Creationism vs. Evolution

The holy spirit... So that's what Mary's secret lovers name is.

She conceived the same as everyone else, But because of the time period she would be killed for not being a virgin and being with Joseph. She either got raped or had a little hankey pankey on the side and got pregnant both would have gotten her stoned to death. So she came up with a elaborate story and fed it to Jesus as he was growing up so he believed he was this magical being and became the first ever magician.

Sounds like a way more believable story...

 

Well this may be true. You can make an educated guess that I probably am not. But you still haven't answered the question.

As for humans and apes being created by the same divine creator... just seems like a fairy tale. Your answer simply closes the door of discovery of the natural world. When there is so much more good further questioning can do why close the door? Tell me have you or a loved one taken any antibiotics or other medications for ailments in the past decade? If you have evolutionary theory has saved your life not "God". While, "God" may exist humans are free of his will. There is no plan for the universe. If there is than it involved the slaughter of 9 million innocent men, women, and children in the matter of 4 years by a single regime and countless other genocides through out history. Why in good conscience would you follow such a plan blindly? Is it because there is glory at the end, peace, enlightenment, salvation or is it that you have no idea what lies beyond and is scares the shit out of you? If it doesn't scare the shit out of you than you're not human or you're just too dumb to have thought about it like a squirrel. I don't think anyone here is either. You've created a story that quells those fears which helps you live your daily life. Evolution and science in general neither disproves nor seeks to disprove the existence of "God" it simply utilizes testable hypotheses to understand the world around us without myths or legends. If it really helps think of science as the explanation of how "God" did stuff.

 

Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying.

 

The difference is that they were not created in the same way. Apes were just amoral animals like the rest, but the first humans were created in God's image and were morally accountable for their behavior just as everyone is today, while animals are not.

I could make a pretty good case that a lot of humans are trying to devolve down to the amoral state of animals by the way that they behave.

 

We all came from the same stuff. If you trace it back far enough all vertebrates came from the same single cell species. If you go back even further everything came from the same atoms that were all present as the galaxy and maybe even the universe formed. It's mind boggling. I don't clam to understand why but I can understand trying to find a reason why you exist. I simply think we're an anomaly that arose from the random happenings of the universe. Everything was created the same way on the brink of destruction. If even one atom or one of the universal constants had been even a little bit different nothing would exist. Do I know why? Does anyone? No, but somehow saying because some omnipotent creator willed it and not thinking about it anymore than a few seconds seems cheap. We have to accept some questions really don't have answers. Somethings have not rhyme nor reason. They just are. But somehow knowing that the existence of the universe, let alone life, had an infinitesimally small chance of being makes me value all living things a little bit more than ascribing it to "God's" will. Thinking such things to me belittles the universal process and struggle for survival of all living things on the planet. While, I don't know what purpose my existence has nor the existence of the universe has I accept that it does exist and ask questions.

 

FTFY

Seriously, it took you 176 pages to realize that some people don't believe in your bible? Are you serious? You cannot be that dense. Do you now realize how silly it is to quote something that the person you're arguing with doesn't believe in?

 

Physically yes, you're absolutely right. All the raw materials are exactly the same.

But in terms of consciousness we were created as unique morally accountable beings different from the animal world.

 

Reading this makes me feel like an idiot. Glad I only shit once a day.

 

I kind of thought the same thing judging by my previous posts. It was pretty self evident of my non-belief.

But...After thinking about it I figure I'll explain my stance a little more (as if my previous posts weren't descriptive enough )

I was brought up in church from the day I was born. My parents are Devout Christians. I was in church every day the doors were open. Do I dislike the church or Christians or any other religion for that matter?? No. I have nothing against any of them. I believe as rational (I use that term loosely) thinking beings we all have an innate desire to believe in something greater than ourselves. I started questioning things when I was around 14 and the only answers I ever got from my parents was you don't question God. Well... I do. Without going into a long lengthy description of me punching holes in the biblical theory I'll just say that my personal opinion is this:

I can not understand how any rational, intelligent, thinking person believes that we came from this secret garden and a talking snake told this girl to eat a apple and because of that original sin we have all the problems we have today. That this so-called supreme being would ask Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac and at the last minute sent an angel down to stop him. What kind of Fucked up supreme being would do some shit like that? If he is truly omnipotent he already knew the decision that Abraham was going to make so "Free Will" goes right out the window. I'm telling you right now if God walked into my house right now and told me to kill my daughter I would tell him to fuck off. I could go on and on but you get my point.

How did we get here? No fucking clue. But I subscribe to evolution. So there is my best answer.

