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Christian Evolutionist:

Autodidact

Intentionally Blank
Wow. 32 pages. Do you all realize that Heneni was never really interested in any facts or evidence, right? She is just blindly and zealously defending the biblical literalist standpoint. Perhaps her strategy was to hold out for as long as she can until everyone here somehow suffered some sort of severe brain trauma to where they could be coaxed into rejecting the ToE and accepting creationism with a candy bar bribe.

This isn't true, is it Heneni? When you said that you reject ToE because it's not supported by the evidence, you meant it right? If you find that the evidence in fact does support ToE, you'll change your mind, right?
 

Luminous

non-existential luminary
Still no conclusive answer to the following questions:

1. If evolution is still going on...what are humans currently evolving into?
humans don't evolve. We're not evolving into anything. a different species might differentiate from our current especies but our species might still be around with the same species characteristics it still has now.

2. If we have been around for millions of years (as humans) why have we only advanced to where we are today and have not advanced MUCH further?
Evolutionary "advancement" is not how it works. or else protazoa and beings YOU consider inferior would not exist today. YOU SEE: the dinosours did not 'evolve' ; they were wiped out. which left room for other species to differentiate into other species and take their place on top of chain, hense: 'us'.

You dont need to understand evolution fully to understand scientific method.
it is like i already said in post #302
^^Me: Blue blue blue blue blue. ...

You see, species don't 'evolve'. evolution is just a simple turm for the complicated world of species differentiation. and population dynamics. that frog (though frogs are our brothers not our fathers) could have never turned into human. but its children's children's... could have devoloped more and more of the characteristic of humans through genetic mutation and the such. Human = what humans have.
 
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Luminous

non-existential luminary
This isn't true, is it Heneni? When you said that you reject ToE because it's not supported by the evidence, you meant it right? If you find that the evidence in fact does support ToE, you'll change your mind, right?
:sarcastic: NO NEVER!

;): ofcourse she would. But to her, logic and reason is not evidence; its just opinion and she has her own.

Heneni is honestly and courageously using her intelligence. She simply cannot grasp how evolution could be true. maybe she doesn't want to. to me, mediocre minds are always slothful.

Heneni doesn't seem slothful so... Heneni, what about: Carbon dating, species of Tortoses in Galapagos Islands, pattern of species existance through fossil record, studdies on population dynamics/genetics, etc.?
 
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Dirty Penguin

Master Of Ceremony
In this thread labelled 'christian evolutionist', i seem to be the only christian....:trampo:

Its amazing how atheists like to pop into christian threads. Like they belong there or something.

Did I miss something? I didn't realize the OP put this under "Same Faith Debates"......Well...did he...???
 

Luminous

non-existential luminary
Well god could have poofed everything into existance......how do you know he didnt?.
Why would you stupidly assume that God is a male? ;... matter of fact, Spagettilicious didn't poof anything into existance, everything is an extension of its tentacles. proof? the logic of stringtheory. how about YOU proof Me wrong?

How many animals were on that ark? Many.
NO, Enough to fit in its clearly labled dimensions. But if you're going to go all religulous on me and say that dimensions are nothing to the power of God, then why did it order dimensions in the first place?

How many different types of vegetation, plant types, would have been needed to feed these animals. Many...im sure they did not all eat grass.

Did these plants all manage to evolve in a few hundred years?
Don't even grasp what the heck that was.
What else can i say?
 

camanintx

Well-Known Member
Still no conclusive answer to the following questions:

1. If evolution is still going on...what are humans currently evolving into?
Nobody knows because there are too many variables to predict, but that doesn't mean that the theory is wrong. Physics says that a rock dropped off of a mountain will follow the path of least resistance to the bottom, but if I challenged to you predict the exact path it will take would you be able to tell me? Just because we cannot predict where the rock will settle doesn't prove that physics is all wrong.

2. If we have been around for millions of years (as humans) why have we only advanced to where we are today and have not advanced MUCH further?
Technological evolution and biological evolution are not the same thing so your question doesn't do much to refute Darwin. Since technology generally follows an exponential growth pattern (see Moore's Law), how your observation unexpected?

You dont need to understand evolution fully to understand scientific method.
No, but you need to understand the scientific method to understand evolution.
 

Autodidact

Intentionally Blank
Well, I haven't heard from Heneni lately, and I don't know whether there any other anti-Evolutionists here, but I will now start with evidence, as previously promised. Since Heneni says she is a Chemist, I assume I don't need to explain that science relies on evidence, not proof, and the most important evidence is fulfilled predictions. Also, Heneni, assuming you're still here, are you familiar with the concept of consilience?

