Expelled.... Thoughts?

I to have doubts about the theory of evolution, although I am not a fan of the ID people either. I also do not understand how the theory of evolution is 'testable.'

Also, I don't understand how the idea of irreducible complexity has been debunked. Do you have a link? It seems that even within the atom itself the complexity just continues as far as we can study.

Brisket, Theology is known as the 'queen of the sciences' with regards to scholastic thought. I am a bit of a scholastic in that regard as well as many others. I firmly reject modernity, and of course the biforcation of science and religion. I believe that divorce to be not only unnatural but impossible to make. I am also the one that states that all beliefs are religious in nature as are all actions. I also believe that all thoughts are expressed in words and that all speech is speech-action. I hope that makes sense. I am not anti-science at all. I agree with Hodge who believed that because God created all things that there was no need to dispute scientific facts as their veracity would be within the realm of God's action.
I do look forward to hearing more of the thoughts from you guys on this thread.
 
I admit I don't know everything about this, but again, I do not understand how you keep claiming evolution is testable and has been tested. Fossil records are not a test for evolution, unless I just don't understand what a "test" means.

And again, applying your standard, has intelligent design been disproven?

I'm with you when you say that evolution makes sense. I'm with you when you say that evolution is the most likely explanation for how things got here. But I get off the bus when you say that evolution is "fact," "proven" or "uncontradicted by any evidence." And I really don't understand how you're claiming that evolution, the process that occurs over millions of years, is "testable" as that term is understood scientifically.
 
It’s true that the evolutionary history of bats is still poorly known. Bats are small, fragile, and live in environments which don’t lend themselves to fossilization. However, the application of DNA sequencing to bats and other mammals has provided some intriguing evidence about evolutionary relationships both within the Chiroptera (the bats) and between bats and other mammalian orders.

This article -The Link
describes some of that work. Similar work is being conducted at labs around the world. That’s the difference between science and ID/Creationism; science posits hypotheses and then gathers data that will be used to test those hypotheses while ID/Creationism simply suggests “God done it. Ain’t it wonderful!” How does one test that idea?

Biology is far from being a complete. There’s still much we don’t know about bat evolution, the relationship between hagfish and lampreys, and the relationship between modern man and Neanderthals, among many other issues. We don’t have the final answer to any of these questions, but we are looking in an intelligent, productive manner. ID can’t do that. ID can only offer magic.

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"And again, applying your standard, has intelligent design been disproven?"

That's the problem, Drew. Intelligent design can't be disproven. ID makes no testable predictions. ID is the idea that somehow, somewhere, a higher presence was involved in the initiation, design, conduct of the universe (including life). ID isn't science, it is religion. It's okay for you to believe that God created life and all the creation in 6 days a few thousand years ago. It's not okay for you to teach that in a science classroom.


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thanx for the links andaval. I will look them up.


I do have a question as well about ID or Creationism. This will show my ignorance, but I never have heard any type of consenus definition of these things. anyone heard a good definition?
 
1. For the record, I am a Christian.

2. Evolution has been and will be tested. It makes predictions about the nature of things that will (and even won't) be found in fossil records. On our limited timescale of observation, most of Evolution's predictions are indirect, relating to what we will find as we continue to unearth old evidence. As yet, all of what has been found has been either consistent with or even supportive of the theory.

3. The argument regarding bats, leaving aside its potential factual error, is a classic example of the fallacy of arguing from ignorance. Absent information is not information in support of the negative. Rather, DNA tens of millions of years old that was identical to current bat DNA, THAT would be evidence against evolution.

4. Literal Creation is also a testable theory. It posits that the world was made as we see it thousands of years ago, not billions. If one's understanding of science does not allow him to see that this has been tested and refuted, that person is so profoundly deficient scientifically that reasoned argument is unlikely ever to change his mind. Of course, one could argue that scientific proof is trumped by miraculous exceptions to the laws of God's Created Nature, but this argument is predicated on admiting that scientific proof against its findings already exists.
 
Relativity is a fact. It not only explains what we see, accurately predicts things we hadn't seen it also is used in daily application. Without Einstein's relativistic dilation equations,GPS would be going out of sync all of the time.
 
There a football play by play announcer who has a monotone voice just like Ben Stein's....maybe on ESPN? I remember he called at least one of UT's games last fall.
 
I am enjoiying this interesting discussion about science/evolution/genetics. Though, you can count me as one Creationist who believes in the literal interpretation of Genesis 1-2. At the same time, I use science at work every day.

I think both sides in this, the Creationist & the Evolutionist, need to use discussions like these to temper their opinions of the other side.

I think the Creationists, who appeal to the authority of the Bible, need to be careful not to limit scientific discovering based on things the Bible does not say. Creationists many times do this because they do not really understand what the Bible says about the origin of life. I can't claim to know exactly what it is saying either.

