I am a Theistic Evolutionist, and I would Like to discuss With Christians Opposed

[Steven_R]

What does Theistic Evolutionist mean? Not being a smart-ass, just curious.

It's a convoluted way to have one's cake and eat it too. There is such an overwhelming amount of evidence for evolution that only the intentionally self-blinded ignore it, so Theistic Evolution says evolution is real...but God Did It. Having some force behind evolution defeats the whole point of evolution, but that is apparently a logical detail left to science philosophers.

It's fence-sitting at its finest.

 

[Mr. H.]

What does Theistic Evolutionist mean? Not being a smart-ass, just curious.

It's a convoluted way to have one's cake and eat it too. There is such an overwhelming amount of evidence for evolution that only the intentionally self-blinded ignore it, so Theistic Evolution says evolution is real...but God Did It. Having some force behind evolution defeats the whole point of evolution, but that is apparently a logical detail left to science philosophers.

It's fence-sitting at its finest.

Interesting. I'm of the notion that at some point throughout the eons, physical matter did not exist and all was pure absolute nothingness. To me, this is the "God" state... irrespective of one's interpretation or representation of God, there had to exist a state before the physical universe came to be. At the very moment that this "pure absolute nothingness" attained physical properties is, to me anyway, the moment of "creation".

From that point forward, everything has been governed by evolution.

 

[Steven_R]

Which is Deism in a nutshell. God created the universe and then promptly let it run its course without any intervention at all.

Theistic Evolution is more along the lines of God let it all run expect when God stepped in. Evolution was allowed to function as evolution does, expect when the hand of God nudged it here and there.

It's little more than mental masturbation and a rationalization to somehow marry what science has been showing us for almost two centuries and what religion says when the two are in diametric opposition.

 

[The Irish Ram]

Why then are there still single celled amoebas, are they the mutants? Why have we never seen a cow turn into a pelican, and how do you explain complex DNA in simple life forms from the beginning.
How is it that the first eye was as extremely complex as it is today. Did it jump evolution?
How did simple possess complex from the beginning?

Speaking of the beginning, in Greek and Hebrew:

"ORIGINALLY GOD BROUGHT INTO BEING AND SET IN PERFECT ORDER
THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH.
BUT THE EARTH HAD BECOME (or, became) A RUIN (confused) AND A DESOLATION:
AND A PALL OF (unnatural) DARKNESS HUNG OVER THE SCENE OF DISASTER."

God did not create formless or void or confusion.
The timespan between earth becoming a ruin and it's recreation for habitation for humans is not given. Even Adam and Eve didn't know about the earlier battles for earth until they gained the knowledge of evil.

While species adapt to their environmet, monkeys remain monkeys, and amoebas remain amoebas to this day.

 

[Infidel]

God created evolution, not hard to understand.

 

[The Irish Ram]

He did indeed if you understand that evolving is actually adapting. He did not make us monkeys first who later turned into Adam and Eve. Even crazy Darwin didn't believe his own bullcrap. He did however believe his dead daughter was following him around while he "worked".

If evolution was correct, then there would be so many transitional species bones from the millions of years it takes to "evolve into other species", that we wouldn't have to dig them up, we would be walking on all of them.

 

[Infidel]

He did indeed if you understand that evolving is actually adapting. He did not make us monkeys first who later turned into Adam and Eve. Even crazy Darwin didn't believe his own bullcrap. He did however believe his dead daughter was following him around while he "worked".

If evolution was correct, then there would be so many transitional species bones from the millions of years it takes to "evolve into other species", that we wouldn't have to dig them up, we would be walking on all of them.

Disputing evolution with ignorance of evolution won't work. Please try again.

 

[M.D. Rawlings]

What does Theistic Evolutionist mean? Not being a smart-ass, just curious.

. . . so Theistic Evolution says evolution is real...but God Did It. Having some force behind evolution defeats the whole point of evolution, but that is apparently a logical detail left to science philosophers.

It's fence-sitting at its finest.

Though I don't hold to any notion of macroevolution whatsoever. The theistic evolutionist doesn't necessarily assert that God directly guided the processes and mechanisms of an evolutionary speciation as such. Your charge is false and, therefore, so is your otherwise logically sound criticism. I understand your point. Rather, the theistic evolutionist asserts that God created the universe in such a way that the processes and mechanisms of evolutionary speciation would naturally occur. Is that the nudge you mean? For sure, that isn't quite the same thing as Deism, for under the dynamics of the latter, the emergence of life was not a sure bet. Arguably, the theistic evolutionist is ontologically splitting hairs, but that's not my problem, for I know evolutionary theory to be unfalsifiable hokum--evidentiarily, mathematically, rationally and metaphysically.