O.K. Evidence #1: ToE predicted that the earth would be billions, not millions of years old. And it turned out to be right.
Early ToE proponents realized immediately that for ToE to be possible, the earth must logically be billions, not thousands or millions, of years old. Otherwise there would not be time for the diverse and complex species we have now to have evolved. Remember, during Darwin's time we did not know how old the earth was.

Around the 18th century Christian, YEC geologists went looking for the evidence they just knew they would find, to verify their understanding that the earth is about 6000 years old. To their surprise, they found evidence that it was considerably older than that, but they couldn't figure out how to tell exactly how old. This evidence was primarily the strata of rocks, and how they revealed that the earth and sea had changed places repeatedly, and the observation of erosion, its slow process and effect on the earth.

They tried everything they could think of. The measured the salt in the oceans, and its rate of increase, to count how long they had been there. They counted sedimentary layers. But they could not come up with a definitive answer. Then the physicists and chemists entered the picture. They started from the earth's temperature, and tried to calculate, knowing what they did about how quickly rock cools, how long the planet had been cooling. In this way, the great Lord Kelvin gave an estimate of 98 million years. This was the best answer at the time, and Darwin knew it cooked his goose--it wasn't enough time. ToE was dead. But what Kelvin didn't know is that the earth had an internal source of energy--radiation. When radiation was discovered in the beginning of the last century, they realized that Kelvin's assumptions were mistaken. By taking this source of energy into account, physicists realized that the earth was several billion years old.

The discovery of radiation also brought the way to finally calculate the earth's actual age. Because radioactive elements decay at a constant rate, they act like clocks. By measuring the proportion of radioactivity remaining in a substance, it is possible to figure out how old it was. All rocks on earth have been through a transformative process, but scientists measured the radioactivity from meteorites to determine that the earth is about 4.56 billion years old, and this is the age that science accepts today.

ToE was right. The earth is billions of years old. This was a bold prediction that turned out to be correct.

If you question the accuracy of radiometric dating, let me know, I think I can persuade you that it is accurate. One important thing to understand is that if you reject it, you reject most of modern Physics, as well as Geology and Biology. It's getting harder and harder to call yourself pro-science, and reject all of actual science.
 

Autodidact

Intentionally Blank
Another question, Heneni: Is it part of your hypothesis that there was a global flood around 4000 years ago, and that every land animal on earth is a descendant of a pair that Noah took on the ark at that time?
 

Autodidact

Intentionally Blank
It's been my experience that evidence is like a powerful spray that makes creationists disappear.
I have tons more--is anyone out there interested?
 

ruejacobs

simon says to, that's why
i know i might sound off topic, considering the flow of this thread...

but i heard that Alexander the Great was an example of the last recorded evolutionary advance, the hardwiring of our brains to accomplish reading without moving our lips to sound out the words. it seems that little Alex was lauded because this was considered remarkable...

"Look...look..that man is reading and he's not moving his lips!"
"Whoa...far out, man! he must be one of them there geniuses!"

another earlier example is the fact that until fairly recently, but definately before Alexander, there was not a seperate word for green in any language. everything that is colored green was called simlpy, "blue" in the various tongues. this indicates that the human eye did not diffrentiate between the two colors.

a modern example of human evolution is the ADHD trait, much discussed by psychiatrists. it seems that our children and the succeeding generations are able to process, exponantially more information than our species was previously able to. this phenomenon has been speculated to be a direct result of the immersion of more and more generations to high paced media. it has been said that 'twitch time' (the amount of time a neuron spends to get from the braincell down the proper channel carrying information as to what we must do with what particular muscle) has remained constant, while the brain stretches out a second of time because it is operating faster than twitch-time...
which would mean that each successive generation in this exponential evolutionary sequence would actually experience the passage of time much differently than the last.
(this only happens to us during moments of extreme duress, the way time slows down during an autoaccident, for instance, because our brains kick up the adrenaline but we are still bound by our physical bodies' capabilities and cannot move as fast as our brain is then working.).

of course, these are only opinions.

there are no facts...lol
 

Heneni

Miss Independent
HE HE...well some of you all should really sign up for the church choir. It takes a LOT of faith to believe in evolution!

Lets see what others have to say about evolution.

"Evolution is unproved and unprovable."
Sir Arthur Keith, author of the foreword to the 100th edition of
Origin of the Species.

Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax ever."
Dr. T. N. Tahmisian, Atomic Energy Commission, USA.

"Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."
Professor Louis Bounoure, Director of Research, National Center of Scientific Research.

"[Evolutionary theory] is still, as it was in Darwin's time, a highly speculative hypothesis entirely without direct factual support . . . "
Michael Denton, molecular biologist


Now i know that autodidact and painted wolf and the rest of you are extrememly proficient in your jobs as lawyers and IT professionals and biologists...but you are really going to have to give evolution another good look.
 
