Originally posted by: shira
You know, some time in the not-too-distant future, scientists are going to design an experiment whose result is the creation of primitive life forms in the laboratory, using systems that mimic the conditions on primordial Earth.
When those results are announced (and I think it will be within our lifetimes), I will be very interested to see how creationists respond. My guess is they'll challenge the initial conditions, claiming that "we have no way of really knowing what Earth was like." To put this another way, it doesn't matter how far science advances, how much we understand, how much we can do. There is a large group of know-nothings out there who will shut their eyes, ears, and minds, and grasp at any straw, to maintain their primitive, mumbo-jumbo, angels-on-heads-of-pins belief system. And worse, to force those beliefs on the rest of us.
Yeah, but that doesn't help since I don't believe in any omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent almighty god anymore than I believe in heaven or hell.Originally posted by: Vic
The concepts of Hell and Satan are incompatible with that of the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent Almighty God.
Your faith (or lack of, in your opinion) is irrelevant to me, and irrelevant to this discussion. Why do you think that it should be relevant?Originally posted by: Harvey
Yeah, but that doesn't help since I don't believe in any omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent almighty god anymore than I believe in heaven or hell.Originally posted by: Vic
The concepts of Hell and Satan are incompatible with that of the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent Almighty God.
Just FYI, very few Christian churches take the 6 days literally anymore, or really ever have. The reference is obvious symbolism to resting every 7th day as the Sabbath.Originally posted by: drpootums
Seriously though, what is easier to believe?:
-Atoms are constantly changing to adapt to the enviroment. Over millions of years single celled organisms evolved into humans as we are today. Nobody knows how it started, but "we know it did and it must be true"
-God created it in 6 days. Us Christians believe in it because of our faith.
Hmmm...which one takes more faith?
Originally posted by: Vic
Just FYI, very few Christian churches take the 6 days literally anymore, or really ever have. The reference is obvious symbolism to resting every 7th day as the Sabbath.Originally posted by: drpootums
Seriously though, what is easier to believe?:
-Atoms are constantly changing to adapt to the enviroment. Over millions of years single celled organisms evolved into humans as we are today. Nobody knows how it started, but "we know it did and it must be true"
-God created it in 6 days. Us Christians believe in it because of our faith.
Hmmm...which one takes more faith?
Being very serious, only idiots take the 6 days literally or believe that all Christians take the 6 days literally, or that the 6 days is even integral to the Christian faith. Seriously. In fact, believing in the Creation itself isn't even integral to the Christian faith, that's just for those who never read past the 1st chapter, and certainly never made it as far as the Gospels.
So taking that in mind, you might see why I don't think your question was as serious as you thought it was.
Originally posted by: Vic
Presupposing the existence of God, an Almighty immortal being who exists beyond this world, one has to ask, "What is a day to God?"
The single rotation upon its axis of a single planet in a universe that certainly contains countless trillions of planets? Let's not be ridiculous.
Questions as to the nature of God are theological, not scientific.Originally posted by: ForThePeople
See, now that is Creationism. A mixture of true scientific fact (that the Earth rotates, with a full rotation in 24 hours), some vaugely theological stuff (that God would not have chosen the Earth's rotation for his time-scale), and the conclusion that the Earth certainly did not serve as the model of a day as described in the Bible.Originally posted by: Vic
Presupposing the existence of God, an Almighty immortal being who exists beyond this world, one has to ask, "What is a day to God?"
The single rotation upon its axis of a single planet in a universe that certainly contains countless trillions of planets? Let's not be ridiculous.
Complete nonsense.
Religion can't answer scientific questions and science cannot answer religious questions.
Trying to make one do the other is futile, and in the case of religion trying to answer science questions, pure Creationism.
Also, did you ever consider that maybe the Bible is simply a collection of stories written by various men who lived thousands of years before modern science was able to explain otherwise scary natural phenomena?
No, that would be too logical.
Originally posted by: MadRat
I think you converted him, Vic.
The seventh day was to rest after so much "perfect work" - he had set up his Creation for a long lasting existence - and we have no idea what of any days since the seventh. So perhaps we still enjoy the seventh day now. Its impossible to tell what the author meant. Then again the author wasn't around for those six days either so it could be *cringe* somewhat inaccurate.
Alot of agnostics don't understand that the Bible is a work of poets, not just historians, therefore careful attention must be made of the original syntax and the play on words. People too often fixate on the english and take the "day" from the traditional translation when its original translation was literal for an age or era, not to be confused with a single day. The earth has gone through many eras since man has existed and some eras last a short amount of time and some last thousands of years. Some dominant eras co-exist within other submissive eras, and vice versa. There is some debate as to what even constitutes an era.