Evolutionists need to be careful not to make assertions about what science tell us that are beyond what the scientific data says.

In both cases, the mistake is taking data and overstating what it truly says. Much of creationist rhetoric I don't believe because they take something hard to understand in the Bible and they inject meaning that I don't think the text is really saying like the whole water canopy theory. It could be true, but I do not see any good reason for it to be. Then, evolutionists take scientific observations from experiments and extrapolate from it.

I think everyone should look at cases of speciation and genetic drift in populations and whatever else as additions to scienctific understanding. However, I don't think anyone should take observations from the present and apply them to things thousands or millions of years in the past or future. This is because we simply don't know what happened in the past. Until time travel is possible we can't observe how and when life first occurred. We can't observe how and when humans developed. We simply can't. The only thing left is some form of speculation.

I for my part will never try to deny that this or that doesn't or can not happen due to my belief in the Bible. If something in nature is true we will be experiment with it, test it, and observe it under different conditions. The truth will become evident whatever that is. I also have no doubt that what we discover scientifically and what is revealed in scripture will not contradict. The only things that will contradict or either misinterpretations of the Bible or misuse of scientific data.

Last but not least, I think those of the Evolutionist persuasion will hopefully recognize that science is not the only means by which we find truth. It is only one of the ways. We also find truth in the recording of history for example. We can trust both science and history to the same degree. As a Christian, I can say that in some ways the Bible is a reliable history of certain events revealed by God to certain men who accurately recorded what was revealed. Some of the things these men saw themselves and others they didn't.
 
I understand the principle of Uniformitarianism. My question is how do we know that that principle is trustworthty? I do agree that without it little can be understood about the past. I also don't totally disagree with the claim that things in the past work similarly to today. However, to make confident assertions using something like Uniformitarianism can be dangerous because of the fact that we just don't know. I know that non-Christians have no reason to believe anything other than that Uniformitarianism is necessary. However, I believe that the Bible is reliable and there are statements in there that indicate that Uniformtarianism is not reliable. Again, that could be a misinterpretation, but at least I think Uniformatarianism can't be trusted in total.

Also, I understand your point, theropods, your comments about looking at fossils and comparing them to today's animals and that those fossils give us indications of what made up their DNA. Still, that was not my point, totally. So I agree that we do have a window into the past through the fossil record. My point was that there are many studies today describing how a species has come into being, or how animals have adapted through genetics to survive a disease. Through these studies we can observe genetics/evolution in action. Plus we can record which attributes of living things have been newly formed in our lifetime or at least since these studies began. The assumption or assertion that an Evolutionist makes is that all attributes of living things were produced in this way. My believe is that some number of living beings were directly created by God with certain attributes but were also provided the ability to develop other attributes over time. Science will never be able to determine what that original "creation" was. The Bible gives us an account of it though. So I think the overall point is that the ability of science is ulitimately and absolutely limited in gaining understanding of what happened in prehistory. We have the fossil record, but anything outside of that is speculation, some of it is better speculation that other parts.
 
"Last but not least, I think those of the Evolutionist persuasion will hopefully recognize that science is not the only means by which we find truth."

I don't think many scientists will try to claim that science is the only means of finding 'truth'. I think most of us would settle for an agreement that scientific 'truth' is what should be taught in the science classroom. Religious 'truth', philosophical 'truth', and any and all other 'truths' may have their place in understanding man's relationship to his universe, but they have no place in a biology class.

P.S., The word 'truth' has a few sticky implications in science, but most of you will understand what I mean.

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How do some know that all life is descended from a common ancestor? Is this view a result from finding that all of today's life forms have some DNA common to all species (for lack of a better word)?

If not, where can I go to read more about the discovery of the common ancestor?

If so, I don't think that common DNA requires a common ancestor. It can as easily show that some common genetic information has been used by a creator when making different kinds of life. It makes sense that we all share similar attributes/capabilities/DNA that allow us to live on the same planet as one another. The commonality could be consequential and not causal.

Show me where I'm wrong.
 
The similarity in DNA corresponds well with other information on ancestry. For example, humans are morphologically similar to chimps, our DNA is very similar to chimps, we are less similar morphologically to old-world monkeys and are a little less similar in our DNA sequence, we are even less similar morphologically to rats and our DNA similarities are less. The correspondence is strong and holds whether you're talking about humans & chimps or humans and protists.

Maybe God made the morphological and the DNA sequence similarities to fool us into thinking we've evolved from other organisms. Would your God do that? Doesn't seem quite cricket.

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Stein has a belief... that is completely improveable by scientific method.

