For me it's just fun. That's why it's a big deal. You don't do things for fun, Maple?
Um, why'd you join the Catholic church? Was it because you are looking for a reason to exist?
Well, I exist for fun. Life is fun for me, so that's why I'm around.
Evolution Debate ...
- Thread starter Planet_EN
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Um, why'd you join the Catholic church? Was it because you are looking for a reason to exist?
Well, I exist for fun. Life is fun for me, so that's why I'm around.
Unfortunately, that's not true. I wish it were that simple, but it's not. There are many who claim they'd see no reason to behave in any morally or ethically correct way if there's no god to provide the absolute measure of those values and judge us at the end of it all. No telling what horrible things they'd be getting up to without their belief. There are also many who believe fervently in god and do terrible things in his name like, to use the most obvious example from recent history, flying airplanes into buildings and killing thousands of people, including themselves.
I agree, that evolution can't be ignored by religion. But it has to be applied logically into religion.
I think God got the ball rolling through evolution. But humans were an exception, and because humans were created in his image, we did not "evolve" but were created by God from the Adam and Eve story.
There thats my stance. Move the discussion along now...
I think God got the ball rolling through evolution. But humans were an exception, and because humans were created in his image, we did not "evolve" but were created by God from the Adam and Eve story.
There thats my stance. Move the discussion along now...
Though we are made in God's image, we cannot remove ourselves from the world we live in or the evolutionary process. Adam and Eve were not actual people. Adam is a Hebrew word meaning"Man", so the obvious and current theological position is Adam was a representation of the first people, not a single person.
That's what you say. But how would you be such an expert? I don't think that's what Christians think at all. I think the whole 7 day creation stuff is bull.
I'll go along with that except for the first part: it was man that made this god thing in man's image.
rofl
Dude1981, I'd like to introduce to you Father C.G. Vaillencourt aka Sanctus. IOW, he's the resident expert on Christianity in general and Catholocism specifically.
the interesting part is the so-called convergance of atoms to make a bacterium. There are literally quadrillions of atoms ina bacterium. probably more. As a chemist I know that generally any reaction involving more than 3 atoms/molecules is unlikely to happen much at all because of the unbelievable coincidence necessary for 4 objects to randomly collide. the theory is pretty wiffly so far and it is indeed hard to pin down how self-replicating molecules such as DNA or RNA could have started off. This is why creation seems to hold a possibility
You can't ignore the fact that chimps are almost exactly the same as humans, and there appear to be fossil remains which show even closer ape relatives existed. Did God create the neandethals in his image too, just with a bit extra hair?
There is evidence though of amino acids within meteorites survivng impacts. Also there is evidence of membrane-like organic globules in both meteorite impact sites and grains from comets like Halley. If we knew how to manipulate these correctly, perhaps we could create the building blocks necessary for life.
still seems like a gigantic coincidence, eh?
then again it had billions of years to happen and millions of yottamoles to happen with
then again it had billions of years to happen and millions of yottamoles to happen with
Dexter, are you saying Intelligent Design in itself is simply wrong or are you saying the guys you mention are simply wrong?
If you say Intelligent Design is fundamentally wrong, I would very much like to know your reasoning. You mentioned yourself ID is a philosophical/religious position. I agree with that, but I'd like to hear your philosophical arguments saying ID is fundamentally wrong.
(This is what you said in another thread on the subject...)
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with teaching ID, it just depends on where you put it. It's a philosophical/religious position, so it could be part of a course on comparative religions, sociology, history, philosophy of religion or ideas or history or whatever. But it's not science, so it doesn't belong in the science classroom.
Well now s_lone, you certainly have a knack for asking hard questions in simple terms, and remembering what people posted a hundred years ago on subjects that interest you. Doesn't surprise me though. I still clearly remember the long thoughtful essay you posted that led me to describe you as "the thinking person's separatist." In fact I did a C&P on that text and saved it locally. It's a useful essay, and you're obviously a smart one.
I'm saying ID is fundamentally wrong, and so are the people I mentioned, along with a lot of other people. The evidence we have, properly understood, just doesn't sustain such a conclusion. There's undeniably an appearance of design, but it's an illusion rooted in misunderstanding of the evidence and a lack of information. The usual examples offered as instances of intelligent design, like a wing, the human eye, the immune response, and so on, always with the observation that if any single part of the system fails the whole system fails so it couldn't have happened in a series of less than fully functional steps but must have appeared whole in one step, is actually a deeply ignorant view of how nature works. What good, some will say, is half a wing, half an eye, half an immune response? The answer is that there was never any such thing as half a wing, half an eye, or half an immune response. There were simply various structures that met the immediate needs of the creatures that possessed them in the environment they found themselves in, that gave them a selective advantage.
If you look closely at any of those things, what you really see is evidence of a lack of design; you see structures cobbled together from various bits of other things with no clear design or direction. The human eye, for instance, from an engineering point of view, is a terrible design. The light sensing structures are on the back surface of the retina, pointing away from the direction the light comes from, and there are blood vessels crossing the retinal surface in front of them, blocking some of the light from reaching them. That's why untreated diabetics go blind; diabetes causes ruptures in those blood vessels and blockage of more light as bruising spreads across the retina until ultimately all the light is blocked.
Or just consider something as apparently trivial as our upright posture. We are the only mammal that walks all the time on two legs, and what is the price we pay for that? Our backs hurt, our bellies sag, our feet hurt, we get hemorhoids, our hips are narrow so birth is painful and difficult... It's only in the last couple or three generations that parents have been able to routinely count on all their children surviving to adulthood, because modern medicine and hygiene have banished most of the diseases and infirmities that once killed off most of us before we were old enough to reproduce. If this is a design intended to promote human life, the designer is hopelessly incompetent. The improvements in the human condition that have produced the population explosion of the last few centuries are due solely and entirely to the progress of science, not nature and not a deity. Unfortunately the fruits of that science have been unevenly applied around the world, so there are still too many places where birth rates are too high, neonatal mortality is too high, and life expectancy is too short.
Well, I do tend to wander all over the map sometimes. But the fact remains: there is no evidence for ID, all the ID supporters can do is try to poke holes in evolutionary theory, they can't produce any positive evidence that supports their position. All they have is negatives rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding.
This is one reason why I think there may be more than one universe and life may have happened at a seam or an intersection (kinda like a couple tectonic plates grinding together). That is unless life just never needed starting in the first place.
Oh man, you're kidding right! Talk about foot in mouth! Sorry Sanctus, I guess you might know a thing or two on the subject:munky2:
The Bible itself is an example of evolution. It went through many changes over the centuries as scribes added or removed what they thought represented true Christianity. It wasn't till Guttenburg's printing press that the bible entered a somewhat permanent form.
"They believe the bible is the exact word of God - Then they change the bible! Pretty presumptuous, huh? I think what God meant to say..." Bill Hicks
"The Bible has fingerprints all over it. And none of them are God-sized." Unknown
"The Bible has fingerprints all over it. And none of them are God-sized." Unknown