Creation vs. Evolution
 

Re: Creation vs. Evolution
 

It has to be evolution,you're never gonna convince me that all that shit out there is somehow planned. :worried:

Re: Re: Creation vs. Evolution
 

Well to tell you the truth be-bop, I didn't turn out like I planned.:(

Re: Re: Re: Creation vs. Evolution
 

[quote] Well to tell you the truth be-bop, I didn't turn out like I planned.


So you're the one to blame? :D

Creationism is a matter of faith and so (conveniently) is exempt from the requirement of evidence.

Personally, I don't see the two ideas at odds and I very comfortably accept both. Evolution makes perfect sense and you don't have to look too hard to see it everywhere. But there is nothing in the theory of evolution that disproves (to me) God or divine creation.

I just erased a three paragraph diatribe addressing those who would advance the argument that evolution DOES contradict (or cannot co-exist with) creationism - I'll save it in the event a Cellarite elects to advance that argument.

For me, its far from "either-or" but it IS either or for some folks and some institutions (e.g., the Kansas Board of Education).

In any event, I think its an interesting topic.

I suppose a good place to start is to define terms from the outset:
Evolution:

• a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state
  
• a theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations

Creationism: The belief that the entire population of the earth, inclusive of man and animal/insect/bacteria, etc were created by a deity henceforth referenced as "God", and the act of this creation was documented in a book known as "the Bible" and that the literal reading of the bible is an accurate presentation of the events that transpired.

More to come.

Post away, I'd love to hear it. How does a 10,000 year old (give or take) earth AND the known fossil record coexist peacefully within the same belief system?:confused:

The people who see a contradiction are the people who believe in the literal word-for-word truth of the Bible. Science has one order for the creation of various forms of life, which doesn't exactly match the one in Genesis.

The concept of a divinely directed path for evolution is logically possible, and any honest scientist will grant that. Unfortunately, the creationists are quick to try to take advantage of that honesty in order to get "Intelligent Design" put into science textbooks. The problem there is that intelligent design is not science. It is no more scientific than saying "warlocks did it." It is certainly POSSIBLE that warlocks are responsible for life on Earth, but it doesn't belong in a science book.

I agree with Happy Monkey above. There is no problem with the idea that God created the universe some 12 billion years ago with the intent that life would arise from it through scientifically consistent means (evolution).

Interestingly one argument a Creationist can make that is completely impossible to refute is the following:

God created the universe 6000 years ago. All bones and evidence for the earth and the universe being billions of years old were all created 6000 years ago. All the starlight that takes millions of years to transit through space from places millions of light years away were in fact created in transit in order to reach earth on time.

And what is the problem with this idea? Well, why would God do such a stupid thing? This idea implies a dishonest God because he is shown to create a universe that is a lie. That just doesn't sound right.
This same idea could be used to say the universe was created five minutes ago, with all of our memories being fabrications.

I don't see a contradiction between the two positions because I have never accepted that a literal interpretation of the Bible is a valid position.

For example, the Bible has been translated many times between many languages since it was originally written. When confronted with the inherent problem in communicating a thought/idea/chain of events between two languages, the theologeans have consistently proffered that the Bible is the Word of God and that God guided their hand in the translation. Taken another way (my way), I understand that to mean that God guided their interpretation of the source text.

Another example supporting the validity of interpretation is that Jesus often made his important points in the form of parables (e.g., the prodigal son). The prodigal son story ONLY makes sense if one understands the underlying principal and applies the personifications that allow the story to make sense (apologies to those not familiar with the story).

Hence, I cannot fathom a justification (but remain open should anyone offer one/some) to take the words in the Bible literally. Taken literally, a large section of the Bible has no application to anyone other than the characters involved. Hardly divinely inspired if it has no application to anyone else.

So, basically, I am advancing the (hardly original) idea that the Bible must be interpreted with divine guidance in order to be useful and that taken literally, the Bible is really hamstrung.

Given that (which is where I am coming from), I understand the Bible as written in metaphors that one can apply to one's own paradigm. That someone several thousand years ago thought the world was created in 7 days does not bind me to the same specific thought. 7 days or 7 millenium - whatever - God made the world/universe/singularity that led to its existence.

In my view, the Bible sets forth that God set the wheels of creation in motion and has pretty much "let it happen" after that - minor divine inflections notwithstanding.