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Heneni

Miss Independent
It's been my experience that evidence is like a powerful spray that makes creationists disappear.
I have tons more--is anyone out there interested?


You can have thousands of books and links to verify evolution. I hope it makes you sleep better at night. But really all you are doing is falling for the biggest hoax of all time.

According to evolution DNA evolved slowly. Forgetting of course that it would be completely useless until it completely evolved, and that no life form would be able to exist without it.

The chances of DNA evolving all on its own, with its incredible intricacies and complexaties are really miniscule. And I really mean...absolutely MINISCULE. In math when the answer is really small, you might as well say it is negligent. And yet...all of us and the ENTIRE plant and animal kingdom exists because at some random point a random amount of dead chemicals came together formed goo and poof billions of years later here we are.

Of course none of this is verifiable. Its not possible to duplicate this in a lab. Its not possible to use the science of evolution and predict what we will evolve into next. Good scientific principles need to verifiable, they need to be able to predict certain events based on non-mistakable information about current science.

I don’t really care how many books have been written about evolution. And it doesn’t really matter how many times a fruit fly can be mutated. None of it proves evolution took place.

The whole evolution theory has not gone through the proper scientific method of establishing scientific facts. So until that is done...its still a theory.
 
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camanintx

Well-Known Member
According to evolution DNA evolved slowly. Forgetting of course that it would be completely useless until it completely evolved, and that no life form would be able to exist without it.
Micheal Behe used to say the same thing about the bacterial flagellum until Nicholas Matzke proved him wrong. Why should we believe that your assumption about DNA is any less mistaken? After all, RNA, which is only half of a DNA strand, is perfectly capable of reproducing itself.

The chances of DNA evolving all on its own, with its incredible intricacies and complexaties are really miniscule. And I really mean...absolutely MINISCULE. In math when the answer is really small, you might as well say it is negligent.
If you don't believe that evolution can happen, then how can you assign any meaningful probabilities to it happening?
 

9-10ths_Penguin

1/10 Subway Stalinist
Premium Member
HE HE...well some of you all should really sign up for the church choir. It takes a LOT of faith to believe in evolution!

Lets see what others have to say about evolution.
Fallacy: Appeal to Authority

According to evolution DNA evolved slowly. Forgetting of course that it would be completely useless until it completely evolved, and that no life form would be able to exist without it.
That's not what evolution says at all. Evolution says this about DNA: it is taken as a given that it exists. This is similar to what Ohm's Law says about electrons or what Le Chatelier's Principle says about molecules.

Just as it would be bizarrely ignorant to claim that Le Chatelier's Principle is unsupportable without knowing the details of the stellar nuclear processes that made the atoms involved in the reaction in question, it's bizarrely ignorant, frankly, to claim that evolution is unsupportable without knowing all the details of how abiogenesis works. People who make either claim effectively put up a big, red flag to everyone around them calling attention to the fact that they don't know what they're talking about.



Heneni, I've seen you continually misrepresent, or at best misunderstand, what the theory of evolution says. I've also seen you take lines of argument that show either ignorance or disregard for how science works, such as ignoring statements about evidence in favour of quote-mining of supposed authorities to support your view.

I've come to the conclusion that one of two things is going on here:

- you don't actually know what science is, and you're misrepresenting yourself as a scientist.*
- you are a scientist and you know how science works, but you've decided to follow lines of argument here that you know are fallacious and unsupported.

Either way, I can see you're not after an honest discussion or debate here. Until you deign to actually address the factual claims involved and tell us why the evidence takes you to a different conclusion, I don't see how there's any use in continuing in this discussion with you.

For example, Auto just gave a number of factual claims; apparently, you reject them... either that or you reject the idea that they're support for the theory of evolution; either way, you haven't given any logical or factual basis for your position. You've also claimed that evolution doesn't follow the scientific method, but when you're asked factual questions about this like "in what way does it not follow the scientific method?" or "what do you view the scientific method to be?", you ignore them.

If you want to be taken seriously here, I suggest you actually address these sorts of things.





* not necessarily implying that you're lying about being a chemist, but there's more to understanding science than simply knowing how to synthesize chemicals or work in a lab, and doing these things doesn't necessarily imply using scientific principles to learn about things... i.e. being a scientist.
 

Autodidact

Intentionally Blank
HE HE...well some of you all should really sign up for the church choir. It takes a LOT of faith to believe in evolution!

Lets see what others have to say about evolution.
What you are doing is called quote-mining. It is one of the many ways that creationists lie.

