I want to believe in evolution
 

Lonestar (August 20, 2012)

Do his "relatives" include any chimpanzees or gorillas?

You could also give them the brains of individuals to eat which, in the past, successfully escaped from your captivity
http://everything2.com/title/The+abi...uccessful+worm

Maybe they can only give birth to humans outside of captivity and without being observed http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...smilies/hm.gif

If evolution was true, shouldn't all animals be the same?

Have any of you had your DNA completed. I have. Father side Haplogroup R1b, M343 (Subclade R1b1a2, M269). My Mother side Haplogroup H.
This was done through National Geographic Project. Cost $100.00 each. No Monkeys were found. Page 1 parp. 2 reads, The genetic markers that define your ancestral history reach back roughly 60,000 years to the first common marker of all non-African men, M168, and follow your lineage to present day ending with M343, the defining marker of Haplogroup R1b, M343 (Subclade R1b1a2, M229.

In Para. 5, it reads, Today, roughly 70 percent of the men in southern England belong to haplogroup R1b, M343 (subclade R1b1a2, M269). In parts of Spain and Ireland, that number exceeds 90 percent.

My surname comes from England. My Mother side come from Ireland. I'm also doing my Ancestry and found out that I'm related to some people like Richard 1, Duke of Normandy etc. on both my Mother and Father side. Yes the means my Mother and Father are very distance cousin. And if my Mother was alive and I told her this, she would shoot me or something.

When the religious nutter / sane person ratio gets too high then you start running out of options

Plus there's an opportunity cost to having nothing but sane teachers, e.g. this would probably result in having pharmacists and doctors who are all religious nutters since you've depleted the sane person supply. "You have gonorrhea? Sorry, amputation and branding are the only cure."

Yes, part of the reason why I posted is that this distraction was re-introduced mainly from SDAs, unfortunately.

JM

Even if there would be no theory of evolution, taking the Biblical creation story literal is not the way to go.
In fact it even equals taking Darwins Origin of Species as an metaphore.

Having said that, for a common human being (=99,5% of all human beings) it's a decicion who they have to believe.
1. a preacher who says it's in the Bible and there are witnesses and it's therefore true
2. a scientist who says it's in the science books and there are people who were able to reproduce these findings and it's therefore true.

For a common person it's believing one or the other.
It's easy to just say that everybody who believes creation is therefore a silly idiot.

Personally I do not like it to rely on others for my opinion.
Eventhough I'm raised in a passive creationist environment (almost everybody believed creation, not in a fundamentalist way, not trying to convince others, etc.) I do not believe in literal creation anymore. Not b/c it conflicts with science but just b/c I started to try to understand what the authors of Genesis really meant to say back then thousands of years ago. And I can't imagine that they wanted to convince us of 7-day creationism (or any variant). Taking the Genesis account literal violates the intentions of the authors of the Bible.

But eventhough I do believe in evolution and an evolving world, I do not believe that everything evolved from one (or a couple of) simple 1 cell life form. I'm not a biologe or an evolutionist so it's just a fools opion, but if I reason from my field of knowledge, computer science, then I simply can't believe that Windows 7 could evolve from DOS 4.0, not even if you copy it a zillion times, have testers remove the too bugged editions from the copy pool, and have the copy system produce more copy errors then it does right now.

The principals of evolution are there, I simply can't make the leap (of faith! imho!) from these principals to the entire system of amoebe to parrot evolution.

So from Genesis I learn that God is responsible for the existing of the universe, and that he's not a part of that universe (compared to other gods of the times of the Genesis authors). And I certainly hope that scientist will continue to try to discover how he did it and how it works.

Am I 100% right? Most probably not, I'm only 1 human being that lacks about 99,99999% of the knowledge of everything there is to know.
Am I therefore a stupid silly idiot? Perhaps, but not more then anybody else on this world who also just bases his opinion on the 0,00001% knowledge he has on everything there is to know.

Fortunately we know still a lot more then then 0,00000000000000000000000000001% people knew 300 years ago, and maybe one day we'll know 1% or 2% or more!

This is an important point.

I tell my YEC friends/family who ask me about it that evolution is what the science observes. I don't want to attack their Faith, though, so I point out Omphalos hypothesis ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis ).

