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| Author |
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Creation or Evolution?
| Creation |
| [ 10 ] 76% |
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| Evolution |
| [ 1 ] 7% |
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| Both (Theistic Evolution) |
| [ 1 ] 7% |
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| Neither |
| [ 1 ] 7% |
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Total Votes : 13 |
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| bobtheorc |
 Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2007 2:22 pm |
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Joined: 19 Mar 2006
Posts: 1218
Location: Wow, its hot in Iowa
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Elessar’s Socks wrote:
NBarden wrote: 5. Vestigial Organs
Every so called vestigial organ except the appendix has been found to be necessary or very beneficial to the function of the body.
What’s your contention here? That vestigial organs don’t exist?
The human tailbone. Sexual organs in dandelions. Flightless birds. Blind fish. Hind leg bones in whales. Male nipples.  Sure there’s more.
Of course, you do have to define what you mean by vestigial; I use it to mean something degenerate or imperfect.
Well for starters the tail bone isn’t a organ per se. Ditto for male nipples.
I assume that by your reference to flightless birds you are trying to show that their wings are useless or something?
Anyway I vote neither because I believe in "Intelligent Design"
JK, ID is basically code for an idea...not a theory..so I guess I am actually a creationist. |
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| Elessar's Socks |
| Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2007 7:10 pm |
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Joined: 29 Jul 2007
Posts: 349
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ingold55 wrote: Evolutionist clame that the earth is several million-billions of years old. with all the pressure building up in the core after all thos millions of years however, the earth would have exploded several million years ago.
*LOL*, well, in a way the Earth has been exploding, though nothing like the Death Stars. (Unrelated to this topic, but How to destroy the Earth makes for some fun reading.) We’ve still got earthquakes and active volcanoes releasing pressure. If everything was sealed up completely (think Mount St. Helens)... that would be bad, yes.
NBarden wrote: One way to think about this is in terms of energy. The Second Law can actually favor the formation of molecules, because they can have less energy than they started out with--something more complex that is energetically favored!
Eh...explain more please? Not quite getting what you’re saying. It seems to be saying the same thing as below.
It sort of is saying the same thing below, because there are several ways of looking at the Second Law. And I’ll freely admit I don’t even understand the Second Law completely, especially when it’s applied on the macro scale (think tidying up your room) and on the micro scale (think creating cells). As a warning you’ll hear people tossing entropy around in terms of disorder, in terms of energy, in terms of probability. So really I think the best thing to do is to hunt down an expert and have a go.
For chemical reactions, are you familiar with Gibbs free energy? You can think of it roughly as available energy. Here’s the equation:
G = H - TS,
where H is enthalpy (J), T is temperature (K), and S is entropy (J/K). Basically if the change in G is negative, it’s favored.
Now hopefully of all the reactions I actually pick a correct illustration, but consider this:
2H2 + O2 --> 2H2O + heat
At room temperature ∆H is negative (lots of heat released), and ∆S is negative as well, though T∆S is smaller in magnitude than ∆H so ∆G winds up negative. Intuitively in this case you can see that something more complex has been formed (a decrease in entropy), but it’s offset by the heat released to make this reaction spontaneous. Here the product is at a lower energy level than its reactants.
(A caveat: spontaneous does not necessarily mean blazing quick, just like a mountain won’t crumble into a pile of stones overnight. But it’s energetically favored.)
Anyway, I am so not a chemist! Hope I explained at least half-decently how something more complex can be favored, though.
Quote: So...when the mug of hot chocolate gets cool enough, its no longer hot chocolate but begins forming a completely different item?
Nah, still hot chocolate. In this case it’s not a chemical reaction. However it’s a useful example to show how one part of a system can have a decrease in entropy while not violating the Second Law.
Quote: By this point, we’ve lost an amino acid. Let’s continue down the line for...say...9 more mutations?
Deletion is just one example of a DNA mutation. Other examples include insertion, substitution, and inversion (an entire section is reversed). With regard to chromosomes one piece can break off and attach to another, or undergo fusion or fission. So it’s not just losing nucleotides to nothing.
Quote: Now, this is a bit of an exaggeration, however, with the enormous amount of mutations required for evolution to occur (see increasing complexity model), to form species perfectly, I wold have to say that its more likely that the whole species would die before the mutations occur in the exact correct order for the species to mutate.
Do species have perfect forms? And more importantly, does survival require perfect forms? You could argue that a flying fish isn’t perfect, because true flight should be better at escaping predators than mere gliding.
You’d also need to take a stance on when one species is considered to have evolved into another. You don’t have "perfect" Species A, and "perfect" Species B, and somewhere in the middle some misshapen mass of goo. Who’s to say the flying fish won’t transit to another species in a few million years? And then our descendants (if they’re around) will look back upon these evolved creatures and say, whoever thought of a cross being a fish and this? Imagine that, a fish with wings flopping around in the water, why weren’t they all gobbled up?
Of course it’s hard to take hold of terms like "more likely to die" and "infinitesimal." I could counter by saying mutations conducive to survival (through natural selection) is "likely," and then we’d get nowhere fast. So we might just have to agree to disagree on this.
