"I think" is for people with brains equipped for logical and rational independent thinking. "God says" is for the rest as it only requires reading an old book, believing in it and parroting what it says.
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Just Accidental?
- Thread starter Deeje
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Like I have already stated many times, if your first premise is flawed then everything you build on it will be flawed as well.
I see enormous flaws in a theory that has very flimsy foundations. I see a monolithic building perched on that weak foundation and I know it is going to collapse one day soon. That is my belief.
I have no problem with evolution being taught as a theory in school....I hope you understand that.
Scientists are welcome to theorize about whatever they like....what I have said throughout this very long thread is that I object to it being taught as a fact when it clearly isn't, and can never be because there is no way to test it or to prove it. It is a suggestion....can science differentiate between a fact and a suggestion? Apparently not.
Our kids at school are force-fed this stuff as though ID is some pathetic myth that must be suppressed at all costs. Those of us who accept the existence of an Intelligent Designer are by no means unintelligent....we just opt for a view that makes way more logical sense to us.
All I ask is that ID be given equal status for those to whom it matters. When exam time comes around, our kids are penalized for giving "wrong" answers to questions that challenge their faith. Its not about keeping science out of religion or religion out of science...its about allowing for choice without penalty. The system makes no allowance for choice. Is it too much to ask that they just present it for what it is....an unproven and unprovable theory....an opposing argument if you like...
Ignorance about something that I believe is absolute nonsense is not going to do me any harm. The more I look at the scientific articles and read what they really say (as opposed to what people think they say,) the more ridiculous it becomes. I believe that to swallow the whole story of evolution, hook, line and sinker is a worse form of delusion than what scientists think we accept. ID is my chosen position and I am not forcing it anyone, but I want people to see that evolution is NOT the foregone conclusion science makes it out to be.
My God doesn't need people who demand more proof of his existence than what he has already provided. He really has no time for those who want to live this life he has given to them, on their own terms. By the time people see proof of his existence, their fleeting recognition will be too late. This is what the Bible says. If people don't want to live by his rules, then he will serve notice of refusal of entry. The terms for citizenship of any nation are not negotiable, so why should the Sovereign ruler of the universe demand any less?
Personal experience is a better teacher than anything out of a textbook....even the Bible. To experience God's hand in your life, leaves you with no doubts.
The existence of my God is demonstrated in everything we see in nature. From the way earth is situated in this galaxy, in this part of the universe, its size, speed of rotation, distance from the sun, its system of precipitation with this amazing substance we call water.....nature's amazing recycling capability, its correct mixture of atmospheric gases...the fact that all living things are remarkably designed to live in the environment specifically designed to accommodate them, fully prepared before their arrival, and with the ability to reproduce themselves in a perpetual cycle of life. The fortunate "accidents" of evolution have to reach a point where the odds of them ever taking place are just ridiculous. This is how I see it. You are free to evaluate the evidence for yourself.
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Three Scriptures come to mind:
Matthew 5:44, 1 John 3:10-15, and John 13:34-35.
These commands are fine and dandy, until fighting between countries erupts. Then their spiritual brotherhood goes out the window!
Not so, with Jehovah's people.
gnostic
The Lost One
That's not going to happen.
I bet you are right.
OK. I'll give ID a shot. Please link to scientific papers and studies providing evidence for ID and provide links to the books used in school to teach ID.
The identity of "Babylon the great" was not made known until these 'last days' began and God's will gradually unfolded more and more until a clear picture was obtained.
If Babylon was Rome, then why not just say so?
She is only spoken about in the Revelation, not written until the close of the first century. All of its contents were future events. The Revelation parallels Daniel's prophesies...both speak about "the time of the end"....the time we are living in right now. (Daniel 12:4; 9-10) God was going to cleanse and refine his people at this time, so identifying "Babylon the great" gave them opportunity to remove themselves from her before God brings her down. She is pictured as a harlot for good reason.....she is 'sleeping' with God's enemies. (James 4:4)
Why "Babylon"? Because original Babylon was the place where all false worship began with the first rebel after the global flood....Noah's great grandson, Nimrod. Instead of obediently spreading out in the earth as one people with one language as God instructed, Nimrod and his cronies dug their heels in and determined that they would stay put and make a great name for themselves. They instead built great cities. Babel was one of them. They also intended to build a tower "with its top in the heavens" so that (as legend has it) if God ever flooded the world again, they would have somewhere to seek high ground and be safe. (Genesis 11:1-9)
To thwart their plans and make them spread out, God confused the language of the tower builders and forced them to separate from one another into the groups who could understand one another. This explains why so many languages exist in various parts of the world.....but they did not just have their language in common, they also took Nimrod's false religious beliefs with them....a common thread runs through all of the world's religions, identifying Babylon as their source. These include, immortality of the soul...belief in multiple deities or trinities of gods....a hell of eternal punishment for the wicked and a heavenly bliss for the righteous.....and many other beliefs and practices, including idolatry.