It's a convoluted way to have one's cake and eat it too. There is such an overwhelming amount of evidence for evolution that only the intentionally self-blinded ignore it. . . .

But scientifically literate and former evolutionists like myself who eschew evolution do not intentionally disregard or ignore the supposed evidence for it; on the contrary, we deconstruct the supposed evidence as we expose the theory for what it actually is.

Why don't you actually demonstrate firsthand knowledge of the supposed overwhelming evidence for evolution, or more to the point, demonstrate that you apprehend the nature of or provide an unassailable epistemological justification for Darwinism's presupposition? It's metaphysical, you know. Or maybe you don't.

From just a few of your posts on this topic, I suspect you're all hat and no cattle, all bromides without any real understanding of the empirical and philosophical ramifications.

The fossil record has never supported evolutionary theory in terms of intermediate forms, and the chronology of speciation perfectly fits with a biological history entailing a series of creative events and abrupt extinctions. In this regard, the evolutionist merely assumes the mathematically improbable processes a biological history that's an unbroken chain of natural cause-and-effect via the gratuitous insertion of a theoretical model of common ancestry. As any honest evolutionist will acknowledge, we don't actually see macroevolution in the fossil record, let alone anywhere in nature today.

In response to this problem, evolutionists have asserted the unfalsifiable notion of punctuated equilibrium, for example, which explains how macroevolution might have occurred more rapidly, but pushes the already staggering mathematical improbabilities of gradual evolution light years beyond the breaking point.

Prufrock's Lair: Labsci and I Discuss Evolution


For years, so-called vestigial organs or structures were said to be the theory’s very best evidence, but in light of recent discoveries that assertion is collapsing.

Genetic mutations beyond the confines of micro-speciation do not conserve information, but degrade it, and we now know for sure from abiogenetic research that prebiotic chemical evolution, particularly in the face of the actual geological and atmospheric conditions that prevailed all those many years ago, is a pipedream, fools gold, the stuff of fairytales.

Pasture's law of biology that life comes from life stands!

So tell us, Steven, at what point did God let go and nature take over? That is to say, how are the findings of abiogenetic research working out for your godless origins? given the fact that what they actually show is the very opposite of what was expected.

http://michaeldavidrawlings1.blogspot.com/2011/03/abiogenesis-unholy-grail-of-atheism.html

In other words, atheistic Darwinism runs into the very same problem, an untidy floor littered with split hairs of an ontological kind.

Recently endogenous retroviruses or pseudogenes were said to be the theory’s best evidence, but that hope is unraveling too in the face of recent discoveries.

Evolution's Best Argument Has Become Its Worst Nightmare

In summary, as I write elsewhere:

First, evolutionists (as they simultaneously asserted punctuated equilibrium) dismissed the naysayers who pointed out the general lack of what should be a vast array of unmistakable intermediate forms in the fossil record. Then they claimed that so-called vestigial organs constituted the best evidence for their theory, but that bit of arrogance has fallen apart in the face of recent discoveries. Recently, they have claimed that endogenous retroviruses constituted the very best evidence for their theory, but now we know that ERV's were not initially harmful or the stuff of a common ancestry at all, but elemental, viral genetic material that were passed from one well-established species to another that could not possibly be directly related via ingestion. They are in fact intricately fine-tuned components that perform vital regulatory functions . . . just like a vast number of beneficial bacteria.

This potentiality was anticipated and argued by the “flat earthers” who recognized that the evolutionist’s claim was purely teleological in nature and scientifically presumptuous.

We now know that we wasted trillions of dollars on research on that took us in the wrong direction for decades. Had we followed the advice of creationist and ID scientists, we would have arrived at this place of understanding concerning ERV’s sooner, which is very important with regard to the concerns of disease control and prevention. Gee wiz. And creationism and ID are not real science, because, supposedly, they have no real predictive power. In the meantime, the only discernibly material predictions from the proponents of a Darwinian common ancestry (which is defied by the fossil record, asserts an ambiguous tautology and ultimately rests on the metaphysical and, therefore, unfasifiable presupposition of ontological naturalism) have been systematically falsified.

The honest and astute intellect paying close attention to the various arguments for evolution will note that all of them inevitably presuppose that evolution is true relative to the evidence that allegedly proves evolution is true: essentially, what survives, survives. The theory really doesn't have any predictive power at all; it's just another story of secular modernity based on nothing more substantial than the unfasifiable presupposition of ontological naturalism.