Regarding the fallacy of literal interpretation of a paradigm-inspired understanding, I'm reminded of Eric vonDaanekin's (sp) book Chariots Of The Gods. In that book, he asserts that the "lines in the deserts" are really ancient landing strips. Only in the age of the Boeing 747 would he postulate that. I guess he never bothered to figure that a craft capable of transversing unfathomable distances would have rubber tires and need a freakin' landing strip a half-mile long to decellerate to a stop.

This is the problem I have with literal interpretations - they preclude subsequent and more logical explanations.

Corrected two spelling errors - content unchanged

Welcome,Slartibartfast, to the Matrix :)

OK, this is a case of Eisegesis and Exegesis.

In addition:

Most scholars agree that the bible is written or edited by different people. So, what if the Mosaic books (the Septuagint, or the first 5 books of the bible, edited or written by Moses) were meant to be taken literally? Does that negate Jesus' parables? Jesus told parables, and therefore ALL of the bible, old and new testament must be interpreted, and not taken as literal truths? That doesn't make sense.

Lets extend your idea to non-religious, fictitious works, for a moment. I'll use the Belgariad by David Eddings as an example.

It opens with the telling of Garion's childhood and events that follow. Then the storyteller (Old Wolf) comes to the farm and tells the story of the creation of the Orb of Aldur and Torak One-Eye. We later find out the Old Wolf is Belgarath, an ancient sorceror, hand chosen by the God Aldur. Belgarath tells many parables and stories throught the next twelve books to illustrate some point or another. Does that make the beginning of the book, the part about Faldor's farm, open to interpretation simply because Belgarath told some parables?

Substitute Genesis for Faldor's Farm and Jesus for Belgarath, and it's much the same thing.

Mostly, I think it's context. In the other thread, I brought up the different translations and how it could be rape or coersion, depending on the translation. It's very much about the Hebrew and Greek and how you translate the words. In context for a fuller understanding? Wouldn't that be the best way to go?

I have an "amplified" bible, that has about a ton of footnotes in it, where the Hebrew is open to different meanings. It also says yom is day, when used with numbers and time of day.

Saying the Bible is written in metaphors is a little misleading, but I think I get what you are saying.

The Bible is a collection of many books. Some sections of the Bible are mythlike (the TWO creation stories in Genesis), some cronical history (Kings), some is poetry (Song of Songs), some is prayer and song (Psalms). There are also many many authors to the books of the Bible, and they had varying intents with what they wrote (something literalism fails to capture)

The parts that are history, such as the lives of the different kings that israel had, are not metaphor as written. They are history -how accurate they are is debatable, but they are still historical documents.
Now one could look at the life of one of the kings and draw parallels to ones own life, but that is similar to looking at the history of one of the presidents and drawing paralells from that.

That means everyone should start wearing black clothes, and shades!

:cool: :cool: :blunt: :cool: :cool: :cool: :blunt: :blunt:

I was writing my post when you posted yours, so I sort of didn't see it until I had finished writing mine.

Yes, you're right!

Scientists hate this definition, as it implies a value judgement. I propose the definition put forth in my textbook, "Primate Adaptation and Evolution", by John Fleagle:<blockquote><i>Evolution is modification by descent, or genetic change in a population through time</i></blockquote>

The only thing to really argue about is whether or not you require evidence for your beliefs, or whether you take things on faith.

You simply can't argue religion from facts, because religion is bullshit. The only way to be religious is to convince yourself it's not bullshit, and the only way to do that is to not require ample evidence for your beliefs.

By the way, www.talkorigins.org is a wonderful resource for this subject.

Yes things do evolve, I will accept that. Galapagos Islands is a perfect example of evolution. The fact that people are living longer is in a small part another step of evolution. The conditions in which we live in have changed and we have adapted to them.

But to say that millions upon millions of years ago matter just sprang up out of nothing and now I have a big oak tree with squirrels playing in my yard is a little hard to believe.

Where did the matter come from that started the Big Bang?

From relative nothingness to what we see today, it's hard to believe that it is all just random.

If it is random don't make fun of me while we are in the big sleep for wanting to believe a higher power had some hand in creating this.

And if I'm right I'll try to slip some icewater to the non-believers okay?

No one believes that man evolved from apes. Evolution states that humans and apes have a <i>common ancestor</i>. That's a huge difference.

The whole idea of a "missing link" is very flawed. Imagine our ancestral line as a giant genealogical tree with a billion little branches. At what resolution would you like to see the tree in before you believe in evolution? We don't have fossils for every single creature that ever died. But we have enough from each time period to show a very nice, gradual progression, morphologically speaking. The problem is, to be able to truly see how perfect this gradual progression is, you have to have a thorough knowledge of skeletons.