Darwin had a belief,,, he gathered data... was persuctued by the "godly" and over time more and more evidence pointed to the fact that thus far Darwinism is the best explanation with evidence to back up it's assertion.

Inteilligent design isn't intelligent it's simply an attempt to explain something without any scientific basis in fact.

Cave men used to do the same thing... the God of Fire for example....
 
GT WT, I understand your explanation. Thanks.

My God has not created all this in its particular way to confuse or fool anyone. I believe it is all a matter of misinterpretation of data, drawing conclusions where data does not support the need to, starting with wrong premises, and ignoring the other sources of truth that are available to you (i.e. the Bible).

I think it is much better to look at scientific data, look at Biblical evidence, look at any other sources of information and draw conclusions which are supported by each source. That is what I am trying to do. I will continue compiling data from all sources until I die.
 
Monahorn, my problem with using the bible as a reference is simply this... which bible do you use? Even if you want to say all of the other religions got it wrong except the Chrisitians, you are still in a pickle, because Chrisitian's don't always agree. If you go to a bookstore and stroll through the bibles available to you, you are going to see different translations and sometimes even different books contained within the pages.

Even assuming the original wordings were directly from God, these words were passed down in the languages of men. In fact, they were dictated in the languages conceived by men of other if any faiths. Understanding that the books themselves went through hundreds of years as an oral tradition yielding a myriad different wordings for a single work before they were ever put to paper. Even after they were written, they were "editted" by each new person who transcribed the work, until finally they appeared before a council of men who decided which works... even which books were "of God". These councils were made up of the same groups of men who excommunicated individuals for saying that the world was round, or that the solar system was heliocentric.

Even after the works were "approved" they were then allowed to be translated by individual's who choose certain words which fundamentally changed the meaning of the work usually to the benefit of the pope/king who comissioned the translation. In English a misplaced comma can completely change the meaning of a sentence... you can only imagine what has been lost over the thousands of years of oral tradition from men who couldn't conceive of a peptide much less a quark.

The only thing available to me which I know is 100% the work of God and not the work of man, is the substance that we and the stars are created from. As such, when the Bible and science are in disagreement, I can not conceive of a situation where I would favor the Bible's version. It has just passed through too many fallable mouths and hands before it made its way to me. To take the "bible" as fact requires more than faith in God... it requires faith in the countless unnamed men who the works were trusted to before the made it to your ears and eyes.
 
"I believe it is all a matter of misinterpretation of data, drawing conclusions where data does not support the need to, starting with wrong premises, and ignoring the other sources of truth that are available to you (i.e. the Bible)."

Perhaps I am misinterpreting my data. I don't think so. After careful consideration I reach the same basic conclusion that many very bright, highly educated scientists have reached when they examined their data - life shares a common ancestor.

Perhaps the problem is with your decision to use the Bible as a science text. I'm no theologian, but any book that describes world floods, creation in 6 days, and a earth-centered universe seems a poor choice for a literal explanation of creation.

However, to each his own.

God bless Texas!

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mia1994, the transmission/translation of the Jewish and Christian scripture has done a much better job of maintaining the original wording and thoughts than you are claiming.

Take the NT for example. It was written in Greek, which was the language you learned to write in if you were from that part of the world at that time. Those Greek originals were manually copied in a quite uncontrolled manner. However, you can look at thousands of those copies from as early as the 1st century AD, which was the same century they were written in. You can't say that about any other ancient writing. All those thousands of manuscripts have been observed and studied. Variation has been found, but no teaching has been affected. This is because much of the variation comes in 3 kinds 1) Jesus referred to in different ways like the Lord Jesus and then the Lord Jesus Christ, 2) mispellings, 3) scribal error where the same word is written twice or omitted. When you have thousands of samples to look at the mistakes can be identified and explained while the most likely original wordingl can be understood. NO DOCTRINES OR CLAIMS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT ARE CALLED INTO QUESTION BY ANY OF THE VARIATION SEEN. That is a fact.

Translation is another issue, but no more threatening. The sentence in all caps above summarizes the effect translating has had as well. And, if an incorrect translation does come out there are many people who have studied and know the NT in the Greek. Even I know enough of the Greek to do basic translation when I see a problem in an English version. Therefore, no one can be justified to state that the message or claims of the bible are somehow lost or distorted beyond recognition. Anyone who honestly studies these issues themselves will come to the same conclusion.

In reply to:
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"I don't take the Bible to be a scientific text."

Monahorns, if you aren't trying to have your Bible (or its mythology) taught in public schools as science, then I have no issue with you. You're welcome to believe in Adam & Eve, Noah, and Jonah if you want. I have an aunt who believes Elvis is still alive. She doesn't hurt anyone and she doesn't mind if I smile a little at her beliefs.



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