 

[M.D. Rawlings]

Any real "thinking" person would know the human body and brain= the most well designed,most complex things in the known universe could never just evolve by accident and time.Just one strand human dna contains more information than a large room of books and no way evolved by accident and time!!! man even with the aid of supercomputers can create even one living bug!!!! GET REAL!!!

Neither evolution nor time are accident. And of time, you have no concept.

You pathetic fuck.

While God may have providentially guided much of evolution, I suspect that we may have had a lot of DNA dropped onto our planet by asteroids from other much older solar systems that had life on them as well. Though obviously dead, bacteria do tend to absorb DNA from genetic debris they consume. This then would have been picked up by some viruses and t he viruses transfer to more complex organisms.

No evidence, just a hunch based on what we already know about how the universe works. All the material in our bodies, such as carbon, developed inside stars that exploded sending their material throughout the local region. And just as that carbon came here, so too might have fragments of previously developed life.

Indeed, there is no evidence for panspermia. But more to the point, the findings of abiogenetic research demonstrate that this scenario is the least likely, essentially absurd, for a number of very complex reasons.

Prufrock's Lair: Abiogenesis: The Unholy Grail of Atheism

I wonder, JimBowie, were you wanting to engage the counter arguments to theistic evolution/Darwinism from real science and the imperatives of reason, or, alternately, just the bromides of creationists and/or evolutionary purists?

 

[Luddly Neddite]

I am so sick of the idiocy the lamers and trolls demonstrate in 'defending' evolutionary theory with Creationists.

I would like a civil discussion somewhere on this board where the trolls and dicks like Daws would be unable to troll and derail the thread.

Can we do that on this message board?

You're one of the least civil people on this board and starting out by calling someone a "troll" and a "dick" doesn't bode well for "civility".

LOL


`

 

[GISMYS]

Any real "thinking" person would know the human body and brain= the most well designed,most complex things in the known universe could never just evolve by accident and time.Just one strand human dna contains more information than a large room of books and no way evolved by accident and time!!! man even with the aid of supercomputers can create even one living bug!!!! GET REAL!!!

 

[Infidel]

God made evolution, deal with it GYSM.

 

[The Irish Ram]

He did indeed if you understand that evolving is actually adapting. He did not make us monkeys first who later turned into Adam and Eve. Even crazy Darwin didn't believe his own bullcrap. He did however believe his dead daughter was following him around while he "worked".

If evolution was correct, then there would be so many transitional species bones from the millions of years it takes to "evolve into other species", that we wouldn't have to dig them up, we would be walking on all of them.

Disputing evolution with ignorance of evolution won't work. Please try again.

No need. The complexity of an eye disputes it for me, just fine.
Regardless of the progression of evolution that you believe occurred, from the very beginning, if a species was able to see, it saw with an extremely complex developed eye.
The eye did not evolve. It started out complex. So did DNA. (An impossibility for the formation of eyes and DNA resulting from pond scum.) If the complexity of the eye was a product of evolution, then the ability to see should have taken millions upon millions of years to occur and our sight should be far better than that of an eagle's by now because of evolution.

Remember the "monkey chart" they tried to feed us in school? Some of them were not "discovered". One was a plaster cast of a monkey skull attached to a human jaw bone. Truth is if man's evolution from ape is linear, there should be millions of bones from each "stage" leading up to and jumping the boundary from one ape man to the next.
If it takes millions of years to transition from one to another, then we aren't looking for a missing link, there should be millions of missing links for every transition of every species of life forms. There are not. It simply didn't happen.

And the fossils we have found simply don't fit into the so called chart of evolution at the right time frame. Burmite fossils are proof (65 million years to soon for the evolutionist) of modern forms of many species long before their "time".
You have been fed a bill of goods that continues to fall apart with every new find. Sorry.

 

[Infidel]

He did indeed if you understand that evolving is actually adapting. He did not make us monkeys first who later turned into Adam and Eve. Even crazy Darwin didn't believe his own bullcrap. He did however believe his dead daughter was following him around while he "worked".

If evolution was correct, then there would be so many transitional species bones from the millions of years it takes to "evolve into other species", that we wouldn't have to dig them up, we would be walking on all of them.

Disputing evolution with ignorance of evolution won't work. Please try again.