"Evolution is unproved and unprovable."
Sir Arthur Keith, author of the foreword to the 100th edition of
Origin of the Species.
this quote is indeed a figment of the creationists' imagination. However, Sir Arthur Keith did indeed write an introduction to the Origin of Species (Keith, 1928), although he did so over 30 years before any centennial edition would have been printed. And considering that Keith died in 1955, he wouldn't have been in a position to write one had he wanted to. Did Keith write another introduction later in his life? This is doubtful as well, since the author of a later introduction to the Origin, W. R. Thompson, states right at the beginning of his own effort:
When I was asked by the publishers of this new edition of The Origin of Species to write an introduction replacing the one prepared a quarter of a century ago by the distinguished Darwinian, Sir Arthur Keith, I felt extremely hesitant to accept the invitation. (Thompson 1958)
Does the supposedly quoted material reflect Keith's views? Describing Darwin's arrival at the Galapagos Islands, Keith writes:
And why should each of the islands have its own peculiar creations? Special creation could not explain such things.
We see that Keith doesn't believe that that special creation is an alternative at all, since he doesn't feel that it can explain the fauna of the Galapagos. And later on he writes:
The Origin of Species is still the book which contains the most complete demonstration that the law of evolution is true.
from The Quote Mine Project
In other words: It's a lie. He never said any such thing. Would you like me to go through each of the lies, distortions and quote mines in your post, or would you rather withdraw them now and save yourself the embarrassment?

Now i know that autodidact and painted wolf and the rest of you are extrememly proficient in your jobs as lawyers and IT professionals and biologists...but you are really going to have to give evolution another good look.
Now, would you like to respond to the evidence? Because, you know, that's what science is all about--evidence.

btw, I advise you to be extremely cautious with information you get from creationist websites--they're all full of lies.

btw, Heneni, it's good to see you back in the thread, so we can continue our discussion.
 
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Autodidact

Intentionally Blank
You can have thousands of books and links to verify evolution. I hope it makes you sleep better at night. But really all you are doing is falling for the biggest hoax of all time.
So Father Heathen is right? You've made your mind up regardless of the evidence, and no amount of evidence will change your mind? If so, please tell me now, because laying out the evidence is going to take days out of my life, there's so much of it.

According to evolution DNA evolved slowly. Forgetting of course that it would be completely useless until it completely evolved, and that no life form would be able to exist without it.
All 3 of these statements are false. Evolution is not about DNA, it's about organisms. It's quite useful to replication even when just a tiny piece, and of course we can conceive of life without it, it's just that all life on earth is based on it, which is itself (as we will see later) a strong piece of evidence in support of ToE.

The chances of DNA evolving all on its own, with its incredible intricacies and complexaties are really miniscule. And I really mean...absolutely MINISCULE. In math when the answer is really small, you might as well say it is negligent. And yet...all of us and the ENTIRE plant and animal kingdom exists because at some random point a random amount of dead chemicals came together formed goo and poof billions of years later here we are.
It's obvious that in addition to knowing nothing about Biology, you know little or nothing about statistics. One of the most basic concepts in statistics is that the chances of anything happening which has already happened are exactly 100%. The odds of DNA coming into existence are exactly 100%.

You persist in wanting to talk about abiogenesis. Since this subject interests you, I suggest you start a thread. It has nothing to do with evolution. Do you see why, or do I need to explain it?

Of course none of this is verifiable. Its not possible to duplicate this in a lab. Its not possible to use the science of evolution and predict what we will evolve into next. Good scientific principles need to verifiable, they need to be able to predict certain events based on non-mistakable information about current science.
We have seen one prediction so far. In this thread I will give literally thousands more.

I don’t really care how many books have been written about evolution. And it doesn’t really matter how many times a fruit fly can be mutated. None of it proves evolution took place.
I thought you knew something about science, since you claim to be a chemist, or I would have supplied this background for you. Science is not about proof, and nothing in science is ever proven. It's about evidence. We accept a theory when the evidence supports it, as is the case with ToE.

The whole evolution theory has not gone through the proper scientific method of establishing scientific facts. So until that is done...its still a theory.
Clearly you know nothing at all about what it's gone through. I will show you in this thread.
 

DallasApple

Depends Upon My Mood..
Arent there quite a few things we know are "true" but cant completely understand yet?Or know everything about yet?..What about diseases?Arent there many diseases out there we arent exactly sure what causes them or how to cure them or how to 100% prevent them?Does that mean that the disease is only a theory and can't be proven utill we understand completely cause?

Arent there still questions about why our heart starts beating?..I think we know what causes it to beat(isnt it electrical)..But why?

What about the human brain?Isnt it still somewhat of a mystery?I mean with all we know about it we don't know everything..But I wouldnt say until we can explain everything about it..I won't acccept that brains exist.

Are those bad analogies? If so I apologize.

Love

Dallas
 
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