Was Darwin Wrong?

[manu1959]

I must be blind, but i didn't see one scientific reference that backed up creationist theory.
QUOTE]


what if the stories of the bible are considered parables and what if the story of genisis and adam and eve are simply descriptive of the moment of enlightenment of modern man

whith that...creationism and evolution can coexist

 

[Isaac Brock]

I must be blind, but i didn't see one scientific reference that backed up creationist theory.
QUOTE]


what if the stories of the bible are considered parables and what if the story of genisis and adam and eve are simply descriptive of the moment of enlightenment of modern man

whith that...creationism and evolution can coexist

That would be perfectly fine to me. The parable and science never conflicted in my mind.

 

[kassandra]

The theory of evolution would have been accepted by everyone on this planet (despite the fact that there are still gaps and problems with the theory - science does not give you truth merely the best model to explain what had thus far been observed) if it were not for the religious implications. Those who say that Darwinism is of no importance to religion are just plain wrong.
In Genesis man falls from a position of grace and innocence into the world of suffering and toil. Evolution declares that we have come from suffering and toil, it is our gentically evolved traits that allow us to survive in a hostile universe, man is merely the result of DNA replication and mutation into a form that is capable of survival and reproduction.
Secondly evolutionary theory does not imply that we are in any sense the end result, there may well be further evolutionary cahnges to man, infact bar his extinction this is inevitable. How can the doctrine of the imago dei be held to be true if man is not the end product of evolution? How can we talk of salvation history if man is not the most superior of God's creation (unless we wan to extend this to all living things and claim that bacteria are capable of savation through Christ).
So if evolution is correct then current Christian theology and doctrine needs an overhaul.

Evolution is attacked becasue it attacks. Creationism the same typical knee-jerk reaction that occurs whenever science and the divine come into conflict (see Galileo's story). As with all preivious theories I have no doubt evolution will prevail, the job of Christians should be to find a way to bring thier faith and man's sceintific adavancement together; not continue to blindly deny what is clearly a far superior theory of man's creation than Genesis 1 or 2(which incidnetaly are two totaly differnt accounts, why?)

 

[Isaac Brock]

The theory of evolution would have been accepted by everyone on this planet (despite the fact that there are still gaps and problems with the theory - science does not give you truth merely the best model to explain what had thus far been observed) if it were not for the religious implications. Those who say that Darwinism is of no importance to religion are just plain wrong.
In Genesis man falls from a position of grace and innocence into the world of suffering and toil. Evolution declares that we have come from suffering and toil, it is our gentically evolved traits that allow us to survive in a hostile universe, man is merely the result of DNA replication and mutation into a form that is capable of survival and reproduction.
Secondly evolutionary theory does not imply that we are in any sense the end result, there may well be further evolutionary cahnges to man, infact bar his extinction this is inevitable. How can the doctrine of the imago dei be held to be true if man is not the end product of evolution? How can we talk of salvation history if man is not the most superior of God's creation (unless we wan to extend this to all living things and claim that bacteria are capable of savation through Christ).
So if evolution is correct then current Christian theology and doctrine needs an overhaul.

Evolution is attacked becasue it attacks. Creationism the same typical knee-jerk reaction that occurs whenever science and the divine come into conflict (see Galileo's story). As with all preivious theories I have no doubt evolution will prevail, the job of Christians should be to find a way to bring thier faith and man's sceintific adavancement together; not continue to blindly deny what is clearly a far superior theory of man's creation than Genesis 1 or 2(which incidnetaly are two totaly differnt accounts, why?)

Welcome, and excellent post.

I'll take issue with two points. The first is that evolutions somehow belittles, or lessens the greatnest of being human and that we have come from suffering and toil. While there is little doubt Darwin himself was anti-theistic, critics often misrepresented Darwin as being ecocentric rather than anthropocentric, in that he viewed humans as no different than the animals. He didnt. His main treatise as a naturalist was that human beings are egocentric foremost, anthropocentric secondly and ecocentric, lastly.