Also, remember that evolution is a change in the gene pool of a population over time. People don't evolve -- populations do. And they usually do it over a very long period of time, so you can't "see" it happening.

Also, I thought you guys might find this chart of interest. It shows the most recent hominid fossil species that have been discovered, and how anthropologists think they are related. Solid lines signify a connection that they are sure of, and dotted lines signify a connection that they are in disagreement over. Even though they're not sure how some of them link up, though, they're so similar to other hominids that it's a sure bet that they link up somewhere in this time frame (otherwise, there wouldn't be so many similarites).

Oh, there is also fossil evidence along the line going way, way back, all the way to when we looked like little rodent creatures 65 million years ago. This chart just shows 5 mya and on. There were also recently two other hominid fossils discovered that are believed to be from 6mya and 7mya. Those are so recently discovered as to not yet be on this chart.

<center>http://comp.uark.edu/~dmorton/images..._phylogeny.gif</center>

Any reasonable person should readily admit that evolution DOES occur. There is a sea of evidence to support evolution, and to refute it would be like claiming that the Civil War never happened. I think the main point of contention in evolution is whether humans evolved from a "lower" life form, or whether humans were plopped onto the Earth, as we are today, by some diety.

I'm a logical person who requires facts and evidence to make conclusions. Based on facts and evidence, I conclude that evolution is a real device used by nature, and/or potentially God(s). I have no direct evidence to indicate whether God(s) exist, but no evidence to the contrary either. So I reserve judgement, but lean towards a no-God(s) mentality. Likewise, I have no direct evidence that humans are descendants of aliens who landed on our planet thousands of years ago, so I tend not to believe that either. And I don't believe that we were all squeezed from a giant pimple on the face of a huge intelligent organism named "Earth" who died long ago and left us to occupy his/her slowly rotting carcass. Just because one belief is more popluar does not make it more likely.

God, particularly by a Christian definition, is such a tangled mess of contradictions and uncertainties that I frankly can't see why anyone believes in him/her/them so fervently. Faith? The dictionary says it best when it defines "faith" as "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence." I don't choose to believe in anything without evidence. If there is a Creator, he/she/it/they created me knowing that I would not accept them without evidence, so they have no one to blame for my lack of faith except themselves.

I'm normally not once to post a me-too, but this is kind of a poll anyway. I hope no one is hoping for a definitive answer on cosmological questions here at the cellar. ;)

Anyway, I believe in the existence of God ( but don't insist that you do and don't insist that my way is the only way to worship God).

I also believe that evolution is real.

For what it's worth, I went to Seattle Pacific University when I went back to get my CS degree. SPU is a methodist university and you have to take one Bible course to graduate. I took Old Testament (NT was already full). It turned out to be a good choice. The instructor was very knowledgeable and entertaining as well.

The instructor said it was obvious to all bible researchers that the Bible was not the literal word of god. His response to all questions along this line was "These books are in the Bible because they are useful for instruction."

>>> Hot_Pastrami said
God, particularly by a Christian definition, is such a tangled mess of contradictions and uncertainties that I frankly can't see why anyone believes in him/her/them so fervently
>>>

It's not easy to explain the infinite.

Look at science. Science is a tangled mess of contradictions and uncertainties (and many truths that took years and years to discover). It too is an attempt to explain something infinite and extremely complex, in this case the universe. I'll admit the analogy is not perfect, but it's the best I can do at the moment.

That's trollbait, and not worth flaming you over, you'd probably just laugh at anyone's attempt to respond to you're comment, so I won't bother.

My point is that religion is based on faith, and science is based on facts and evidence. They're two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world, and this is <i>the</i> main difference between the two camps. Whichever path you follow, the appropriate belief system also follows.

If people are going to try to use the bible as evidence of creation, then I feel it's fair to say that it's not evidence at all, because the whole thing is BS. It's based on faith, not fact.

Well, there is a distinct, important difference here... when science does not have enough information to answer a question, the hypothesis is not touted as a fact, regardless of how long or how fervently someone believes they know the answer. Firm, convincing, consistent evidence is required for anything to go beyond the realm of theory. When there is a contradiction between theories, the scientific community at large does not label either a "truth," they label both as "possibilities."