If you examine the teachings of all the world's various religions you will find these core beliefs in some form along with a flood legend, indicating a common origin.
Original Babylon is the symbol of the 'greater Babylon' in our time, where false worship is rife. The devil has seen to it that all religion on this planet is designed to alienate people from the true God....just as atheism has. As he corrupted the worship of the Jews, so he has corrupted Christian worship. (foretold well in advance by Jesus and his apostles)
By making people's worship unacceptable to God, satan has successfully siphoned it off for himself. He wanted to be a god and now he has the entire human race serving his interests in one way or the other. This is why "few" are on the road to life. (Matthew 7:13-14)
The only way to survive the time of trouble that the Bible says is coming upon "Babylon the great", is to obey God's directive to "get out of her". (Revelation 18:4-5)
There is a place of refuge that God has provided for his people in these last days.
LOL....I said "to those to whom it matters".....the "scientific papers" that promote evolution are not based on the evidence; they are based on biased interpretation of the "evidence". So there is nothing science can provide to prove that evolution ever took place. You have no more real evidence than we do......you keep dodging that issue.
I wonder why?Did you answer a wrong post or something? I said: "OK. I'll give ID a shot. Please link to scientific papers and studies providing evidence for ID and provide links to the books used in school to teach ID."LOL....I said "to those to whom it matters".....the "scientific papers" that promote evolution are not based on the evidence; they are based on biased interpretation of the "evidence". So there is nothing science can provide to prove that evolution ever took place. You have no more real evidence than we do......you keep dodging that issue.
Shad
Veteran Member
Absolutely true!Yet science is part of a group claiming knowledge, millions (even billions) of years removed from the the living things they study and no one was around to document a single thing.
Validation comes in many forms from model predictions, results of these predictions, genetics, and structure; these are the basics taught.
Who can validate your arguments except perhaps other evolutionists....does that count?
Any biologist can. The fact that only a tiny minority object to evolution often for religious reason such as your own
No you don't. You have no evidence that your book was written by God. You put forward a faith view nothing more.
Too bad 150 years of evidence shows otherwise
No it is the best explanation we have it has predictive power while your idea doesn't.
Being able to test predictions and models is the advantage evolution has compared to "God did it" Lets see you use your ID method to predict the next species which emerges creation ex-nihlo.
You have already made a judgement that has no objective evidence.
Yet your comment contradicts what the diagram shows....
Evidence...
Have you figured out how to defend your position yet?Hint: insults just don't add credibility to anything you say.
I am commenting on your lack of education as demonstrated by your inability to read a diagram. This may be insulting as it exposes you and you become upset as a result.
Is there an echo in here?Diagrams are not a substitute for real evidence.....I think we already established that though.
I am the most vocal here because its my thread.....
I was using the diagram and your comment to establish you can not read diagrams. I never made a comment regarding if the diagram was true or not.
There is that echo again.What is AIG?
The source used by you and others. When you start linking pictures and copy/pasting whole articles it is very easy to find the source.
I said AIG and other blogs. Blogs which masqurade as wiki such as creation wiki #1368
Your years of study has no merit neither does your opinion
Until you have experienced God's hand in your life, I don't think you are in a position to deny anything about him.
A subjective experience that can not be shared by anyone else can be dismissed as a truth claim about reality.
