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It has become apparent through recent posts that there are a number of WP members who believe in Creation, or at the very least disavow evolutionary theory. This has made me wonder why do you believe this? As an avid atheist, dialectical materialist, and believer in the scientific method, I cannot comprehend a belief in creation. I am genuinely interested in the thought process that brings you to such a conclusion.

It's in the Bible. What more do you want?

I think you are joking a bit. But just for the record the Bible is largely a book of stories, not a scientific treatise or an historical compendium. Most of what is in the Bible are stories told to children to keep them quiet.

ruveyn

I believe that evolution is one of those beliefs that is long on faith and short on evidence. Science has not proved evolution to be true; in fact, the origin of life is not testable and repeatable like a chemical reaction or the refraction of light. Evolution is just one of many ideas of what could have happened at a specific time with the evidence that science has in its possession.

A person who embraces Darwinism and its fundamental premise of naturalism embraces the thinking that chaos creates order and information; non-life creates life; randomness creates fine-tuning; and non-reason creates reason. This hardly sounds like logical thinking to me, more like tainted science.

I don't believe that any logical thinking person would ever believe that a dictionary, for example, developed simply because of an explosion in a printing shop; or that a billion monkeys typing for a billion years could produce the book Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Everyone knows that every designed thing in the human experience points directly to a designer.

And design is based on the principle of cause and effect. It is understood in science that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. For every cause, there is an effect. This also applies to the origin of life, which is to say that life must have a cause.

A person who is walking about on another planet and comes upon some stones shaped in a perfect triangle, might be able to assume that chance plus aeons of time may have caused the triangular shaped rocks. But if a person happens to come upon a piece of paper with information about an in depth analysis of McDonald's cheeseburgers, that person would not assume that chance plus many billions of years of atmospheric pressure had caused that information to be written.

Information assumes intelligence. I think it's breathtaking to realize that all the information in a single thread of human DNA fills 600,000 pages. I've read that the information capacity of a single human cell is enough to store the Encyclopedia Britannica (30 volumes) three or four time over; and that the amount of DNA placed on a pinhead is equivalent in information content to a pile of books that when stacked would reach 300 times the distance the earth is from the moon.

It seems to me that an atheist would have to have a lot of faith in evolution in order to believe that this DNA information, or that any information, could possibly have risen from disorder and by chance. But, then again, the theory of evolution, like the theory of creation, cannot be be demonstrated and observed and repeated by science; it can only be believed.

Last edited by JetLag on 10 Oct 2009, 5:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What about recorded evolution of microbes?



Personally, I deal in probability, not fact. I have not directly observed evolution, but it seems the most likely of the available options. Likewise, I don't know for certain that I'm not in the Matrix, but it seems more likely that I'm not.
The idea that an all-powerful being could even exist seems extremely unlikely, let alone one that's also all-knowing. Then, the assumption that that all-powerful, all-knowing being would create a universe... Why? Is it an experiment? One who knows all would have no need for experiments. Does the impossibly powerful being have an ego? It would know the pointlessness of such a thing.
Random chance is far more likely a cause than some being without motivation.

Further, even if you disproved (observed!) evolution, that would not be proof of creation. Science doesn't work that way. The scientific method has no step saying that if a theory's proven false then its competitor wins.

So, to re-pose the question:

The evidence supporting evolution by variation and natural selection is massive. All the results in modern genetics and molecular biology (which are well founded on physics and chemistry) support the theory of evolution.

What you are saying is like that the notion that the sun is at the center of gravity of the solar system and that the earth revolves about the sun is just a belief.

I suspect you do not have the dimmest notion of what the theory of evolution is.

ruveyn

Evolution has became a scientific fact among scientists , its existence has been proven through thousands of studies, and it's the backbone of modern biology , only its mechanisms and its dynamics remain theoretical, like gravity, scientists know it's there but how it functions remain a theory.

But you are obviously creationist, so debating with you would be a waste of time.

Anyways, 95% of scientists admit that evolution exists. No offense, but scientists are more likely smarter that you, I would believe scientists rather than common folks who read the bible.

One should be careful to flying off the handle or jumping to spastic conclusions - I'd tack Dawkin's thesis that evolution is absolute disproof of God or all possibility within rational limits as just that - spastic and sadly much more cathartic than measured by reason or logic.
Our study of the real science of evolution is very infant, we only started getting any real research done on DNA and the human genome maybe 35 years ago, Watson and Crick discovered it in the mid 50's - that's perhaps 50 years ago, point being that we still have no clue where the science will lead us.