Quote: Glad you asked. I’d like to go through the species...
Keep in mind what I said above how you place your divisions. Otherwise you could call a transitional species that’s just a tiny bit more on the ape side "fully ape," and a transitional species that’s just a tiny bit more on the Man side "fully Man," and voila! Everything is fully ape or fully Man. Apes and Man share similar traits to begin with, after all.
Also I’d be interested in seeing sources for claims that "most scientists" think australopithecus was fully ape, and the same for zinjanthropus (= paranthropus?).
Quote: No, I don’t believe Vestigial Organs exist. By Vestigial, I mean useless. Every organ has a role, whether we know what it is or not.
Ah, then we’ll have to disagree on this. For example, to me the hind leg bones in whales indicate a land-walking animal that returned to the sea. In fact, they’re mammals. Having to surface to breathe is an odd feature to have in a sea creature as well. So even if the leg bones have a use--which I’m not sure they do--I see them as degenerate/imperfect, and therefore vestigial.
BTW, I might need a heads-up on why vestigial organs are such a bad thing. Heck, even evolution. Does accepting these cause people to disbelieve God or something? Why can’t God have brought the universe into existence, and maybe given a nudge here or there, but for the most part let evolution run its course? |
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| Turin06 |
| Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2007 6:54 pm |
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Joined: 24 Oct 2006
Posts: 197
Location: Good Question
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Here are my notes for a talk I did on this a few months ago. Some of it will have already been covered but will probably present things better for someone new to the subject.
The challenge of Evolutionism
First we need an understanding of two key terms.
-Microevolution= "small evolution" = changes within a species, with loss or adjustment of genetic information. A key example of this is the peppered moth. Back before the industrial revolution the white peppered moth was dominant because the trees they hid on were white themselves. However during the industrial revolution the soot from the factories turned the trees black. The white moth started to die out because it was less safe than the black moth and over time they all evolved to have a black pigment instead of white except for a small minority. However when the clean air act was passed the white moth came back into ascendency and the they all evolved back to white skin pigment instead of black except for a small amount. Now this is a perfect example of microevolution because genetic material is altered or lossed but no genetic material is gained. So the moths evolved but were still moths because they didn’t gain anything.
-Macroevolution= "big evolution"= Change from one species to another by random mutation, with an increase in genetic information (from amoeba to banana to human etc).
Not many people will argue that that microevolution exists. We see it all the time. However Macroevolution remains vastly improbable. One of the big problems in school teaching of evolution is that they purposefully do not make that distinction and use micro to prove macro which of course is rubbish.
Evolution is seen by many as providing an alternative to the account given in Genesis 1. It is often believed that Darwins theory makes belief in God impossible, or at least massively unlikely.
Atheists, particularly, can look to pick fights on the issue. This revealing quotation shows why:
Christianity has fought, still fights, and continues to fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god. Take away the meaning of death. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins then Christianity is nothing.
G. Richard Bozarth, "The Meaning of Evolution", American Athiest, February 1978
It is worth saying that Bozarth is wrong. There are plenty of scientists who believe in evolution but not in evolutionism, which is the belief that the whole world exists as a result of purely natural processes, without a god. Several leading scientists, including John Polkinghorne (FRS) and Francis Collins (head of the Human Genome Project) have written books in which they defend the theory of evolution as well as Christian belief based on the Bible (Polkinghorn, Science and Christian Belief: Theological Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker and Collins, The Language of God) Whether or not they are right in their interpretation (and in my view they are not), belief that evolution took place clearly cannot be a reason to disbelieve that God created the world. These writers would argue that the way God created the world was using the mechanism of evolution. This is called ’theistic evolution’ or ’BioLogos’.
continued below |
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
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| Turin06 |
| Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2007 6:55 pm |
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Joined: 24 Oct 2006
Posts: 197
Location: Good Question
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Problems with Evolution
-The theory of entropy. Over time, order tends towards chaos in a closed system, not the other way around. Evolution is the only scientific theory that has order developing out of chaos. Scripture, on the other hand, says the earth was "without form and void" but God formed it into order (Genesis 1:2), and sin has subsequently been responsible for causing decay.
-The problem with the fossil record. If all Organisms were gradually evolving from one to the next, you would expect fossils to reflect this, with so-called transitional types. But it doesn’t, as even evolutionists admit (see below). What it shows is species emerging suddenly, and fully formed, as it would if a species were newly created (look up Cambrian explosion).
Steven Jay Gould: "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology......To preserve our favoured account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study. Natural History(1977)
Niles Eldridge: "No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seems to happen." Reinventing Darwin (1995)
What actually happens is that each species produces offspring according to its kind (Genesis 1:11, 21, etc).
The improbability problem. Even using generous estimates, evolution’s biggest problem is that it is just ridiculously unlikely that life would have appeared in the first place without a creator.
