Why is evolution even still a debate?

[Wildswanderer]

OK, the nice parts are because of God, the bad parts are because of sin.

I wonder how you find that out without being a Christian first. But if you are a Christian first, then for sure you do not need nature to infer God because you already believe in Him, right? So, how does it work, exactly?

Ciao

- viole

Nature declares the glory of God. Like this morning in the middle of a snowstorm, when I was cutting firewood and the sun broke through the clouds. We are often startled by the intense beauty and raw power of nature, but with no belief in a deity, there's no reason for awe whatsoever. Nature can certainly lead one toward God or confirm their belief in a creator, but the mistake some make is to worship nature itself. And believing in God doesn't necessarily make one a Christain of course. I never remember not believing he existed. I didn't always accept Christ for me personally.

 

[Wildswanderer]

Why? Suppose it did. Suppose the first life arose naturalistically, and that that can be demonstrated. How can we ever determine that without speculating that it may be the case and looking for evidence for or against that hypothesis?

Then you would be demonstrating that miracles are possible and you are into religion and have left science behind. Of course, science and faith are on different levels. I don't have to prove God, I only have to demonstrate that science can't explain a whole lot of reality.

 

[Polymath257]

No, real science has to be able to be tested in real-time. If it can't be it's no different than faith. The problem is, that they put their speculations out there and people take them as facts.

Simply not the case.

The *basic principles* should be testable (so, general relativity, quantum mechanics, chemistry, etc), but that doens't mean the specifics need to be tested in real time. In fact, many phenomena happen on *way* different time scales than what can be done in the lab. Plate tectonics, the 'life cycle' of stars, the dynamics of galaxies, and so on, simply don't happen in the few thousands years of human civilization. But we *can* know about them, test the basic principles, and have reliability of our conclusions.

And, yes, those conclusions reveal *facts* about events that happen over millions or even billions of years. it is not 'just speculation', but data and test driven knowledge.

 

[Polymath257]

I'm not pushing anything. I'm just pointing out that science keeps claiming to know things it can't and people take them on faith.

And we are pointing out that the things you claim it cannot know, it actually can and does.

 

[F1fan]

Only they don't...because the big bang can't be demonstrated to be anything but a guess, in other words, a popular myth.

False. Not only do you have contempt for science but you have contempt for fellow RF members who have valid education and knowledge about these matters. Do you really think your rejection and denial of established science carries any weight? You are getting science wrong, why is that?

 

[cladking]

And yet, we *do* know some of these things.

Maybe we don't know everything, but that doesn't mean we know nothing.

I'm not going to dispute the meaning of the word "know" but will observe that since all of reality is interdependent then it follows that If you don't know how these forces and processes interact then you really don't understand them. Sure we can measure the force that holds molecules (or even atoms) together but we don't understand the cause or why it is as strong as it is any more than we understand gravity. Indeed, at least we know the approximate "speed" of gravity.

More specifically, life is a complex collection of chemical reactions. Nothing supernatural is required.

We do not know how consciousness arises from "a complex collection of chemical reactions" and we don't even have a definition for "consciousness" which is apparently the very foundation of life itself. Remarkably it even appears the "consciousness" of some things lies partially outside the individual itself. Bacteria can glow only under specific conditions and slime molds affect their environments to create their own "memory". Roots change their directions before they get to obstructions.

Across the spectrum of life we see remarkable abilities of even the simplest life forms. We see "intelligence" in animals that can sometimes exceed human "intelligence" if such a thing even exists.

 

[Polymath257]

The topic of evolution is meaningless if it's just a point A to point B theory. It still has a million holes in it, but the real question people have is why are we here? Where did it all start? Not whether the chicken or egg came first.

And the way to find out the answers to the deeper questions is to *first* find out how things behave and learn the general principles. Then we can apply those principles to situations that we cannot directly test.

This is no different in kind to what a crime investigator does when there are no witnesses: they collect physical evidence and use that to determine what happened. And, frankly, that is more reliable than eye-witnesses in many (if not most) cases.

The theory of evolution is a theory about how species change over time. It has been established that they do, in fact, change. If you are not interested in that, then don't worry about it.

I happen to consider the questions of why we are here and where did it all start to unnecessarily assume aspects that may or may not be true (the question of why assumes there is a cause). I happen to be interested in when eggs first arose.

 

[F1fan]

This thread should be focusing on why certain Christians adopt a false and misinformed view of science and rejects valid science. What has led any believer to the place they are today in rejecting science and preferring a false view of the universe and nature?