That said, unless some one is really a new-earth creationist, both atheists and old-earth creationists believe in evolution, they just differ to what extent that they're willing to give it credit for what we see today. You also have a little book of theistic darkness called Signature in the Cell by Stephen C Meyer which brings up the statistical odds of chance being able to create life (as compared to the universe's entire probabilistic resources), the scientific reasoning given as well that there is no naturalistic law that necessitated chemicals reacting in such ways - after all anything that comes together by necessity doesn't and can't hold meaningful amounts of information - its a crystal and crystalline structure is purely repetitive in short unites while information, by definition, is independent of its medium. I've been reading this, just on my own curiosity - as is yours - as to how people could believe such junk as Intelligent Design, from there wondering if there perhaps was something to it (wanted to rule it out), went to the most eloquent source I can find, lo and behold - scary as it is - Meyer makes quite a compelling case, if in fact we want to talk about the truth of evolution as a list of competing theories and which theory has better explanatory power than the next (so - either God may have written the genetic code or, maybe taking the results of the competing hypothesis theory can yield complete garbage as a winner since by definition its built on incomplete information and won by whatever conventional wisdom of the day praises as most logical).

I have no idea if, 20 or 30 years from now you'll find that you're absolutely right and that evolution and the origin of life is exactly what you thought it was today, or whether guys like Stephen C Meyer (ie. the growing best and brightest numbers in the ID camp), or perhaps whether it will be something that absolutely no one today would have predicted which would end up being neither. Its still an infant science, the data is still coming in, and I think those who would at this point - so early - hang their hat for their atheism on evolution - could very easily just be falling for the conventional fad of the day.

I question how much I should wade into this as the topic is generally not worthy of debate. Neither side really expects the other side to experience some "conversion to the light" based on what is said here.

I can say this much:

1. The Bible is not a owner's manual to the universe. It is about God's relationship with Man. Past, Present and Future. To try and fight over hair-splitting issues that the Bible really doesn't cover is not the proper application of the book.

2. That said, everything in the Bible has been proven (and new findings keep affirming) to be historically accurate. Pretty much the only content you can dispute is the first few chapters of Genesis and the relevance of the Book of Revelation. I've found most people who want to cause people reject Christianity try to attack the smallest part of the Bible which cannot be independently corroborated while ignoring the fact that the vast super-majority (and perhaps the most important parts of the Bible) have independent corroboration.

3. Man's understanding of "reality" is largely a joke. We can only measure what we can sense or build devices to measure. We have learned much, but even science must admit that every answer creates 10 or more new questions. For beings of such limited knowledge and understanding, we have such confidence in how little we know. Certainly there can't be something above and beyond what we know of, right?

4. All that said, I had a lively debate with someone over the idea of man having "free will" or not. I believed in free will, and the other man said it was an illusion at best. What follows is what I've concluded about "free will" and it is essential for any agnostic or atheist who thinks God cannot exist because evil happens in the world or because God won't prove His existence beyond any doubt.

First, if you study all of the Bible, you learn that God has always desired man to have a productive relationship with Man. Reasons for why is irrelevant here, and the Bible never says God's motive for the whole exercise, so anything said on such an issue is speculation at best.

Second, while God could create creatures with perfect obedience to worship and praise Him, God wanted such from someone who chose freely to give it, not something that had no other choice. This is not hard to understand. Do you want relationships with people who are forced to like you or people who genuinely want to be with you?

Third, the challenge is that if God gave man proof that He is who He claims to be, would man really have a choice? Option A is serve God and get the benefits. Option B is to reject God and face damnation. There is no Option C. However, if God denies absolute proof of His existence, then men must first choose to believe in God and then choose to serve God. It might be only an illusion of free will, but in the absence of absolute proof, man is "free" to choose what he really wants in his own heart. Nobody serves God out of compulsion. This is why the Bible teaches that it is impossible to please God without faith. Faith is knowing you don't have absolute proof of God's existence, but you choose to believe in Him anyhow.