The polar opposite is religion... where firm, convincing, consistent evidence simply does not exist... but depite that, in the minds of believers, these "facts" are completely irrefutable. Add to this a God from whom believers are not allowed to ask evidence of his existence, and you have what appears to a be a circular problem. But really, it all amounts to the fact that people who believe in God do so only because they want to. And that's fine... it doesn't make them right or wrong, it just makes them naive and illogical... Even if it turns out they're right. Especially if it turns out they're wrong.

More on Micro and Macro Evolution:
 

I agree with you. But I submit to you that Evolutionary theory is ALSO based on faith, and that it may be wrong, just as Creationism may be wrong. What I'm doing here is trying to present both sides of the argument, using science as much as possible. I'm not trying to prove either side right or wrong, I'm examining the arguments.


I believe that the bible is a historical book, with portions to be taken literally, as historical fact, as well as story book, with sections that are, well, allegorical.

Note: Historically speaking, many parts of the bible have been proven by corrobberations from other writers of the time as being true statements of fact.

The Bible has just as much "evidence" as the fossil record, or carbon-14 dating, two ideas I WILL be exploring.

But for the sake of the argument, let's agree that the Bible will be the Creationist's primary "evidence", and I'll try to find supportive "science", and we'll examine Evolutionist's "evidence" and find supportive science. That's fair, right?

Well, there is much evidence to support macro-evolution (lungfish, for example). But maybe God "planted" that evidence on the scene to trick the more intelluctual of humans to not believe in Him. Smart, because having intellectuals in heaven would just take away from the whole experience. Besides, God doesn't want to be losing debates to these intellectuals in heaven on whether or not He exists... that's where black holes come from.
Well, in many ways, this thread is about whether religion is right or wrong, despite what you say. The idea of creationism is based purely on religion... so if religion is bunk, then it follows that creationism is bunk. If you pose a question whose two possible answers are dependent on contrasting beliefs (religion vs. science), you should expect the debaters to argue the merits of those beliefs.

Nah, it's not my intention to piss people off. It's just how I feel.

It's the same thing as a religious person saying "God loves us, even those who don't believe in him." It's a simple matter of someone being assertive and confident in what they believe. The difference is that the Science side of the question has actual evidence, where the Religion side does not.

And, I'd say we do know that the Earth was formed billions of years ago, as much as we "know" many other things about our universe, such as the fact that the sun is a ball of fiery gas millions of miles away. When careful, thorough observation of evidence leads us to a conclusion, and there is no credible evidence to the contrary, we call that a "truth." Observation is our one and only tool in determining truth, and so we must trust it, or call everything into question. Such observation tells us that the Earth was created billions of years ago. It tells us that the Earth is definitely older than 6000 years old. The only evidence to the contrary is a very old text from questionable sources which has been re-translated and edited countless times. That makes it's credibility very low.

I don't agree. Just because something is written down in a book, and some things in the book happen to be true, that doesn't mean that all of the book is true. There is no evidence in the bible pertaining to this subject.

Sure, it's possible either one or both are wrong. But like I said, the important thing is <i>how</i> you decide which is right. It's about standards of proof.

The "theory" of evolution refers to the mechanism of evolution -- i.e., <i>how</i> it happened. That it did happen is a fact.

Take gravity, for example. That the phenomenon of gravity occurs is a fact. There is a theory to explain how it occurs.

Fact and theory are two completly separate things, not rungs in a heirachy of certainty.

You'll have to be a bit more explicit here. What are you stating is a fact?

Well, it's not really random at all. That's the idea -- that there are forces that act on things in a consistent manner. The talk.origins faq addresses this, if you're curious.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-...ns.html#chance

Only the bits that involve first century Roman politics. That hardly gives any weight to the bits on the origins of the universe.

creation vs evolution
 

[quote]
*chuckles* I think I've bitten off more than I can chew....

You bet your bottom dollar you have,Have read everyones threads replies and I'm still no further convinced to either argument.
If you look at how random and violent the universe is with regards to comets.black holes things crashing into things and say that some omnipotent creator is in charge of it all and it's all going to plan then all I can say is"sack the juggler" cos i don't want to be wiped out by some friggen bit of rock crashing into our planet.Because the Man/Women/God who's in charge decided to have a day of rest.