JM

I think only one of my relatives has given me a creationism book, and that relative doesn't attend church anymore. I think it was more to get rid of a book than to give me a book.

JM

I usually point to the creation scheme in Genesis.
Light on day 1, after which it becomes evening and morning, the 2nd day... and God saw it was good.
Then on day 4 God creates the sun.

Then I ask: if it was good on day 1 that some unknown light source seperated day from night, then why is God on day 4 suddenly implementing the sun? Was he dissatisfied after all with how light, day and night worked on day 1?
And how was earth positioned before the sun existed? Was it hanging on a rope from heaven? And then on day 4 it was bound to the gravity of the sun? During day 1-3 earth was in position by some work around? Is a work around good?

Of course God can do anything and everything, but if he says that it's good, then why is there a need for workarounds from day 1-3 b/c the sun had not yet been created?

Every sane person, either a creationist or an atheist will agree that the authors of genesis were smart people, or at least the person who edited it all together. He was able to write, was able to write something that was an interesting read, good enough to stand the test of time, the piece of work was both in line and in response to writings of those days. It was well structured, etc.

This person was not a fool.
He was smart enough to understand that day and night are caused by the sun, and that the work-around for day 1-3 was not 'good'.
This can only lead to the conclusion that the authors/editors of Genesis 1 didn't mean it to be understood literally. As a matter of fact that's known of those days, that most writings and tales aren't meant to be understood literally, but carry a message along. Usually written in structures and rhymes to make it easier to understand.

And then suddenly the structure of the 6 days (not 7!) makes sense.
Day 1 light/night/day, Day 4 light bearers
Day 2 water / sky, Day 5 water-animals/ sky-animals
Day 3 land / plants Day 6 land animals / plants are taken care of

It's not meant to be literal and it hasn't been interpretated literal by most important theologes in history either.
Only when the Theory of Evolution popped up some christians started to explain Gen1 literally in response to this theory of evolution.
It's simple a reactionair way of reasoning.

So she believes in a mountain of paper (the Bible was certainly never a single text) written ten thousand years ago by the leading minds of the day, and you believe in a mountain of paper written ten years ago by the leading minds of the day. Perhaps this is why your argument failed?

Science is designed to have it's theorems constantly challenged and improved. That's it's strength.

I'm sure our understanding of Evolution will improve, we don't know everything. But what we know is enough to know it's not going to be fundamentally wrong. It might be that it's not the full picture, like the difference between moving between Newtonian laws and Relativity. But Newtons laws still apply for most of what we do. They aren't wrong, they just aren't the complete picture.

It's not really fair to say one "believe's in Evolution" that's not accurate. People understand that Evolution is the best theory to describe the observations of life on our world, and understand that there are many predictions that can/could be made and all that can so far be tested conclusively have supported the theorem.

Which God understood by a person of which religion? There are so many that one of them might be right I suppose.

Anyone can take the data about experiments and observations made about Evolution and recreate them for themselves. (though some will take a lot of time and money).

You can't watch Jesus come back to life, but you can watch Evolution happen in front of your eyes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/sc...pagewanted=all

I have went to my biologist friends about a couple of points in the evolution/creationism discussion.

They didn't know, and but believed in the science.

I think that other than a few experts, almost no one takes the time to know/understand without the need of faith (and that is ignoring trusting the experimentalists to be doing good science) in the experts.

As far as YEC goes, the theology can be discussed... but the science is just pointing out possible inconsistencies within the evolution theoretical framework. I guess there is science the other way, but it is just lunacy and I don't think that anyone who really values science gives it any value.

JM
(Maybe more time should be spent on the theology, there is a reason why ~100 years ago there were very few YECs.)

Yes, yes, I'm a 100% science type. I was just pointing out that _his_ argument was comparing a stack of paper to a stack of paper. Citing scientific proof without understanding it is every bit as bad as citing religious works, as far as I'm concerned; that's how we ended up with Natural Medicine or whatever.

Evolution is stupid... throw rocks at it.

(That would make an awesome tshirt)

Anyway, I convinced myself evolution is a bunch hooey when I decided that there is no way we would ever evolve away prehensile tails.

I hate it when they slip through the border.