No need. The complexity of an eye disputes it for me, just fine.
Regardless of the progression of evolution that you believe occurred, from the very beginning, if a species was able to see, it saw with an extremely complex developed eye.
The eye did not evolve. It started out complex. So did DNA. (An impossibility for the formation of eyes and DNA resulting from pond scum.) If the complexity of the eye was a product of evolution, then the ability to see should have taken millions of years to occur and our sight should be far better than that of an eagle's by now because of evolution.

Remember the "monkey chart" they tried to feed us in school? Some of them were not "discovered". One was a plaster cast of a monkey skull attached to a human jaw bone. Truth is if man's evolution from ape is linear, there should be millions of bones from each "stage" leading up to and jumping the boundary from one ape man to the next.
If it takes millions of years to transition from one to another, then we aren't looking for a missing link, there should be millions of missing links for every transition. There are not. It just never happened.

And the fossils we have found simply don't fit into the so called chart of evolution at the right time frame. Burmite fossils are proof (65 million years to soon for the evolutionist) of modern forms of many species long before their "time".
You have been fed a bill of goods that continues to fall apart with every new find. Sorry.

How do you know that an eye can't evolve out of pond scum over millions or billions of years?

 

[The Irish Ram]

How do you know that an eye can't evolve out of pond scum over millions or billions of years?

Because it is an eye. To work it had no choice but to be complex at it's origin, and because of the complexity of a single cell organism's DNA. The pond scum hypothesis calls for starting out as the simplest form of life, progressing to complex forms of life.

There is no such thing as simple DNA. From it's conception, it is complex. So much so that in all of our enlightened, evolutionary state, we just recently found out it exists.
Darwin didn't know that single celled amoebas have this:

DNA Packaging: Nucleosomes and Chromatin | Learn Science at Scitable

Randomness or chance can't produce that, consistently, which is what it would have had to do to create a species. In fact, the more complex an organism becomes, the more it matters that the DNA doesn't change much if the species is to survive. That's the opposite of the evolution theory. Evolution requires constant, consistently repeated exact mutations. Consistent randomness. Science refers to it as precise random complexity. Give me an example of precise random.

How many times would you have to blow up a Chevy with a stick of dynamite before you get 2 exactly the same explosions, the same exact pieces, falling in precisely the same spot? And how long before they turn into a Volvo?

In the womb, when your eyes are forming, each eye starts to send a million fibers out toward the brain. Simultaneously the brain starts sending out 1 million fibers toward the eyes. When it is time for them to create the connections necessary for vision they have to find, out of a million per eye, their exact match and unite with it. It's not that they do consistently accomplish that feat, but it is the complexity of the "fiber" necessary to accomplish it, that is beyond the scientific degree of possible by chance.

Our Father's thoughts are so far ahead of ours, He designed every bit of it before the earth was even formed, and we're just now finding out about it.

Isaiah 55: 9 For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.

The NET Bible translates it this way:

for just as the sky is higher than the earth, so my deeds are superior to your deeds and my plans superior to your plans.

We are not random. We are His beloved children, skillfully wrought by a loving Dad. To kindly and peace-fully rule as members of the Royal Family of God, a brother or sister of Jesus Christ, and in the order of Melchizedek, over all of the universes He has created for us. Forever.
This vapor of time is merely basic training. Love and Peace in training. And a joyful graduation each in his own time.

 

[PostmodernProph]

Disputing evolution with ignorance of evolution won't work. Please try again.

No need. The complexity of an eye disputes it for me, just fine.
Regardless of the progression of evolution that you believe occurred, from the very beginning, if a species was able to see, it saw with an extremely complex developed eye.
The eye did not evolve. It started out complex. So did DNA. (An impossibility for the formation of eyes and DNA resulting from pond scum.) If the complexity of the eye was a product of evolution, then the ability to see should have taken millions of years to occur and our sight should be far better than that of an eagle's by now because of evolution.

Remember the "monkey chart" they tried to feed us in school? Some of them were not "discovered". One was a plaster cast of a monkey skull attached to a human jaw bone. Truth is if man's evolution from ape is linear, there should be millions of bones from each "stage" leading up to and jumping the boundary from one ape man to the next.
If it takes millions of years to transition from one to another, then we aren't looking for a missing link, there should be millions of missing links for every transition. There are not. It just never happened.

And the fossils we have found simply don't fit into the so called chart of evolution at the right time frame. Burmite fossils are proof (65 million years to soon for the evolutionist) of modern forms of many species long before their "time".
You have been fed a bill of goods that continues to fall apart with every new find. Sorry.

How do you know that an eye can't evolve out of pond scum over millions or billions of years?

because there has never been any scientific evidence that even a single celled organism ever crawled out of pond scum, let alone an eye.......