Then I remember my friend's wife who became a Jehovah's witness who had her elder/guru whatever, to dinner who quite seriously tried for around 3-4 hours to convince us that there was nothing true about evolution that it was all false and all evidence such as fossils etc were fakes.(The Devils work) I mean this guy was very serious.
Shit we will never Know for sure who is right or wrong and in the end does it matter we are here,everone is a long time dead so why not live it to the full because tomorrow you could be....etc

If you believe in total evoloution, what did we start out from? What was there at the very nano second of the explosion that started us on this rat race? Where did that primordial soup come from that became so dense it exploded sending whole galaxies out into the emptiness of space? Science can get very close to the beginning of time, but they cannot as of yet get to the very instant of the 'bang'. There are a lot of possible explinations, but in the end you are just going to have to believe either one without much solid proof. I mean I don't think theres a movie clip floating out in space somewhere that shows what happened. If you believe in the higher power or not your still going to have to make that belief on some possibles instead of absolutes.

That's a good question. I keep getting interrupted here, though (damn life!), so I'll try to answer tommorrow. :)

Evolution doesn't address this. That's astronomy. :)

Yes, but it's very crucial to my theory of evolution. Did we all descend from the same basic building blocks? If so what was it? I know that tends to be more astronomical in nature, but it's at that moment in time that evolution started right? What was there to evolve to where we are today? Nobody knows for sure, so we have to believe in something. Maybe we did start from absolute nothing, but that's as hard for me to believe as it is for some people to believe there was a higher power that had some hand in bringing about the big bang.

Sometime, somewhere something had to be in existence for us to be where we are today. What I want to know is where did that matter come from. How was it formed?

A question important to this thread is what can and cannot be established as being fact. To go back to Descartes who really thought about this for a long time. His famous answer was "cogito ergo sum" I think therefore I am.

If you want to get down to the only thing you cannot deny as being true is the fact that you are a thinking being. everything that your senses tell you could be a lie. The only thing that is absolutely true is the fact that one's own thoughts exist.

Descartes postulated as his worst case scenario the very cool concept of the 'evil genius' who is somehow feeding all false information into your senses (yes Virginia, the idea of the Matrix is from the seventeeth century) The only thing the evil genius cannot falsify is the fact that there is a thinking being that is experincing these thoughts.

As an aside, Descartes goes on to 'prove' using only what he can believe as being undeniably true (no external evidence, only thought), and using logic, the existence of a God.

one good website about Descartes is
uhttp://www.utm.edu/research/iep/d/descarte.htm

What all I'm saying boils down to is that next to nothing in this world is absolutely provably 100% ipso facto true to a bazillion decimal points.

The question is how much certainty do you want to accept.

With that being said, evolution has been proven to the limit of certainty. Is it 100% undeniably true? No, nothing is, and scientist are aware of that fact, but its as close as you can get.

I am saying that evolution is a fact. That being, the descent with modification of different lineages from common ancestors. This includes one species evolving into another.

The theory of evolution can easily be proved to be false. One simply must make a prediction based on it, and then show that prediction to be false. Every prediction based on the theory of evolution so far has proven to be true. In contrast, creationism isn't falsifiable at all.

It's also important to remember that there's no such thing as a "species" in real life. It's just an artifical label that scientists made up to help them classify organisms. In reality, there is a very gradual range of differences between all organisms. Naturally, most of the common ancestors and transitional forms are now extinct, though.

The theory of evolution assumes a self-replicating lifeform existed at the beginning of the process. It necessarily limits its scope because the phenomenon is provable without this information.

Personally, I think think that time is infinite, and extends forever into the past and future. So, in that model, then perhaps that matter has always existed? I guess that's hard for people to believe, since they like for things to have a "beginning" and an "end". But the more I think about it, I don't think time works that way.

Although like I said, that's not evolution. It's more like, "Origins of the Universe".

Evolution is "the descent with modification of different lineages from common ancestors". There is nothing in that definition about the origin of the universe.

The fossil record is directly relevant, because it gives us evidence of transitional forms -- something predicted by the Theory of Evolution.

Syc just pointed out to me that I was wrong here. In fact, humans <i>are</i> apes, as are all of the common ancestors between them and the living apes. Doh!

I guess what would be more accurate is that the statement, "We evolved from apes" is a little deceptive. It implies that we evolved from the apes that are alive today, which isn't true at all.

Or: "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."

Here's a history of Occam's razor. It was originally used to suggest that one cannot use reason alone to deduce God's existence.

Anyway, the simplest explanation is not always the one that is easiest to write. If it were, then Occam's razor would always provide the same answer: Magic! Why does the sun come up? Magic! Why is grass green? Magic! Why is the sky blue? Magic! How did my prize sheep end up in my neighbor's flock? Magic!