Evolution is not a matter of suffering and toil, but a mechanism for change, which has no moral value associated with it. To all which has appeared before our time is indeed a creation, whether we believe it to be intelligent or otherwise no less miraculous or great than found in the scripture.


Second is that evolution does not give the "best" model for interpretting gaps in fossil records or other observations. To this I say, Creationism (in the sense of 7 days and 6000 year Earth) has not been able to provide a a better scientific model to explain astronomical phenomena, geological records, nuclear emissions, fossil record, etc.

On the issue of salvation I can reserve little comment, as it is not a belief which I share. Though i would muse a guess that if humans are the epitomy of Christian design, and the rest of prophecies are true, then there will be no species after humans and all which has come before is indeed the Creation and the matter of whether is in 7 days or billions of years in not relevant to theological teachings.

 

[manu1959]

45% of US adults surveyed believe,

why does everyone automatically conclude that these US adults are american? given the number of legal and non-legal residents of the US, that may or may not have been educated in the US is it not possible that a proportionate number of these folks are anything but educated americans?

 

[Zhukov]

The idea that God created the world and life is often thought to have been disproved by evolutionary theory.

Thought by whom? No reputable scientist would say God has been disproven. I would argue with any scientist who did, and I don't believe in a god.

First, the scientific community is now almost unanimous in affirming that the universe had a beginning.

Untrue, but...

this implies that someone or something brought the universe into existence

Why?

Secondly, the universe bears all the marks of having been “finely tuned” to make life possible. For example, the elementary forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and the atom are precisely what they need to be. The earth’s size, distance from the sun, rotational period, composition, and many other factors are all just right. The chances of there being even one planet where all of these factors converge by accident are very slim indeed.

And yet it happened. Of course had it not we wouldn't be having this discussion.

The argument that there must have been a creator because the Universe seems to be so perfect is not a logical argument at all. The Universe is what it is. If it were different, then it would be different.

This argument is more or less the same as winning the lottery and saying, "it must have been rigged."

That's not logical.

Thirdly, the evidence is mounting that life on earth simply could not and did not come into existence through natural processes in a primordial “soup.” For example, the experiments to prove that it could have happened are suspect because little progress has been made possible due to the ingenious designs on the part of experimenters.

The Theory of Evolution is not dependent on whether or not life even originated on this planet.

Fourthly, the genetic code of all biological life on earth contains evidence of intelligent design. This is because the genetic code contains information comparable to the information in complex computer programs as well as information in books.

Care to elaborate on this?

Fifthly, the fossil record continues to be an embarrassment to the Darwinian theory of evolution. The many transitional forms which Darwin predicted would be found simply have not surfaced. This fact has forced evolutionists to modify Darwin’s Theory, often in absurd ways.

I just don't agree with this. We have found multiple examples of proto-human primates.

Could you provide some examples of "absurd" modifications?

Not only this, but much of what is being touted today as science isn’t really observable at all — things like quarks, electromagnetic fields,

That depends on what you consider observable. If you mean can be directly seen or heard. Then no. The effects of quarks however have been observed. In the aftermath of particle collisions the trails quarks leave and their effects on other particles (velocity) have been observed.

For EMF, how would you explain a compass?

In fact, if we’re to consider only what is observable to be scientific, we’d still be saying that the earth is flat.

Why? People have been to the moon. The earth is spherical. Men have observed it.

Can one species transform into an entirely different one? The honest evolutionist must sadly reply “no.”

Says who? I disagree with that statement completely. Though perhaps we are talking about two different definitions of 'honest'.

And on and on and on.


This article states over and over again that scientists are trying to destroy religion with evolution. This just isn't the case. No one is trying to disprove God. Most scientists are religious people. They don't see a conflict between god and science. The only one stiring up conflict in this article is the author himself.

 

[Hobbit]

Zhukov, you're one of the most reasonable atheists I've ever met. Most of the ones I meet are like, "God doesn't exist and if you think he does, you're childish and stupid." I find this funny, because the statement itself is childish and stupid. However, you're quite similar to the way I am in this respect. It's more like, "Yes, I realize the logic and truths behind your beliefs, but I just happen to like this other explanation better.