The common denominator is that every era transitions suddenly and cataclysmically from one to another, hence we tend to label eras based on the grand scale that are associated with great die-offs of life. It is quite clear from the fossil record that the pressures on life to survive have been tremendous since day one. Now, when we talk about eras for God do we mean small time eras that face the progression of mankind's community or is it the big time eras that threatened the very existence of all life?
Don't bother ansering me, because - for hell's sake - some around here don't even believe in a Great Flood. Its hard to reason with a closed minded person that denies even the simplest of truth.
Originally posted by: ForThePeople
Originally posted by: MadRat
I think you converted him, Vic.
The seventh day was to rest after so much "perfect work" - he had set up his Creation for a long lasting existence - and we have no idea what of any days since the seventh. So perhaps we still enjoy the seventh day now. Its impossible to tell what the author meant. Then again the author wasn't around for those six days either so it could be *cringe* somewhat inaccurate.
Alot of agnostics don't understand that the Bible is a work of poets, not just historians, therefore careful attention must be made of the original syntax and the play on words. People too often fixate on the english and take the "day" from the traditional translation when its original translation was literal for an age or era, not to be confused with a single day. The earth has gone through many eras since man has existed and some eras last a short amount of time and some last thousands of years. Some dominant eras co-exist within other submissive eras, and vice versa. There is some debate as to what even constitutes an era.
The common denominator is that every era transitions suddenly and cataclysmically from one to another, hence we tend to label eras based on the grand scale that are associated with great die-offs of life. It is quite clear from the fossil record that the pressures on life to survive have been tremendous since day one. Now, when we talk about eras for God do we mean small time eras that face the progression of mankind's community or is it the big time eras that threatened the very existence of all life?
Don't bother ansering me, because - for hell's sake - some around here don't even believe in a Great Flood. Its hard to reason with a closed minded person that denies even the simplest of truth.
There was no world flood. It never happened.
Just think critically for a minute:
1) Where did all the water come from? It takes A LOT of water to cover the Earth enough to cover the highest mountain. It must have come from somewhere?
2) Where did all the water go? The Earth today isn't completely covered by water (duh) so the water must have gone somewhere. Where, exactly, did all that water go?
3) How much space would you need for 2 of every animal? It is completely absurd to think that there was an ark with 2 of every animal. What about dinosaurs? What about new species that arose in the last thousands of years?
It doesn't stand up to critical reasoning. It did not happen.
Originally posted by: ForThePeople
Originally posted by: Vic
Presupposing the existence of God, an Almighty immortal being who exists beyond this world, one has to ask, "What is a day to God?"
The single rotation upon its axis of a single planet in a universe that certainly contains countless trillions of planets? Let's not be ridiculous.
See, now that is Creationism. A mixture of true scientific fact (that the Earth rotates, with a full rotation in 24 hours), some vaugely theological stuff (that God would not have chosen the Earth's rotation for his time-scale), and the conclusion that the Earth certainly did not serve as the model of a day as described in the Bible.
Complete nonsense.
Religion can't answer scientific questions and science cannot answer religious questions.
Trying to make one do the other is futile, and in the case of religion trying to answer science questions, pure Creationism.
Also, did you ever consider that maybe the Bible is simply a collection of stories written by various men who lived thousands of years before modern science was able to explain otherwise scary natural phenomena?
No, that would be too logical.
Originally posted by: Jack31081
Originally posted by: ForThePeople
Originally posted by: MadRat
I think you converted him, Vic.
The seventh day was to rest after so much "perfect work" - he had set up his Creation for a long lasting existence - and we have no idea what of any days since the seventh. So perhaps we still enjoy the seventh day now. Its impossible to tell what the author meant. Then again the author wasn't around for those six days either so it could be *cringe* somewhat inaccurate.
Alot of agnostics don't understand that the Bible is a work of poets, not just historians, therefore careful attention must be made of the original syntax and the play on words. People too often fixate on the english and take the "day" from the traditional translation when its original translation was literal for an age or era, not to be confused with a single day. The earth has gone through many eras since man has existed and some eras last a short amount of time and some last thousands of years. Some dominant eras co-exist within other submissive eras, and vice versa. There is some debate as to what even constitutes an era.
The common denominator is that every era transitions suddenly and cataclysmically from one to another, hence we tend to label eras based on the grand scale that are associated with great die-offs of life. It is quite clear from the fossil record that the pressures on life to survive have been tremendous since day one. Now, when we talk about eras for God do we mean small time eras that face the progression of mankind's community or is it the big time eras that threatened the very existence of all life?