The entities Occam wants to slice away are theoretical constructs that must be taken on faith. One way to apply it to evolution is as follows: microevolution is obvious, known, demonstrated, and generally accepted. It explains how one species can change over time, and gain and lose traits. We have fossil evidence that many years ago there were animals that no longer exist, and there are many animals that exist now that have no evidence of existing earlier than a certain point many years ago. But there are structural similarities between some of the extinct animals and some of the current animals.

I'll use the non-scientific version of the word 'theory' here: We have two theories:
A) Microevolution happens as observed, but God does the big changes.
B) Micro- and macro- evolution are the same process in different timeframes and environmental pressures.

Theory B is the one with fewer entities, and therefore the one Occam points to.

How It Happened
 

My brother began to dictate in his best oratorical style, the one which has the tribes hanging on his words.
“In the beginning,” he said, “exactly fifteen point two billion years ago, there was a big bang and the Universe—”
But I had stopped writing. “Fifteen billion years ago?” I said incredulously.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m inspired.”
“I do not question your inspiration,” I said. (I had better not. He’s three years younger than I am, but I don’t try questioning his inspiration. Neither does anyone else or there’s hell to pay.) “But are you going to tell the story of the Creation over a period of fifteen billion years?”
“I have to,” said my brother. “That’s how long it took. I have it all in here,” he tapped his forehead, “and it’s on the very highest authority.”
By now I had put down my stylus. “Do you know the price of papyrus?” I said.
“What?” (He may be inspired but I frequently noticed that the inspiration didn’t include such sordid matters ad the price of papyrus.)
I said, “Suppose you describe one million years of events to each roll of papyrus. That means you’ll have to fill fifteen thousand rolls. You’ll have to talk long enough to fill them and you know that you begin to stammer after a while. I’ll have to write enough to fill them and my fingers will fall off and even if we can afford all that papyrus and you have the voice and I have the strength, who’s going to copy it? We’ve got to have a guarantee of a hundred copies before we can publish and without that where will we get royalties from?”
My brother thought awhile. He said, “You think I ought to cut it down?”
“Way down,” I said, “if you expect to reach the public.”
“How about a hundred years?” he said.
“How about six days?” I said.
He said, horrified, “You can’t squeeze Creation into six days.”
I said, “This is all the papyrus I have. What do you think?”
“Oh, well,” he said, and began to dictate again. “In the beginning—Does it have to be six days, Aaron?”
I said, firmly, “Six days, Moses.”

-- Isaac Asimov

Taking the Bible literally, I used the story which includes "Give unto Caeser what is Caeser's and give unto God what is God's" to mean that Jesus began the separation of Church and State.

I think that if God/dess wants to create the world through evolution, who are we to say S/He can't? Things seem too perfect for them to be mere chance...it seems logical that there is some kind of intelligence behind it. There is no reason that science and religion have to be at odds. If one is true, it doesn't necessarily make the other false, and just because we can't prove that something is there doesn't mean it isn't. It just means we can't measure it YET.

To paraphrase MIB...five thousand years ago, everyone KNEW the earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everyone KNEW the earth was flat, and five minutes ago, you KNEW you were alone in the universe....Imagine what you'll KNOW tomorrow.

Sidhe

I saw an interesting analogy for this reasoning. I think it was in Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams. Imagine a puddle of water in the ground wakes up and contemplates its environment. It notices that the hole it is in is the perfect shape to contain it. That hardly seems to be likely enough to have happened by chance, so the puddle concludes that the hole was dug especially for it.

Evolution is the process by which life adapts to fill its environment. Life that more perfectly meshes with its environment (including other life) is more successful. So intricate, perfectly balanced dependencies end up appearing.

This isn't to deny that it is possible that evolution is directed, but the intricate dependencies don't imply it.

It comes down to this. Either you believe that the bible is the infallible word of God, or you don't.

If you do, then you can't be an evolutionist, because you believe that yom means 1 plain old regular 24 hour day, that God created the whole kit and caboodle.

If you don't, and you want it proved to you, well, that's a bit harder. And what this thread is about.

Why make this exception? Even the most faithful person has to realize that assuming the accuracy of scripture is fallible. One can have faith that it is true, but humans are fallible, so faith can be fallible.

It's a bit hypocritical to criticize science for relying on assumptions when ALL of religion is an assumption.

The idea that scripture is God's word is fallible. It is a human idea.