I think the only difference is that I do try to convince people that I am right...without offending them, of course. I don't challenge their beliefs, I simply present mine. Now, many people ask why I do this at all, and, well, it's the whole Hell thing, plus that part where Jesus said, "Go to the four corners of the Earth..." Kinda hard to talk your way out of that one.

Well, best of luck to you. I do hope you come around, but I won't hate you if you don't.

 

[MissileMan]

...uh...perhaps because, by preponderance of the evidence, creation/divine design is 'MORE' likely.. I thought you were supposed to be smart? Look 'honestly' at both theories. Try it.

Any chance you can link some of this preponderant evidence?

 

[shadrack]

The cover on my National Geographic is "Was Darwin Wrong?". Then before the article begins it shows the second part of that title in very bold print, "NO. The evidence for Evolution is overwhelming."

Many of the religious raise the bar very high when it goes against their beliefs and lower it very low when it supports their beliefs. Any shred of doubt, however unreasonable, is enough to enable them to dismiss overwhelming evidence.

How unreasonable can the religious be?

 

[dmp]

Any chance you can link some of this preponderant evidence?

What good would that do? You don't want to believe the evidence...you're like an OJ Simpson Juror.

 

[MissileMan]

What good would that do? You don't want to believe the evidence...you're like an OJ Simpson Juror.

I figured you wouldn't be able to produce any.

 

[Mariner]

or "Intelligent Design" is that they offer no testable theory. Science is about looking at the natural world and seeing what is real, and being willing to accept the evidence no matter how implausible it might be.

The ideas that things get infinitely heavy as you raise their speed towards that of light, that time slows down when you move (you're a billionth of a second younger after driving to work), or that gravity warps space and can trap light--these are all rather counter-intuitive ideas, but the evidence supports them. Your TV screen is designed with a curve in it that is required because of these effects of relativity. If relativity is wrong, then your TV wouldn't work.

It's the same with evolution. You can watch evolution at work every day. If you're a farmer and you use the same pesticide year after year, it will work great at first, but then will cease working, and soon you'll have a field full of pests immune to the chemical. An advocate of Intelligent Design arrives, and says, "Wow, look at the amazing chemistry that these grasshoppers have, which keeps this chemical from killing them. Obviously, there's a God. Who else could have designed such great chemistry?!"

This type of everyday evolution has been demonstrated numerous times. Another famous example was when the industrial revolution began, deposting soot on trees throughout Great Britain. Light-colored moths were no longer camouflaged and got eaten. Dark-colored moths proliferated.

We're all mutants. Each living human has about 300 unique mutations. Some of these will conver benefits, others will result in our being spontaneously aborted. Over time, successful mutations spread through the population and humans look different, having evolved.

When it comes to complex organs like the eye, computer simulations show that evolution is perfectly capable of creating them. I've watched a simulation where a flat area of membrane curls up, evolves a lens, and becomes round, looking very much like a real eye--but there was no input whatsover from the programmer aside from randomness that simulated mutation. It does look magical and just as counter-intuitive as relativity.

It's obviously hard for fundamentalist Christians to swallow, because the Bible seems to suggest that the world is about 4000 years old. But the church has been giving way to science in the material realm for two millenia. To my mind, that does not reduce the value of religion. It only means the Bible isn't a physics, earth science, or biology textbook.

Since CS and ID don't offer any way to falsify them, they cannot properly be called science. If you can't prove it wrong, then it's faith not theory. And when it comes to "there are scientists on both sides of the issue," do remember that there are a handful of anti-evolutionary biologists versus the vast majority who believe in evolution and work with it every day.

Mariner

 

[5stringJeff]

or "Intelligent Design" is that they offer no testable theory. Science is about looking at the natural world and seeing what is real, and being willing to accept the evidence no matter how implausible it might be.

...