Don't bother ansering me, because - for hell's sake - some around here don't even believe in a Great Flood. Its hard to reason with a closed minded person that denies even the simplest of truth.
There was no world flood. It never happened.
Just think critically for a minute:
1) Where did all the water come from? It takes A LOT of water to cover the Earth enough to cover the highest mountain. It must have come from somewhere?
2) Where did all the water go? The Earth today isn't completely covered by water (duh) so the water must have gone somewhere. Where, exactly, did all that water go?
3) How much space would you need for 2 of every animal? It is completely absurd to think that there was an ark with 2 of every animal. What about dinosaurs? What about new species that arose in the last thousands of years?
It doesn't stand up to critical reasoning. It did not happen.
Good god. He spends his entire post explaining how he thinks the Genesis story is not a literal transcription of creation, and yet when he refers to the Great Flood, you automatically think he is referring to a literal worldwide flood with Noah getting 2 of every animal on some wooden boat. It seems you're arguing now for the sake of it.
It's pretty widely believed now that the Great Flood occured, but it was much more localized than the 'worldwide flood' of the bible. It occured somwhere around the north end of the Black Sea I think, no?
Originally posted by: Hafen
Since when did the "Great Flood" suddenly become an undisputed fact? Where and when did it occur and what was its scope? How was it proven it was the great flood to which is referred to in many relgions and mythologies (not just christianity) and not some naturally occurring flood?
Your statement sounds like; " Duh, get with the times, everyone knows that the moon is made of cheese..."
Religion can't answer scientific questions and science cannot answer religious questions.
Originally posted by: fjord
Just a pet-peeve on the frequent convocation of Macroevolution--so often misunderstood and/or misused by lay-people.
Macroevolution defined (from the archives of talk.origins)
In science, macro at the beginning of a word just means "big", and micro at the beginning of a word just means "small" (both from the Greek words). For example, a macrophage means a bigger than normal cell, but it is only a few times bigger than other cells, and not an order of magnitude bigger.
In evolutionary biology today, macroevolution is used to refer to any evolutionary change at or above the level of species. It means the splitting of a species into two (speciation, or cladogenesis, from the Greek meaning "the origin of a branch") or the change of a species over time into another (anagenesis, not nowadays generally used). Any changes that occur at higher levels, such as the evolution of new families, phyla or genera, is also therefore macroevolution, but the term is not restricted to the origin of those higher taxa.
Microevolution refers to any evolutionary change below the level of species, and refers to changes in the frequency within a population or a species of its alleles (alternative genes) and their effects on the form, or phenotype, of organisms that make up that population or species.
Another way to state the difference is that macroevolution is between-species evolution of genes and microevolution is within-species evolution of genes.
There are various kinds of dynamics of macroevolution. Punctuated equilibrium theory proposes that once species have originated, and adapted to the new ecological niches in which they find themselves, they tend to stay pretty much as they are for the rest of their existence. Phyletic gradualism suggests that species continue to adapt to new challenges over the course of their history. Species selection and species sorting theories claim that there are macroevolutionary processes going on that make it more or less likely that certain species will exist for very long before becoming extinct, in a kind of parallel to what happens to genes in microevolution.
The history of the concept of macroevolution
In the "modern synthesis" of neo-Darwinism, which developed in the period from 1930 to 1950 with the reconciliation of evolution by natural selection and modern genetics, macroevolution is thought to be the combined effects of microevolutionary processes. In theories proposing "orthogenetic evolution" (literally, straight line evolution), macroevolution is thought to be of a different calibre and process than microevolution. Nobody has been able to make a good case for orthogenesis since the 1950s, especially since the uncovering of molecular genetics between 1952 and the late 1960s.
Antievolutionists argue that there has been no proof of macroevolutionary processes. However, synthesists claim that the same processes that cause within-species changes of the frequencies of alleles can be extrapolated to between species changes, so this argument fails unless some mechanism for preventing microevolution causing macroevolution is discovered. Since every step of the process has been demonstrated in genetics and the rest of biology, the argument against macroevolution fails.
Non-Darwinian evolutionists think that the processes that cause speciation are of a different kind to those that occur within species. That is, they admit that macroevolution occurs, but think that normal genetic change is restricted by such proposed mechanisms as developmental constraints. This view is associated with the names of Schmalhausen and Waddington, who were often characterised as being non-Darwinians by the modern synthesis theorists.
The terms macroevolution and microevolution were first coined in 1927 by the Russian entomologist Iurii Filipchenko (or Philipchenko, depending on the transliteration), in his German-language work Variabilität und Variation, which was the first attempt to reconcile Mendelian genetics and evolution. Filipchenko was an evolutionist, but as he wrote during the period when Mendelism seemed to have made Darwinism redundant, the so-called "eclipse of Darwinism" (Bowler 1983), he was not a Darwinian, but an orthogeneticist. Moreover Russian biologists of the period had a history of rejecting Darwin's Malthusian mechanism of evolution by competition.
In Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species, he began by saying that "we are compelled at the present level of knowledge reluctantly to put a sign of equality between the mechanisms of macro- and microevolution" (1937, page 12), thereby introducing the terms into the English-speaking biological community (Alexandrov 1994). Dobzhansky had been Filipchenko's student and regarded him as his mentor. In science, it is difficult to deny a major tenet of one's teachers due to filial loyalty, and Dobzhansky, who effectively started the modern Darwinian synthesis with this book, found it disagreeable to have to deny his teacher's views (Burian 1994).
The term fell into limited disfavour when it was taken over by such writers as the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt (1940) and the paleontologist Otto Schindewolf to describe their orthogenetic theories. As a result, apart from Dobzhansky, Bernhardt Rensch and Ernst Mayr, very few neo-Darwinian writers used the term, preferring instead to talk of evolution as changes in allele frequencies without mention of the level of the changes (above species level or below). Those who do are generally working within the continental European traditions (as Dobzhansky, Mayr, Rensch, Goldschmidt, and Schindewolf are) and those who don't are generally working within the Anglo-American tradition (such as John Maynard Smith and Richard Dawkins). Hence, the term is sometimes wrongly used as a litmus test of whether the writer is "properly" neo-Darwinian or not (Eldredge 1995: 126-127).
The term has been revived by a number of authors such as Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, the authors of punctuated equilibrium theory (see Eldredge's 1992 Macroevolutionary Dynamics ), but there is a tendency in these authors to revert to the orthogenetic view that something other than within-species processes are causing macroevolution, although they disavow the orthogenetic view that evolution is progressing anywhere.
Conclusion
There is no difference between micro- and macroevolution except that genes between species usually diverge, while genes within species usually combine. The same processes that cause within-species evolution are responsible for above-species evolution, except that the processes that cause speciation include things that cannot happen to lesser groups, such as the evolution of different sexual apparatus (because, by definition, once organisms cannot interbreed, they are different species).
The idea that the origin of higher taxa, such as genera (canines versus felines, for example), requires something special is based on the misunderstanding of the way in which new phyla (lineages) arise. The two species that are the origin of canines and felines probably differed very little from their common ancestral species and each other. But once they were reproductively isolated from each other, they evolved more and more differences that they shared but the other lineages didn't. This is true of all lineages back to the first eukaryotic (nuclear) cell. Even the changes in the Cambrian explosion are of this kind, although some (eg, Gould 1989) think that the genomes (gene structures) of these early animals were not as tightly regulated as modern animals, and therefore had more freedom to change.
References
Alexandrov, DA: 1994. Filipchenko and Dobzhansky: Issues in Evolutionary Genetics in the 1920s. In The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, ed. MB Adams, Princeton University Press.
Bowler, PJ: 1983. The Eclipse of Darwinism, Johns Hopkins University Press
Burian, RM: 1994. Dobzhansky on Evolutionary Dynamics: Some Questions about His Russian Background. In The Evolution of Theodosius Dobzhansky, ed. MB Adams, Princeton University Press.
Dobzhansky, Th: 1937. Genetics and the Origin of Species, Columbia University Press
Eldredge, N: 1992. Macroevolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches and Adaptive Peaks, McGraw-Hill
Eldredge, N: 1995. Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate, Weidenfeld and Nicholson
Goldschmidt, R: 1940. The Material Basis of Evolution, Yale University Press
Gould, SJ: 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Norton
What you can't see is that the deception is in the notion that complete trust in the scriptures, literally (meaning how you see them), is required. The promise is not abnegated because your ideas are wrong. God is much bigger than your absurd ideas and your ideas don't have to be right for God to grant eternal life. You are shadow boxing phantoms in a prison in your mind.Originally posted by: petrek
What is a day to god?
If by god you mean God, than a day to him is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day...in other words, God exists outside of the Universe he created, and thus is outside of time.
What a day is to God is not the same as what a day is in reference to Genesis. Genesis, and in fact the whole Bible, is not meant for God's understanding of man, but rather for man's understanding of God, himself, and the universe in which we exist.
For God to use morning and evening in reference to a day when writing Genesis, and expect me to believe He meant an indeterminable amount of time, is unacceptable to me. God, who expects nothing less than complete trust in Him (according to the Scriptures) in exchange for eternal life, would not start out by intentionally deceiving us in those Scriptures.
Dave