Have you ever heard the one about the monkey and the typewriter? Often an evolutionist will argue that life forming is like the probability of a monkey eventually typing the complete works of Shakespeare. It will take a long time but eventually it will happen. However it has been worked out that for a monkey to type even just the foirst verse of psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want.") it would take 17 to the power of 42 trillion trillion trillion trillion trilllion trillion years. So you can imagine that for it to do the complete works of Shakespeare would take a ridiculous amount of time.
That is just an illistration and doesn’t help prove anything so here are some more mind boggling figures:
- A DNA string is rather more complex than the first verse of Psalm 23. It contains as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica. The numbers are so silly that it is hard to explain them, but a model by Harold Morowitz, an evolutionist and professor of biophysics at Yale, cocluded that the chance of the simplest bacteria evolving by chance in the history of the universe was less than 10 in 100 billion.
-Fred Hoyle, a non-Christian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, said that the chance of life spontaneously arising by accident is the chance of giving enough people to fill our solar system a rubix cube, blindfolding them, and all of them solving it simultaneoulsy. His basis for saying so was that there are only 10 to the power of 80 atoms in the known Universe, yet the chance of an enzyme was somewhere around 1 in 10 to the power of 40,000. And even if you get that enzyme that is still not enough for life.
- This is a quite astounding quote from the head Atheist himself Richard Dawkins.
"Why did it have to be the kind of Universe which seems almost as if, in the words of the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, it ’must have known we were coming’? The philosipher John Leslie uses the analogy of a man sentenced to death by a firing squad. It is just possible that all ten men of the firing squad will miss their victim. With hindsight, the survivor who finds himself in a position to reflect upon his luck can cheerfully say, ’Well, obvioulsy they all missed, or I wouldn’t be here to think about it.’ But he could, forgivably, wonder why they all missed and toy with the idea that they told to" Richard Dawkins The God Delusion. Of course in the case of evolution it’s more like 40,000 men missing rather than 10.
As a result of stats like these, a number of atheist evolutionists have come up with a way of trying to make it all sound less unlikely. The most widely used one of these is the ’multiverse’ theory, which is that maybe there are millions of universes, and we live in one, and therefore life was bound to happen eventually on one of them. Obviously the rather large problem with this is that it is not even nearly science simply because there is no evidence for it. You could say ’maybe’ anyhting. You could say maybe the world is actually floating on the back of four elephants who are themselves standing on the back of a giant turtle flying through space. None of it is science because there is no proof for it.
It seems that people will believe anything rather than the God of the Bible.
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Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow |
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| Turin06 |
| Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2007 6:55 pm |
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Joined: 24 Oct 2006
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Location: Good Question
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Creation by God
I love the word ’creatures’. In fact the Old Testament never uses the word ’nature’ but instead talks about ’creation’ and ’creatures’. ’Creation’ points to a creator. Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry, wrote:
It seems to detract from the honour of the great author and govenor of the world, that men should ascribe most of the admirable things, that are to be met with in it, not to him but to a certain nature.......the agency of God is litten taken notice of it their thoughts.
He is right. We need to give God credit for the amazing wisdom he had displayed in creation.
-Guillemot Bird- lay eggs spinning, so they don’t get blown off cliffs, who taught them?
- Electric Eel- emits 300V of electricity to stun its prey- How could that have evolved?
-Bombadier Beetle- combines two chemicals, which when acted upon by a third chemical causes a jet projection to come out of its backside at up to 200 degrees centigrade, propelling the beetle several feet away from its predator. How long do you think it took the beetle to get that right without blowing itself to pieces.
-Honey Bee- performs a circular dance to communicate the distance and direction of nectar it has found, and even the windspeed, so that the worker bees won’t go astray on their journey.
-Migratory Birds- 3000 mile journes over featureless oceans- who taught them the way?
Can anyone else see the absolute absurdity of this. |
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow |
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| NBarden |
| Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2007 7:06 pm |
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Joined: 28 Dec 2006
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Location: I don't know...
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Yeah, the Bombardier Beetle. How did that evolve, without the chemicals killing the beetle?
Add another huge improbability to the list.
How can random, chance accidents cause such an interdependent, complicated planet such as earth?
And if evolution was true, why don’t we find alien life? |
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| gil-estel |
| Posted: Sun Nov 25, 2007 1:16 pm |
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Location: Groningen, the Netherlands
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A friend of mine once said: how many solarsystems are there? I responded:billions. He continued: so if the earth was the only planet where evolution succeeded it would be a chance of 1 in billions?...It made me think. I’m a profound believer, I believe my heavenly Father created earth, but I guess from some perspective it would take as much faith to believe evolution as to believe in a Creator....why do I say this? I think in this whole discussion it is very important to stay humble. We don’t have all the anwsers, and I don’t see much in to ’proving’ evolution is wrong or to state creation is the way to go. God has spoken for Himself, and there is faith necesarry for that to see, no hard facts...for all the wisdom of man is sillyness for God.....You must think clearly, but rather bow your head in faith and be impressed by the things we experience. And if others ask you where your hope lies:
Always be ready to give an answer when someone asks you about your hope. 16 Give a kind and respectful answer and keep your conscience clear. 1 Peter 3:16 |
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