Creationism vs. Evolution

Let me simplify this for your simple mind. I'm right and everybody else is wrong. mmkay?

 

that means hes one of them scientologists

j/k

 

oh ok, see that makes sense, why didn't he just say that from the start?

 

Nah, but watch out for anybody that answered yes to the extra-terrestrial poll. They might be.

 

Thanks for the reminder of where the term "Big Bang" theory" originated. Like the word "Christian," which originally was a derisive term used by enemies of Christ to label the Lord's followers in Antioch, "Big Bang" was used initially to belittle the idea that the universe had a beginning.

Multitudes of Christians see the Big Bang theory as a scientific explanation of the Creation event, certainly not something to be rejected or belittled. Labeling "Christians" in general as persons who belittle the Big Bang theory is a flawed argument, for many do no such thing.

 

Even Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory (1809–1882), expressed doubts about his proposed explanation for the diversity of life. Reflective by nature, Darwin worried about the philosophical implications of his biological theory. One concern was whether man’s cognitive, or, belief-producing faculties, which he believed evolved from the lower animals, could be trusted to produce reliable, true beliefs about reality itself.

Here’s how Darwin expressed his reservations concerning the purely naturalistic process of evolution:

“With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

The worldview of naturalism (nature as the sole reality) involves a fundamental state of epistemological (related to knowing) incoherence, or is self-defeating by nature.

Consistent with Darwin’s original uneasiness, a growing contingent of theists thinks it is irrational to believe in evolutionary naturalism in particular. Why? Because it fails to provide a viable pathway to ensure that humans develop reliable, true beliefs about reality, and the pronouncements of science depend upon humans having reliable and true beliefs about the natural world.

The idea that evolutionary naturalism can reliably account for man’s rational faculties and explain how human beings can discover truth faces certain essential barriers.

Naturalism postulates a nonrational source for man’s supposed rationality. If a person accepts the evolutionary naturalistic worldview then he must also accept that the ultimate source of people’s reasoning faculties was not itself rational (endowed with reason), personal (self-aware, intelligent), or teleological (purposive) in nature. Rather, the source was a nonrational, impersonal, purposeless process consisting of a combination of genetic mutations, variation, and environmental factors (natural selection).

Naturalism therefore postulates that a combination of random chance and blind impersonal natural processes (physical and chemical in nature) produced humanity’s rational faculties.

However, presuming that a nonrational, chance origin explains human intelligence raises legitimate questions about whether human reason can be trusted, just as Darwin confessed. According to the presumptions of science, an effect requires an adequate and sufficient cause, and indeed the effect cannot be greater than the cause.

But in the case of evolution, the effect of human intelligence is exponentially greater than its supposed cause. The naturalist, as Darwin opined, appears to have adopted a self-defeating posture in that he is assuming a trustworthy reasoning process only to conclude that his reasoning is ultimately untrustworthy, based on its source.

Evolution promotes a species’ survivability, not its true beliefs. Evolution by natural selection is said to have taken billions of years to produce intellectual and sensory capacities in humans. But that process supposedly operated solely in light of survival value and reproductive advantage. In other words, evolution functioned to enhance a particular organism’s adaptation to its environment—thus promoting that species’ continued existence. What a particular species believes about its environment was and is nonessential to the process.

Also, whether the organism’s convictions about reality are in fact true is highly questionable. In some cases reliably true beliefs might contribute to survivability, but in others the truth of those beliefs would be irrelevant.

Scientist Francis Crick puts it this way; “Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents.”

Evolutionary naturalism appears to lead to an inevitable conundrum concerning the truth of one’s beliefs. This has led philosopher Alvin Plantinga to conclude; “Evolution and naturalism are not merely uneasy bedfellows; they are more like belligerent combatants. One can’t rationally accept both evolution and naturalism… Naturalism, or evolutionary naturalism, seems to lead to a deep and pervasive skepticism. It leads to the conclusion that our cognitive or belief-producing faculties—memory, perception, logical insight, etc.—are unreliable and cannot be trusted to produce a preponderance of true beliefs over false.”