Finally, because God chooses to allow man to have the perception of "free will" God can not directly or overtly intervene in the affairs of man lest He give the very evidence that would rob man of his perceived "free will." I assure you that God does interact in our world and does have ways to get things done, but never overtly and not in "magical" ways that in a few short years would compel men to accept there must be a "supreme power" interceding in our daily affairs. Sometimes God works a miracle in what seems like a chance encounter. Sometimes God sends someone to meet a need when the need arises. Sometimes God does things in a supernatural way (from most accounts, this is rare and many witnesses go to lengths to dismiss what happened as anything but supernatural). However, the "necessary evil" of man having the freedom to follow his conscience is that there are many men who chose to do evil, and if God prevented that evil from happening too much, then He might as well just made humanity to be slaves to His desires from the very first day. In the eyes of a critic, God never gets it right. If God forces man to be good to each other, he is a benevolent tyrant. If God allows men to make their own choices and they choose to do evil to each other, God is cruel and uncaring or distant for not stopping it.

5. Now, on creation....

My friend went to seminary. I went to law school. We compared notes. His study of the original Greek/Hebrew indicates the possibility that the Earth was present when God created life here. That could explain many scientific inconsistencies. When Genesis says that the Earth was void and without form, my friend says that could be translated as the Earth being in chaos. Supposedly our star system passes through a part of the galaxy every so many tens of thousands of years, and the odds of being hit repeatedly by asteroids and such is almost a certainty. More than enough ELEs (Extinction-Level Events) to be had. So, maybe God took a world in place and made it into a garden? If you think of the Genesis story as told from the perspective of someone standing on the surface of the planet, perhaps that makes some sense.

Likewise, we know there are rules in physics that get left out when you talk about the Big Bang. If the Earth is near the center of the known universe and time moves slower the deeper you are in a gravity well, then the Big Bang happens, matter near the expanding edge of the universe goes through changes at insane speeds while literally seconds tick on Earth because of the relationship of matter to the overall gravity well. Another item to consider as food for thought.

Then, we know there are scientific findings deliberately repressed because they affirm a creation-event view of the universe or seriously compromise the enshrined theory of evolution. If science is indeed a search for truth, then any finding that holds up under repeated experimentation should be published, not the ones that are "evolution friendly." Politics has no place in science, but the two are hopelessly intertwined.

***

So, for me, a rational man, I know that the "science" of this world is void of much knowledge and understanding. It repeatedly rewrites its story of how we got here as the flaws in its latest story become unbearable to compensate for. I know the "science" of this world is plagued with bias and politics and foolish presumptions and assumptions that make no sense because the world and the universe do not exist in a static environment where what is happening today MUST be what was happening 10,000, 20,000 or even 1,000,000 years ago.

Likewise, I doubt the way we got here is as simple as the Bible says it was. However, men are simple minded creatures, and the story of how we got here has to be told in terms we can grasp. Still, in the years I've chosen to live for God, I know that God is real because God has done things to prove Himself to me as real. My evidence won't matter here because it's specific to me. Those not inclined to believe will find any number of ways to write off my evidence as anything else but proof that God is real.

Still, as I explained to someone, it comes down to this. Events in life can be nothing more than a coincidence, but statistically, the odds of a string of events favoring a given outcome grows longer and longer as you add more events into the string. At some point, the odds of the whole string being one giant coincidence or chance happening are so long that it simply is not credible or reasonable to believe that. There must be something or someone behind that string of events. Go to any common sense person and show them a "fair coin" that comes up heads every time when it's flipped 100 times. There is no way a person would believe that to be the product of chance. Mathematically, it could happen. Realistically, there must be something wrong with that coin or a force acting upon it.

As such, I believe God created all that we see. It is a choice, based on faith. I don't presume that the Bible gives a "blow by blow" account of how it all happened, and I know that ultimately it is not relevant. I do not let the ability to question one tiny section of the Bible detract from the meaning of the whole work. Until someone makes a working time machine so we can go back and independently prove what happened, neither side will be able to prove who is right and who is wrong.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS5vid4GkEY[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=istxUVBZD2s[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdEZTdOlGss[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjFeVwuJB7I[/youtube]

I could go on.

Thanks for dumbing the conversation down - the slow thinkers need it.

You are objectively wrong and deliberately ignoring evidence to the contrary. Kind of like when Behe said all proposed explanations of the evolution of the immune system were unsatisfactory, and then was shown large piles of research on the subject, none of which he had read.


When a creationist argues with me, I often start off by running a basic comprehension test: do you know to what the phrase "Darwin's Theory of Evolution" even refers? I have yet to meet a creationist who was capable of correctly answering that question.