It isn't the people metis...its the leaders of the churches...all equally teaching false Christianity. (the weeds of Jesus' parable) Just as in Jesus' day, the religious leaders had taken the people off the path to life and led them down the wrong road. Jesus castigated those leaders every opportunity he got...appealing to people's hearts with the real truth. Those who listened to Jesus were redirected back to true worship, but those who stayed and continued on in the way they had always been taught, missed out on the opportunity to become kings and priests with Christ in his kingdom. It was held out to the Jews first, but the majority didn't think their religious leaders could be wrong, so they joined them in rejecting this "false Messiah", Jesus Christ....condoning his murder and cursing themselves with his blood (Matthew 27:25). They did not think that they were doing anything wrong. They felt as though they were supporting true worship and being loyal to God......they were terribly misled. Satan uses what works.....again and again. He is good at corrupting people's worship.
Just as Christ's disciples had to separate from the apostate Jewish system, so today, sincere ones have to separate from all ties with Babylon the great. But you can't "get out of her" unless you first identify her. There was only one ark in Noah's day...I believe that there is only one "ark" today. (Matthew 14:37-39)
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I said to "those to whom it matters"......it doesn't matter to you. You have demonstrated that very clearly.
If you want actual proof, more than what is already in front of you? Sorry, I cannot offer it any more than you can offer actual proof for your theory to me.
By the time you acknowledge the actual proof you require, you'll probably wish you had done it sooner.
My belief gives me hope of a better future that does not rely on man to accomplish it. That fills me with confidence. What future do you see? And who will deliver it....science?
So science is practicing the art of prediction.....I thought that was tied in with sorcery and magic.
I wasn't hiding them.
You still didn't tell me what AIG is. We Aussies don't do the "initials" thing very well.
KBC1963
Active Member
Selected List of Peer-Reviewed Scientific Publications Supportive of Intelligent Design
The list below provides bibliographic information for a selection of the peer-reviewed scientific publications supportive of intelligent design published in scientific journals, conference proceedings, or academic anthologies:
- Stephen C. Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239 (2004) (HTML).
- Michael J. Behe, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution,’” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 85(4):1-27 (December 2010).
- Douglas D. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 341:1295–1315 (2004).
- Michael Behe and David W. Snoke, “Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues,” Protein Science, Vol. 13 (2004).
- William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol. 14 (5):475-486 (2010).
- Ann K. Gauger and Douglas D. Axe, “The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2011(1) (2011).
- Ann K. Gauger, Stephanie Ebnet, Pamela F. Fahey, and Ralph Seelke, “Reductive Evolution Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High Fitness,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2010 (2) (2010).
- Vladimir I. shCherbak and Maxim A. Makukov, “The ‘Wow! Signal’ of the terrestrial genetic code,” Icarus, Vol. 224 (1): 228-242 (May, 2013).
- Joseph A. Kuhn, “Dissecting Darwinism,” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, Vol. 25(1): 41-47 (2012).
- Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II, “Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, pp. 3047-3053 (October, 2009).
- Douglas D. Axe, Brendan W. Dixon, Philip Lu, “Stylus: A System for Evolutionary Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional Constraints,” PLoS One, Vol. 3(6):e2246 (June 2008).
- Kirk K. Durston, David K. Y. Chiu, David L. Abel, Jack T. Trevors, “Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins,” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Vol. 4:47 (2007).
- David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, “Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models,” Physics of Life Reviews, Vol. 3:211–228 (2006).
- Frank J. Tipler, “Intelligent Life in Cosmology,” International Journal of Astrobiology, Vol. 2(2): 141-148 (2003).
- Michael J. Denton, Craig J. Marshall, and Michael Legge, “The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms: New Support for the pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 219: 325-342 (2002).
- Stanley L. Jaki, “Teaching of Transcendence in Physics,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 55(10):884-888 (October 1987).
- Granville Sewell, “Postscript,” in Analysis of a Finite Element Method: PDE/PROTRAN (New York: Springer Verlag, 1985).
- A.C. McIntosh, “Evidence of design in bird feathers and avian respiration,” International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Vol. 4(2):154–169 (2009).
- Richard v. Sternberg, “DNA Codes and Information: Formal Structures and Relational Causes,” Acta Biotheoretica, Vol. 56(3):205-232 (September, 2008).
- Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig and Heinz Saedler, “Chromosome Rearrangement and Transposable Elements,” Annual Review of Genetics, Vol. 36:389–410 (2002).
- Douglas D. Axe, “Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 301:585-595 (2000).