False belieifs illustrate evolutionary naturalism’s epistemological unreliability. Some naturalistic scientists and philosophers heighten Darwin’s original doubt by suggesting that man’s inherent religious impulse is itself driven by evolution. In other words, beliefs in God, objective morality, and life after death are evolutionarily generated and must have served some survival purpose in the distant past. Preeminent scientist and popular science writer Lawrence Krauss says; "Celebrated atheist Richard Dawkins has gone further, arguing that belief in God is a mental delusion caused by a malfunction in the evolutionary process of the human brain. He dismisses all religious beliefs as simply the result of a defective 'mental virus'.”

Attributing man’s false religious convictions (from the naturalistic perspective) to purely evolutionary process only adds further weight to Darwin’s original doubt. If evolution is responsible for humankind’s virtually universal religious impulse, which from a naturalistic point of view is patently false (and even pernicious according to Dawkins), then human history shows that false beliefs about reality have promoted human survivability more than true beliefs.

If evolutionary naturalism can cause a person to believe that which is false (such as religiously oriented beliefs) in order to promote survivability, then what confidence can evolutionists muster that their convictions are reliable, true beliefs? If evolution cannot guarantee true beliefs in a person’s mind, then how does one know that belief in evolutionary naturalism itself is a true belief about the world?

Alternatively the Christian worldview teaches that a perfectly rational being, God, is the ground and source of reason. Therefore conceptual realities such as logic, mathematics, knowledge, and truth flow from a supremely intelligent divine mind and characterize his universe.

Because God made human beings in his image with rational faculties and sensory organs that generally function as designed, humans are able to discover the world’s basic intelligible and empirical order. Their omniscient and wise Creator “networked” the intelligibility of the world with the mind of man.

Set against precarious evolutionary naturalism, God’s objective existence is the fixed ontological (based upon being) reference point that makes authentic knowledge of the world possible.

www.reasons.org

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How do you think Noah got himself a couple of polar bears. That'd be a long walk with a couple of polar bears when there were so many elephants and zebras that needed corralling

 

You have to BELIEVE.

 

It's all theory, man. You still arguing with these brick walls?

 

So, dinosaurs were scrubbed off earth long before man and earth were created. I see.

 

Who's a brick wall, sport? This thread needs to be closed......now.

 

Finally, something I can agree with you about.

 

I find it decidedly strange that you can bang all day on religious issues on TW, but politics is off limits. Back to my corner for some more popcorn....

 

is it possible these prophecies are happening because people want them to? if they become true then it gives people something to believe in and a reason to do better in life (to get to heaven). people will believe what they want to. i personally think religion is a way for people to better except death, and to know that their loved ones aren't gone forever and that they will be together again one day.

 

I haven't seen near as many political threads here. Nothing personal, but I'd bet a dollar against a donut that we wouldn't agree there either. If I had realized this was such an old thread when I first started reading it, I wouldn't have posted here at all. This is my last post here. It's a dead horse.

 

Differentiating myth from science is not always easy. Karl Popper explains:

“Historically speaking all—or very nearly all—scientific theories originate from myths … a myth may contain important anticipations of scientific theories.”

The atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus (c. 400 BC) is an example—as is the Genesis 1:1 creation account (which presaged the big bang theory). However Aristotle’s theory of motion, geocentricity, and most other early myths did not make the “cut” as twentieth-century science. So we have to ask why?

True science is defined by a process know as the scientific method. Typically, this includes an observation about a natural phenomenon, a hypothesis formulated to explain it, and a test performed via a controlled experiment. If the test results are not as expected, the hypothesis may be revised and retested.

The key to this testing process is falsifiability. A positive test result means a hypothesis is plausible, but a negative test result proves it false. Hence, the proper test of a hypothesis is to make a prediction and devise a test such that at least one outcome seeks to prove it false.

Scientists often look first and foremost towards verifying pet theories. However Popper states:

“Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it… . It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory—if we look for confirmations. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions… . The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.”

As an example, Einstein’s theory of general relativity made the risky prediction that the gravity of the sun would bend light from distant stars. The theory was confirmed when observations determined that this prediction was true. It would have been falsified if that prediction had failed.