You poorly misunderstand evolution, as well as physics and chemistry. The interactions between different objects in nature are not random- they are governed by a set of elegant physical laws.


It is quite amusing the myriad ways in which creationists can fail at simple Newtonian physics. The Second Law seems to be a popular choice for their misunderstandings.


The theory of evolution has been demonstrated and repeated and observed by science plenty of times. Ignorant and dishonest creationists merely pretend otherwise.

First of all, quantum physics is not deterministic. Many happening ARE random. Put an electron through a Stern-Gerlach magnet. Half spin UP, half spin DOWN. It is a fifty-fifty crap shoot. The odds depend on the eigenvalues of a Hermitian Operator describing the observable.

Secondly, the laws of thermodynamics are NOT deducible from either Newton's laws of motion or from Langrangian/Hamiltonian least action principles. Statistical mechanics requires assumptions not deducible from Newton's laws.

Other than that, you sort of have it right.

ruveyn

If you want to be quite accurate, the natural sciences never prove any theory to be true. Not Newton's laws, not relativity or anything else. The only things you can prove in the strict sense of the word are mathematical theorems.

A theory in the natural sciences is considered a good theory if it predicts experimental findings, both positive and negative. If the theory has no major gaps or inconsistencies, and there is no serious rival theory, it may, for practical purposes, be treated as fact. Evolution has that status. If you want your claim

to be anything more than an expression of your personal beliefs, you have to show either major gaps or inconsistencies or point to a better theory.


Whenever that argument comes up in this forum one of the better informed people points out that the theory of evolution (shorthand for theory of biological evolution) deals with what happens once you've got life. Have you not seen that before?


What are the other many ideas?


Are you proposing some variant of the argument that order can come only from the action of an intelligent agent? Dembski has been trying to prove that. The physicist Victor Stenger has looked at Dembski's arguments, and writes it is trivial to show that Dembski's definition of information is inverse entropy, and entropy is not conserved. He also explains why there is no paradox from inferring that the universe began with the big bang and the observation that the universe is not now in a state of maximum entropy.

And here is an example of order arising from a simple natural process: convection in a thin layer of liquid when there is a temperature difference between the lower and upper surface.

This is a picture of Raleigh-Benard convection cells. The accompanying text says:

You notice the nicely ordered, regular hexagons? And I expect you can see that when you let salt water evaporate and you get salt crystals, the sodium and chloride in the crystals is in a more ordered state than before without a designer putting each atom in its place in a crystal lattice.


That is exactly why evolutionary biologists don't believe this. This is a straw man argument that is a sign of either ignorance or dishonesty.


If you define "designed thing" as "something made by an intelligent agent to carry out a specific function" then your statement is a tautology and has no place in an argument. If you define "designed thing" as "something that carries out a function" then your statement is begging the question. Whether something that has a function needs to be designed by an intelligent agent is exactly the question to be resolved. If you presuppose the answer, you are not engaged in the examination of a scientific theory, you are merely stating dogma.


If you take that as your starting point, you are again begging the question. And if you are talking about Shannon information, you are demonstrably wrong. Disordered states contain more information. That is why creationists then talk about "specified information", but I have not yet seen a formal definition that would lend itself to analysis. If there is one, please tell me where I can read about it, because I would find that interesting. I do know of a scientists who is trying to develop a mathematical definition of something like specified information (for use in evolutionary models) but last I heard he hadn't cracked the problem yet.


See above. I don't know of anyone who believes that. I do know that creationists would like it if those who accept evolutionary theory had beliefs that fit your description. This claim is either ignorant or dishonest.

But all that deviates from DentArthurDent's original question:

Would it be fair to say that

is the basis of your rejection of evolutionary theory?

If that is it, I have a partial answer for DentArthurDent: Humans may be primed to believe in creation (link). Those who are unwilling or unable to abandon intuition for reasoned argument would resist anything that shows their teleological bias to be wrong.

A very nice essay.

Arguing evolution with Creationists is like arguing the shape of the earth with Flat Earthers or the motion of the planets with a heliocentrist. Young Earth Creationists are beyond the pale of reason and logic. They take the Bible as fact, which is the first of their many errors.

ruveyn

Of course, there is some degree of randomness, and a lot more at the quantum scale. But the interaction between hydrogen and oxygen to form water, or sodium and chloride ions to make salt, is not just pure "random chance" like creationists like to claim.


I don't think I ever claimed they were.