 

[Polymath257]

Nature declares the glory of God. Like this morning in the middle of a snowstorm, when I was cutting firewood and the sun broke through the clouds. We are often startled by the intense beauty and raw power of nature, but with no belief in a deity, there's no reason for awe whatsoever. Nature can certainly lead one toward God or confirm their belief in a creator, but the mistake some make is to worship nature itself. And believing in God doesn't necessarily make one a Christain of course. I never remember not believing he existed. I didn't always accept Christ for me personally.

Why would I need to believe in a deity in order to have awe? I can be amazed at the beauty of the universe, of that raw power and still not think any intelligence was involved in its formation.

I don't remember actually believing a deity exists: at best I thought of it as something like Santa Claus that I was told.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

I don't see any new kinds of animals being produced. All the kinds were produced on day 6 of creation and man was the last kind.

"Kinds" is another thing your side keeps saying that screams it doesn't know about science and biology. Mentioning the Biblical days of creation professes ignorance of geology and paleontology. Such as, we humans are not found until much more recently in the Earth's history. Prior to that the Earth is teeming with life, but we are absent for billions of years.

 

[Valjean]

I'm not pushing anything. I'm just pointing out that science keeps claiming to know things it can't and people take them on faith.

Why would it claim to know something it can't know? How would it test such a belief?
Just because you don't understand how science knows what it knows, doesn't mean it's unknowable. It just means you're ignorant of the subject.

Faith? Science hates faith. Faith is the thing the scientific method seeks to replace.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

but with no belief in a deity, there's no reason for awe whatsoever.

Why?

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

It's not a debate among biologists.

It's not a debate among anybody except some religious and many who had no education beyond high school.

 

[viole]

Nature declares the glory of God.

Again, does that include kids cancer? Awesome, indeed.

Ciao

- viole

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

This is not strictly true;

Gradualism vs. Punctuated Equilibrium

I believe all these "theories" are actually merely hypotheses and they are each more wrong than right. Until experiment shows something it is an hypothesis.

That's not a debate about the existence of evolution as the generator of earth's life-forms, but rather a difference of opinion on some of the mechanism through which evolution achieves this.

 

[F1fan]

Yes the Bible tells the truth to all peoples.

It's how the Bible is interpreted that is the problem. The more fervent the believer, the less accurate the interpretation, from what we observe.

I see the 2 accounts as agreeing because the 2nd is not an account of all of creation, it is just a focus on the creation of man and what happened to man.
If you take note you can see that God started forming the man even before the plants were in the ground. This was not on day 6 but maybe on day 3 of Genesis 1. So God started to form the body of man (in an evolutionary sense) that early in the creation. Maybe the beginning was the organising of molecules that could eventually become the first animals.

If your interpretation is correct then it is poorly designed and written.

 

[cladking]

That's not a debate about the existence of evolution as the generator of earth's life-forms, but rather a difference of opinion on some of the mechanism through which evolution achieves this.

Again. I do not believe in "punctuated equilibrium". This is merely the closest biological hypothesis to what I do believe which is far more complex than any set of hypotheses. I believe all of reality takes place interdependently and based upon conditions which immediately preceded it. Since time is probably not quantum than even the previous statement is a somewhat simplistic way of describing the immense complexity that is reality and that we each take for granted.

I believe the nature and causes of change in species are many orders of magnitude more complex than any current "theory" and that "survival of the fittest" does not really apply to the mechanisms that cause species or collections of individuals to change. "Natural selection" is an abstraction and is produced by a reductionistic science that can't even study change in species because we preferentially see our beliefs and abstractions to reality itself. Darwin led us far astray. One must jettison everything but experiment and known facts as well as define consciousness before even beginning to see how individuals of species change from their parents in a coherent way that we call "evolution". Just because off spring can coherently differ from their parents does not mean they have "evolved" or that it was caused by "survival of the fittest".

"Evolution" is a "science" based on false assumptions. Ironically religion got it closer than "science" in this specific case.

 

[PureX]

Evolution is still a theory because there are many aspects of it that remain a mystery to us.

 

[Valjean]

Only they don't...because the big bang can't be demonstrated to be anything but a guess, in other words, a popular myth.

You're not aware of the evidence of a beginning, 13.787 billion years ago?

 

[ppp]

Evolution is still a theory because there are many aspects of it that remain a mystery to us.

If we uncover most or all of those things that remain a mystery to us, you think that means it will stop being a theory? Well that's not how it works.