- William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Hmmm books used in school that teach ID
Creationists in general are quite obviously cheered by these recent developments. John N. Moore, a "born again" professor of natural science at Michigan State University and a founder of the Creation Research Society, called the attention of a citizen's group to the appearance of the new texts, naming among these Biology: An Inquiry into the Nature of Life (Allyn and Bacon).
The Allyn and Bacon text pairs creation concepts with those of evolution in adjoining columns. One reads: "Creationists say ... the theory of evolution need not be accepted simply because most scientists support it," but "evolutionists say . . . agreed. Evolution should be accepted only as long as the evidence supports it." The several approaches to evolution inquiry are then cited, and the column ends with "Creationists say . . . evolutionists deny the creative power of God," and "evolutionists say . . . the hand of God is just as evident in evolution extending over billions of years as in creation occurring in an instant or a few days."
In 1975, this book, Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity (published by Zondervan, a fundamentalist publishing house), was chosen as one of seven officially approved biology texts by the Indiana state textbook commission. In two of Indiana's districts, it was the only ninth-grade biology text available to students.
But an Indiana court later barred the book for use in public schools in that state on the grounds that it was sectarian-based. In Dallas, Texas, a committee of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergy opposed it there and, in a compromise, got it relegated to library use as a reference work...
Genetics and Genesis: The New Biology Textbooks that Include Creationism | NCSE
Science 4 for Christian Schools (Home Teacher's Edition) Paperback – 1995
- Paperback: 242 pages
- Publisher: Bob Jones University Press (1995)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0890845697
- ISBN-13: 978-0890845691
Biology for Christian Schools is a 1991 school-level biology textbook written from a Young Earth Creation point of view by William S. Pinkston and published by the Bob Jones University Press.
Biology for Christian Schools - Wikipedia
So it would appear that there are school textbooks in existence that teach science from a specifically inferred intelligent designer
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KBC1963
Active Member
Can you point out exactly what my reasoning is?
Thanks for the list. I will look through the articles when I can find enough free time.
I think you misunderstood my request or maybe I didn't formulate it correctly. From the FAQ at discovery.org:
"7. Is intelligent design theory the same as creationism?
No. Intelligent design theory is simply an effort to empirically detect whether the “apparent design” in nature acknowledged by virtually all biologists is genuine design (the product of an intelligent cause) or is simply the product of an undirected process such as natural selection acting on random variations. Creationism is focused on defending a literal reading of the Genesis account, usually including the creation of the earth by the Biblical God a few thousand years ago. Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible or any other sacred text."
Frequently Asked Questions | Center for Science and Culture
I would be very interested in reading an ID text book for use in schools with no religious bias.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
The concept of self-defense vis-a-vis the church has long been a sticky-wicky, but I am one, as a non-Christian, who feels that there should be an avoidance of using deadly force if at all possible. However, I do feel that a country and a person does have the right of self-defense, not done out of hatred but out of a need to protect innocent lives.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
Because it shows up in other literature, according to the theologians I've read. Also, why would the author use the feminine form for "Babylon" if he was referring to the actual town of Babylon? That would make no sense.The identity of "Babylon the great" was not made known until these 'last days' began and God's will gradually unfolded more and more until a clear picture was obtained.
If Babylon was Rome, then why not just say so?
[I had a longer response that I accidentally deleted, so the above will have to do for now]
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metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
You really didn't answer my question. It is people who may or may not be "saved", not churches or denominations. Therefore, what you are doing is resorting to a politically-correct form of legalism that actually defies what is written in the gospels.
John 3:16, for example, doesn't say that in order for one to be "saved" that they need to believe in some sort of this, that, and many other things that go beyond a basic belief in God and Jesus. Therefore, what you and the other JW's have been doing is adding things to that basic teaching that actually defies what the scriptures say.
Gotta go for now.
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
No, they're based on carefully collected observations and measurements (i.e., Evidence).LOL....I said "to those to whom it matters".....the "scientific papers" that promote evolution are not based on the evidence; they are based on biased interpretation of the "evidence". So there is nothing science can provide to prove that evolution ever took place. You have no more real evidence than we do......you keep dodging that issue.
Enough with the cop out answers. Time to get real.
Where is ID's carefully collected evidence and please explain how it can be falsified. What kind of predictions does it make and how can we test them?
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