 

My point was actually as of right now there is no way to measure/test "God" as of yet. Maybe one day there will be but science simply measures or tests what it can. Thus, no scientific conclusion can be made about the existence of "God". I personally believe in "God" I just don't believe he has a damn thing to do with what happens in our observable universe.

So you're saying life shouldn't be fun? Life should be enjoyed we only live once. Morally right and morally wrong are between that person and themselves. If you truly believe your "good book" if you are confronted with your misdeeds and regret them you will be forgiven.

I'd rather die a million times on my feet than live on my knees or follow anyones way but my own. If that means I go to hell then so be it! I'll have it all sorted by the time you get there.

 

>>>BUMP!!!

You asked for a clear explanation of the evolutionary process and here it is, in brief, by someone who knows what he's talking about.

Quit avoiding the fact that evolution is evident all around us, the world is 4.5 billion years old, the universe is 14 billion years old, and that nothing in the Bible itself contradicts these facts.

The discussion here is not about your faith in Jesus. Lots of people have faith in Christ, myself included. The discussion here is about the claims of wild eyed creationists who tell us that God created the world in six 24 hour periods of time, and refuse to seriously look at the mountain of evidence that tells us just the opposite -- that the earth is old beyond anything man can begin to imagine on his own.

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Douglas Futuyma; world renowned scientist and professor of evolutionary biology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook...



Natural Selection: How Evolution Works
_________________________________________

What is natural selection, and how is it central to the theory of evolution?

Futuyma: Natural selection is the process by which species adapt to their environment. Natural selection leads to evolutionary change when individuals with certain characteristics have a greater survival or reproductive rate than other individuals in a population and pass on these inheritable genetic characteristics to their offspring. Simply put, natural selection is a consistent difference in survival and reproduction between different genotypes, or even different genes, in what we could call reproductive success. [A genotype is a group of organisms sharing a specific genetic makeup.]

The reason that natural selection is important is that it’s the central idea, stemming from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, that explains design in nature. It is the one process that is responsible for the evolution of adaptations of organisms to their environment.

Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection caused quite a stir when it appeared in 1859. Evidence to support evolution and natural selection, of course, has accumulated over time, and now science accepts that evolution is a fact and that natural selection explains very well how adaptive evolution takes place.

Is natural selection the only mechanism of evolution?

Futuyma: No, certainly not. There cannot be evolution without genetic variation in the first place. So there must be mutation and often recombination to generate the different genotypes or the different versions of the genes, known as alleles, which then may or may not make a difference in the ability of an organism to survive and reproduce. You can’t have any evolutionary change whatever without mutation, and perhaps recombination, giving rise to genetic variation. But once you have genetic variation, there are basically two major possibilities:

First, there is simply no difference between the different genotypes or different genes in their impact on survival or reproduction, and in that case, you can have random changes of one versus the other type in a population or a species until eventually one replaces the other. That is an evolutionary change. It happens entirely by chance, by random fluctuations. That is what we call the process of genetic drift.

Genetic drift is very different from possibility number two, natural selection, which is a much more consistent, predictable, dependable change in the proportion of one gene vs. another, one genotype vs. another. Why? Simply because there is some consistent superiority, shall we way, of one genotype vs. another in some feature that affects its survival or some feature affecting its reproductive capabilities.

Does natural selection lead to new species, and if so, how?

Futuyma: It sometimes does but not always. A great deal of evolution by natural selection can happen without the formation of new species. Natural selection is only the process of adaptation within species, and we see many examples of that. Under some circumstances natural selection does play a role in the origin of new species, by which I mean a splitting of one species lineage into two different lineages that do not interbreed with one another — for example, the splitting of one ancestral primate lineage into one that became today’s chimpanzee and the other that became the hominid line resulting in our own species. The process of splitting and becoming reproductively isolated, that is, incapable of breeding with one another, can often involve natural selection but perhaps not always.

Some take natural selection to mean survival of the fittest. How does this slogan sometimes lead to misconceptions?

Futuyma: “Survival of the fittest” is a slogan that is really very misleading. First of all, it’s not an adequate description of what really goes on in nature for two reasons:

“Survival of the fittest” is a misleading term.

Sometimes there isn’t a “fittest” type. There may be several different types that are equally fit for different reasons. Perhaps they’re adapted to different facets of the environment. One is not going to replace the other because each has its proper place in the environment.

Moreover, it’s not just a matter of survival. Natural selection is a difference in reproductive success that involves both the ability to survive until reproductive age and then the capacity to reproduce.

The notion of the survival of the fittest is also unfortunate because it has been viewed as a kind of tautology, a kind of empty statement for those who say that the fittest are those that survive and so there’s no real predictive content to the notion of natural selection. That is simply false.

