all exist in the present—and the facts all exist in the present. When one is trying to understand how the evidence came about (Where did the animals come from? How did the fossil layers form? etc.), what we are actually trying to do is to connect the past to the present.
However, if we weren’t there in the past to observe events, how can we know what happened so we can explain the present? It would be great to have a time machine so we could know for sure about past events.
Christians of course claim they do, in a sense, have a ‘time machine’. They have a book called the Bible which claims to be the Word of God who has always been there, and has revealed to us the major events of the past about which we need to know.
DDH: Actually, those of us who are scientists or who teach science do, indeed, have such a time machine. We call it “science”. Imagine for a moment that you are charged with investigating a fairly recent event such as a train wreck, a plane crash, or a murder. There is an entire branch of science dedicated to the investigation of such past events. We call this branch of science “forensic science” and we often ask people adept at the practice of this science to tell us what their best scientifically informed guess is as to what has happened in the past, such as what caused a plane to crash or what triggered a mine explosion or what caused a building or bridge to collapse, in order to keep it from happening again. Of course, the most obvious reason that we would need to ask these people to practice their expertise in this science is that we weren’t there and the people who WERE there as witnesses or participants are now deceased.
The interesting thing about forensic science is that it uses exactly the same techniques, methodologies, and mathematical equations as the more common and mundane fields of science such as physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, climatology, and engineering. These techniques, methodologies, and mathematical equations are the same for forensic science as they are for regular science. And the mathematical equations of regular science have a very unique characteristic: they have great predictive capability. The prophetic capability of Newtons’s F=M X a or Einstein’s E=m c**2 is without peer. Biblical prophecy can’t even begin to approach the success of the predictability of the differential equations of ballistic motion that hold communications satellites in orbit around the earth. Of course, the only difference between the various scientific fields is whether we run the equations forward or backward. For fields like architecture, chemical engineering, civil engineering, aerospace engineering, weather prediction, ballistic missile design, astronomy, bridge building, software design, electrical engineering, designing weapons of mass destruction, etc. we run the mathematical equations forward. For fields like archaeology, pathology, forensic engineering, forensic pathology, medical diagnosis, cosmology, and even Biblical ethnology, we run the mathematical equations backwards. The equations seem to work equally well going backward as forward.
Lambo:On the basis of these events (Creation, Fall, Flood, Babel, etc.), we have a set of presuppositions to build a way of thinking which enables us to interpret the evidence of the present.
DDH: Hold that thought. We will return to it momentarily.
Lambo:Evolutionists have certain beliefs about the past/present that they presuppose, e.g. no God (or at least none who performed acts of special creation), so they build a different way of thinking to interpret the evidence of the present.
DDH: Well, actually, no. Evolutionary biologists have no need whatsoever of hypothesizing either that God exists or that God does not exist. Indeed, evolutionary biologists don’t even concern themselves with God at all. If they are involved in science, that hypothesis is precluded from their consideration. Evolutionary biologists begin where all science begins, i.e. in doubt. All of modern Western science began with Rene Descartes’ “Discourse on Method”. Most lay people are only familiar with this treatise through the famous dictum, “Cogito ergo sum”, most often translated as “I think, therefore I am” but more correctly translated as “I am thinking, therefore I exist.” In this treatise Descartes dared to do the unthinkable, which was to question how humankind could know anything. And, then granting the singular assumption that it was possible to actually know anything, Descartes went on to ask an even more insightful question, “with what certainty did we know that we knew anything?” Descartes dared to think like an atheist and managed to not get toasted in a time when doubters were commonly burned at the stake by the Church for such questioning. Other famous thinkers, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Newton, and Einstein, to name only a few, went on to build principle on top of principle to Descartes’ fundamental scientific underpinnings.
With over 300 years of hindsight, modern philosophers of science inform us that there are three unifying strands that tie all of this scientific work together.
The first is that the success of all of this work derives from the willingness of those, who would use this method to think, only in naturalistic terms. That is to say that the observer is only permitted explanations that would have objective explanatory value. There can be no explanations that would not look objectively like an explanation to everyone who heard the explanation. The objective explanation cannot invoke magic, miracles, faith, or fairies, not that they might not actually be the cause of what was being observed, but simply because those attributes are not the same for everyone. The explanation must be in terms that everyone could agree to. If the other person could not see the explanation as the cause of the phenomenon, there was no explanatory value expressed in the “explanation”. Any acceptable stepwise scientific explanation had to stop at the step before the step that requires the explanation “and then a miracle happens”. This does not deny the existence of some deity, nor does it require that denial. It simply states that any explanation, to remain scientific, had to stop at the step before coming to that explanation.