In the case of a “historical science,” such as the theory of evolution, it is impossible to recreate conditions in the “beginning” and perform a controlled experiment; yet a falsifiable test is still possible.

The “big bang” hypothesis of cosmology for example made the risky prediction of cosmic radiation bombarding the earth. In 1965, this prediction was found to be true, the big bang was accepted as a plausible explanation, and the then-prevailing theory that the universe was eternal, steady state, without beginning or end, was falsified. If microwave radiation did not exist, the big bang theory would have been falsified.

The fundamental problem with claiming evolution as a plausible scientific theory is that it is neither predictive nor falsifiable. Embryologist and geneticist C. H. Waddington explains:

“The theory of evolution is unfalsifiable… If an animal evolves one way, biologists have a perfectly good explanation; but if it evolves some other way, they have an equally good explanation… . The theory is not … a predictive theory as to what must happen.”

Information theorist Mark Ludwig elaborates:

“Darwin’s hypothesis … has the character of unfalsifiable philosophy: it can explain anything and predicts practically nothing… . Darwinism … requires belief… . It has become the scientist’s paradigm, and he is rarely able to admit that it is fragile and charged with philosophy.”

The Darwinian theory of evolution is unfalsifiable, which is the true test of a scientific theory, because it relies on random, unpredictable mutations. Only predictable randomness, like radioactive decay, can be seen as a valid scientific phenomenon.

Murray Eden of Massachusett's Institute of Technology illustrates the difference using physical chemistry:

“It is accepted that the law of mass action is derivable from the assumption of random collisions between reactive molecules, but the explanation of a chemical reaction in which molecules A and B become C is to be sought … and not in a random rearrangement of the atoms of A and B.”

Yet this is the very argument of Darwinianism—an argument no different from the once popular “god of the gaps” argument. As evolutionary zoologist Pierre-P. Grassé explains:

“Chance becomes a sort of providence, which … is secretly worshipped.”

It’s hard to dispute Henry Morris’ charge that the litany of evolutionary biologists is:

“We know evolution is true, even though we don’t know how it works and have never seen it happen.”

Science is not static; improvements in technology continually make it possible to test and falsify theories that were earlier untestable, such as the phlogiston theory of chemistry and the luminiferous aether theory of physics. So it is with the theory of evolution.

It was barely possible to see cell structure under a primitive microscope in Darwin’s time, and DNA had not yet been discovered when the neo-Darwinian synthesis was developed in the 1940s. Technology and computing power have grown dramatically and, although unpredictable mutations cannot be tested, other problematic ramifications of the theory can be.

Nevertheless, it seems that difficulties lead evolutionary theorists only to create modifications of the theory, many of which are speculative at best. This pattern led astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Sir Fred Hoyle to comment:

“Be suspicious of a theory if more and more hypotheses are needed to support it as new facts become available.”

Popper—who considers evolution a “metaphysical research program”—observes:

“Reinterpreting the [evolutionary] theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation … is always possible, but … only at the price of … lowering, its scientific status.”

Nevertheless old theories die hard. This was evident when eighteenth-century scientific giant Joseph Priestley refused to accept falsification of the phlogiston theory; he kept reinterpreting data to escape its refutation until he died.

The myth-like character of the theory of evolution makes it especially hard to reject because evolution has come to define the naturalistic worldview. Evolution is simply assumed—whether justified or not—because any challenge to evolution undercuts this worldview. Grassé says:

“Paleontologists … assume that the Darwinian hypothesis is correct [and] interpret fossil data according to it." But he believes the “duty [of biologists] is to destroy the myth of evolution … to think about the weaknesses of the interpretations and extrapolations that theoreticians put forward or lay down as established truths.”

Seen through the lens of true scientific methodology the theory of evolution is more accurately described as myth than science precisely because of its unfalsifiability.

www.reasons.org

 

That's because Political Threads are VERBOTEN by TCBob.

 

What's going on in here?............

 

Dunno, but I'm finding a lot of dead cockroaches and dustballs in my corner.

 

How long do you have to hang in your "corner" Pster? ..Obviously you're allowed to say some things, so what are you NOT supposed to get involved in talking about - other than politics of course, a topic I guess we're all supposed to avoid?