How do scientists interpret “chance,” and does it play a role in natural selection?

Futuyma: Philosophers and scientists use “chance” only in the sense of unpredictability. Chance means essentially that you cannot predict the outcome of a particular event. For example, you cannot predict whether your next child will be a son or a daughter, even though you can specify the probability or likelihood. “Chance” does not mean lack of purpose or goal in science. If it did, we could say that absolutely everything in the natural world is by chance because we don't see any purpose or goal in storms, in ocean currents, or anything else. Evolution certainly does involve randomness; it does involve unpredictable chance. For example, the origin of new genetic variation by mutation is a process that involves a great deal of chance. Genetic drift, the process I referred to earlier, is a matter of chance.

However, natural selection itself is the single process in evolution that is the antithesis of chance. It is predictable. It says that, within a specific environmental context, one genotype will be better than another genotype in survival or reproduction for certain reasons having to do with the way its particular features relate to the environment or relate to other organisms within the population. That provides predictability and consistency. So, if you have different populations with the same opportunity for evolution, you would get the same outcome.

Can natural selection select for future needs of a species?

Futuyma: No, because natural selection is not like Mother Nature watching over us. Since natural selection is totally an impersonal process that is nothing more than a difference, generation by generation, in the reproductive success of one genome over another, there’s no way that it can look forward to the future or guard against the possibility of extinction. What individuals have right now that gives them superior adaptation may lead to disaster tomorrow.

Could you give us an example of natural selection at work in the recent past?

Futuyma: There are so many examples of that! One example is the apple maggot fly. About 100 years ago it started to become a serious pest of apple orchards in New England and New York State. It’s now a threat throughout most of northern United States. It originally fed just on hawthorn fruits, but then it adapted to apple and it’s become a serious threat to the industry. That is a genetic change propagated by natural selection.

Perhaps much more crucial is an issue that agriculture has to deal with all the time: the evolution in hundreds of species of insects of resistance to various chemical insecticides. The insects then become more and more difficult to control.

Closer to home, and more serious, is the single greatest crisis in medicine: antibiotic resistance. The fact is that enormous numbers of the most dangerous bacteria and viruses have evolved to be resistant to the antibiotics or other drugs that used to be effective against them. An obvious example is the HIV virus, which, as we know, is capable of rapidly evolving resistance to drugs that once were effective against it.

The late Stephen Jay Gould has written that if we were to rewind the “tape” of evolutionary history and play it again, the results would not be the same [S.J.Gould, Wonderful Life, 1989]. Why?

Futuyma: Well, it almost certainly would not be the same. I don’t think anyone can say how different it would be, whether it would be along the same general lines or utterly, unimaginably different.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the same, because first of all, random processes are involved in the evolutionary process. For example, the origin of new mutations: a lot of evolution is dependent on particular mutational changes in genes that were very, very rare or unlikely, but that just happened at the right time, in the right species, in the right environment, but it need not happen that way. So, there’s this unpredictability.

In addition, the particular sequence of environmental changes that the Earth underwent and that organisms were exposed to over billions of years has left a long-term imprint on species as they are today. If the sequence of environmental changes were different, you would have a different evolutionary history, leading to entirely different organisms over time.

Why does natural selection pose a threat philosophically to some people?

Futuyma: The philosopher Daniel Dennett called natural selection “Darwin’s dangerous idea” for a good reason: it is a very simple natural mechanism that explains the appearance of design in living things.

Before Darwin, the adaptations and exquisite complexity of organisms were ascribed to creation by an omnipotent, beneficent designer, namely God, and indeed were among the major arguments for the existence of such a designer. Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) concept of natural selection made this “argument from design” completely superfluous. It accomplished for biology what Newton and his successors had accomplished in physics: it provided a purely natural explanation for order and the appearance of design. It made the features of organisms explicable by processes that can be studied by science instead of ascribing them to miracles. The contemporary “intelligent design” movement is simply a repetition of the pre-darwinian argument, and cannot be taken seriously as a scientific explanation of the properties of living things.

 

That's where all the drugs and hookers are going to be so count me in.

 

Unlike Satan I charge admissions fees.

 

Eh... It will be worth it

 

Debate over!

 

You have definitely bought into the Dogma I'll give you that.

 

For me, when the lights go out... they go out. If there is an afterlife and it means I go to hell because of this disbelief, then why would I want to believe in a God that would let that happen to me?

When I die, I have already told my family to cremate me and some of my friends are to knead some of my ashes into some catfish bait and catch a fish with me. That's my dream of a good afterlife.

back to the funny pics thread...

 

I guess some of you people either can't read or "choose" not to read. But I said "debate over!" and that's final.