The second unifying strand was that all useful scientific theories made some type of prediction. The prediction could be trivial or monumental. But, some type of prediction was absolutely essential for the theory to be called science. It is often thought that this means that scientific theories are testable against said predictions. This is not categorically true. There are some “scientific theories” such as string theory that actually make predictions but that cannot be formally tested, at least with any form of technology that we are likely to acquire in a reasonable period of time. But, if string theory remains untestable, it will almost certainly be replaced by a theory that actually is testable.
Finally, ALL scientific theories can be imagined in some way to be falsifiable. We can imagine a way in which the theory in question could be proved to be false. This is not to say that the theory is false. We are simply saying that we can imagine some set of circumstances that would cause us to come to doubt the explanatory nature of the theory. If one cannot state some fashion in which the explanation could be shown to be false, then once again the theory’s explanatory power is brought into question. For example, if hereditary theory ever came up with an individual offspring whose phenotype (i.e. its physical characteristics) had no relationship whatsoever to its genotype (i.e. the arrangement of the DNA in the organisms genetic chromosomal structure), then all of hereditary theory would be thrown into chaos and the entire understanding of heredity would have to be reformulated, assuming that a field of science called “heredity” even continued to exist at all. If fossils from much deeper layers turned out to be much more complex and much younger than fossils found in shallower sedimentary layers, then the entire field of paleontology (strictly speaking, stratigraphy) would be brought into question, and we would naturally be justified in continuing our search for a coherent and logical theory with more all-encompassing explanatory power.
With regard to the modern fusion of genetic theory with Darwinian evolution, often referred to as the Modern Synthesis, it is the fact that the genetic information that we have does not contradict either the morphological (Linnean) classification of the living world into Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Genus and Species or the cladistic analysis that convinces us that evolution is a true representation of the way that things actually happened. It is one of the great successes of Darwinian evolution that modern genetic techniques have confirmed the much earlier morphological (Linnean) classification scheme rather than contradicting it.
The day that ID people proffer up some way in which ID might be made falsifiable or some prediction that might be made from ID or Creationist theory, they will be that much closer to having their “theory”accepted as science. But, to date, we have had zip from them on either score.
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Lambo:Thus, when Christians and non-Christians argue about the evidence, in reality they are arguing about their interpretations based on their presuppositions.
That’s why the argument often turns into something like:
‘Can’t you see what I’m talking about?’
‘No, I can’t. Don’t you see how wrong you are?’
‘No, I’m not wrong. It’s obvious that I’m right.’
‘No, it’s not obvious.’ And so on.
These two people are arguing about the same evidence, but they are looking at the evidence through different glasses.
It’s not until these two people recognize the argument is really about the presuppositions they have to start with, that they will begin to deal with the foundational reasons for their different beliefs. A person will not interpret the evidence differently until they put on a different set of glasses—which means to change one’s presuppositions.
DDH: Again, no. When we consider most scientific topics or topics that lend themselves to rationality, we engage in a language game, as Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called it. The exact same facts must apply or be agreed to. And the rules of logic for consistency of premises and what constitutes logical coherency MUST remain the same both sides of the dialogue. In order to play the scientific language game our definitions must be the same and our understanding of what constitutes a logical fallacy at all times remains the same.
I have often observed that when religious people wish to discuss theology or Christian apologetics, they often indulge in a mishmash of ethical premises mixed with theological or creedal tenets and pseudo-logic that attempts to mimic mathematical logic without adhering to any of the basic tenets of formal logic, nor are any of the usual logical fallacies observed and avoided. I have come to call this mishmash of pseudo-logic and theology “God-speak”. You will often see “God-speak” in theological discussions of the theory of atonement, which generally offers no less than eight different theories of atonement, all of which are logically incompatible, with no effort whatsoever to say which theory is operative or paramount.
Lambo:I’ve found that a Christian who understands these things can actually put on the evolutionist’s glasses (without accepting the presuppositions as true) and understand how they look at evidence. However, for a number of reasons, including spiritual ones, a non-Christian usually can’t put on the Christian’s glasses—unless they recognize the presuppositional nature of the battle and are thus beginning to question their own presuppositions.
It is of course sometimes possible that just by presenting ‘evidence’, you can convince a person that a particular scientific argument for creation makes sense ‘on the facts’. But usually, if that person then hears a different interpretation of the same evidence that seems better than yours, that person will swing away from your argument, thinking they have found ‘stronger facts’.
However, if you had helped the person to understand this issue of presuppositions, then they will be better able to recognize this for what it is—a different interpretation based on differing presuppositions—i.e. starting beliefs.
As a teacher, I found that whenever I taught the students what I thought were the ‘facts’ for creation, then their other teacher would just re-interpret the facts. The students would then come back to me saying, ‘Well sir, you need to try again.’
However, when I learned to teach my students how we interpret facts, and how interpretations are based on our presuppositions, then when the other teacher tried to reinterpret the facts, the students would challenge the teacher’s basic assumptions. Then it wasn’t the students who came back to me, but the other teacher! This teacher was upset with me because the students wouldn’t accept her interpretation of the evidence and challenged the very basis of her thinking.
What was happening was that I had learned to teach the students how to think rather than just what to think. What a difference that made to my class! I have been overjoyed to find, sometimes decades later, some of those students telling me how they became active, solid Christians as a result.
Debate terms
If one agrees to a discussion without using the Bible as some people insist, then they have set the terms of the debate. In essence these terms are:
‘Facts’ are neutral. However, there are no such things as ‘brute facts’; all facts are interpreted. Once the Bible is eliminated in the argument, then the Christians’ presuppositions are gone, leaving them unable to effectively give an alternate interpretation of the facts. Their opponents then have the upper hand as they still have their presuppositions — see Naturalism, logic and reality.
DDH: I am rather amused by this last section of this “argument”, especially this last line that says “see Naturalism, logic and reality”. Yes, it is quite true that science, by virtue of the fact that it is built completely atop the underpinnings of logic and rationality as I have discussed above, will have the upper hand in virtually any confrontation between religion, especially one that seeks to stress its irrational or faith oriented component, and especially since religion in engaging science in dialog at all seeks to turn the tenets of rationality and logic to its own use. Watching religion attempt to turn reason to its own defense tends to remind one of Samuel Johnson’s famous observation about watching a dog walk on its hind legs. “It isn’t so much that it is done well as that it is done at all.”
However, in a confrontation that is truly to be based on facts and logic, the Christian’s decision to put his Bible on the side is really no great loss to them. One wonders exactly how much logical and factual support could be expected from a book whose own self-contradictions number in the hundreds. See for example, William Henry Burr’s “Self-Contradictions of the Bible”. Burr’s little book, published in 1859 contains 140 textual inconsistencies, classified under "Theological Doctrines”, "Moral Precepts", "Historical Facts", and "Speculative Doctrines." (Or simply Google “Self-contradictions of the Bible” on the Internet.)
Long before science had matured into the formidable edifice that it is today only learned Christian fathers tortured their intellects in an attempt to underpin Christian dogma with “rationality”. Even Saint James and Saint Paul had their disagreement as to whether one was “justified by faith” or “justified by acts” (assuming that the acts followed from reason), at least if the New Testament is to be believed. There were few who were up to the challenge. But great thinkers such as Augustin of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas did manage to leave their mark. Saint Augustin of Hippo infused neo-Platonism into Christian dogma around 380 CE in his treatises “City of God” and “Confessions”. St. Thomas Aquinas did the unwrapping of Greek philosophy from Christian dogma in about 1300 CE during the Middle Ages in his magnum opus “Summa Theologica” at the end of the 900 year long pipe. Greek philosophy saw the better end of the trip. These men made commendable and formidable attempts to stand Christian dogma astride rationality. But science and logic had moved on eventually going its separate way. Today, it would seem that the most rational position for the devout is the fideism of Kierkegaard, which readily admits that faith is not reasonable at all and urges the “faithful” to abandon the search for an underpinning rationality to faith. But, of course, in the great marketplace of religious ideas, fideism is one of the toughest of sells.
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Lambo:Truth can/should be determined independent of God. However, the Bible states: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Psalm 111:10); ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge’ (Proverbs 1:7). ‘But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned’ (1 Corinthians 2:14).
DDH: Of course, if the rationality is spiritually discerned, then scientific rationality must remain silent. “About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Lambo:A Christian cannot divorce the spiritual nature of the battle from the battle itself. A non-Christian is not neutral. The Bible makes this very clear: ‘The one who is not with Me is against Me, and the one who does not gather with Me scatters’ (Matthew 12:30); ‘And this is the condemnation, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the Light, because their deeds were evil’ (John 3:19).
Agreeing to such terms of debate also implicitly accepts their proposition that the Bible’s account of the universe’s history is irrelevant to understanding that history!
DDH: In the recently adjudicated Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, “Intelligent Design” case, judge Jones, for the most part, got it right. Intelligent Design as constituted by the Seattle Discovery Institute is simply a theological ruse in the culture wars meant to covertly slip religious Creationism into public school science classes. However, judge Jones did, in my opinion, seriously err in one regard. Judge Jones asserted that there is nothing incompatible between biological Darwinian evolution and a belief in God. Of course, this is absolute nonsense. The only “God” left by the stochastic processes of mechanistic descent with adaptation is a madman who spins off species after species, never satisfied with his Creation, sending one species to oblivion no sooner than creating it, and obliterating 98% of every species that He has ever created. In the words of Richard Dawkins, this is an “Apprentice God”, one completely unworthy of any type of obeisance let alone worship. In this regard people of science and fundamentalist Creationists can completely agree.
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Lambo:BTW like Seagoon, I too am a creationist.