Since CS and ID don't offer any way to falsify them, they cannot properly be called science. If you can't prove it wrong, then it's faith not theory. And when it comes to "there are scientists on both sides of the issue," do remember that there are a handful of anti-evolutionary biologists versus the vast majority who believe in evolution and work with it every day.

Mariner

Mariner, you could just as easily be describing macro-evolution, which also offers no testable theory. There is no way to test whether a species can evolve into a different species, as Darwinian evolution teaches.

And speaking of accepting the evidence, how do you accept the evidence of the Cambrain Explosion, where the fossil record suddenly shows a major increase in the number of fossils, and the number of types of fossils, without any minor evolutionary changes?

 

[shadrack]

Mariner, you could just as easily be describing macro-evolution, which also offers no testable theory. There is no way to test whether a species can evolve into a different species, as Darwinian evolution teaches.

And speaking of accepting the evidence, how do you accept the evidence of the Cambrain Explosion, where the fossil record suddenly shows a major increase in the number of fossils, and the number of types of fossils, without any minor evolutionary changes?

Speciation is observable in simple forms of life, like bacteria.

It is not unreasonable to infer large-scale changes in gene frequencies from the fossil record while knowing small-scale changes in gene frequencies have been demonstrated in a laboratory.

It is unreasonable to hold to the idea of spontaneous generation simply because there are knowable unknowns and unknowable unknowns.

 

[Mariner]

at Darwin's "Origin of Species" and decide for yourself based on the scientist's own work. It's a perfectly readable book. Darwin's method was to assemble vast quantities of data on the distribution and characteristics of various living things, which he presents in a perfectly comprehensible fashion. I submit that by the time you've finished it you will have changed your mind about the plausibility of evolution. In fact, any other explanation for the unbelievable diversity of life on earth might seem both implausible and unnecessary.

As for the Cambrian explosion--well, I'm not an evolutionary biologist so I'm not the person to ask, but as a scientifically minded fellow, I would suggest that some threshold event may have happened--perhaps there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere, or perhaps lightning strikes fellow below a certain number, or the acidity or salinity of the oceans hit a certain number so that suddenly vastly more forms of life became viable than had been before. The fossils certainly are impressive.

Even if we never figure out a definite story for a particular evolutionary event like the Cambrian explosion, that hardly negates the entire theory of evolution.

When you think about speciation you can also think about viruses. Why does last year's flu vaccine not work? Because viruses evolve from year to year (I know they're not officially classified as fully living, but the concept is the same, and the materials they're made out of: DNA or RNA and protein, are just what we're made out of.) So if you don't believe in evolution you needn't bother getting a flu shot.

Mariner.

 

[WeAreLegion]

Hello all, new here.

My belief set is really very simple because that's the type of guy I am. I believe in evolution but not cross species evolution (I am in Texas and there are farmers here who try it daily via the conventional method, or so I have heard... and I have yet to witness a sheep boy ).

Man (as a whole) seems to be evolving daily. Look at it from a physical anthropological viewpoint. How different are we than our forefathers? Have you ever been in a house that was built in the 1700's? They have 7' ceilings and 6' door frames. We are physically different for certain (not monkey to man different, but different), to me it's not difficult to assume that we may have a mental edge on our predecessors (as a whole) as well.

Being that neither science nor faith offers proof of anything below the atomic level, and neither can provide a definition for just exactly what provides the spark of life, nothing can really be proven by man.

I believe that Darwin was in some ways correct and in some ways incorrect. I am a believer in divine design and I suspect that science will eventually lead man to God.

Of course I can't prove that.

 

[Mariner]

There's no such thing as "cross-species" evolution in the currently accepted Theory of Evolution. A single species can divide, e.g. when finches arrive on an island where the food supply or the predator situation is different. In the new environment, the selective forces are different, so the random mutations that every baby creature has gradually cause a drift from the home population, which also continues to drift. If they drift far enough apart so that their offspring are no longer viable, then they have become two separate species. There are thousands of documented examples of this type of speciation.

So man didn't evolve from apes. Instead, primates evolved and speciated just like all other creatures. Our nearest relatives may have just been discovered--Floresians, who lived in Indonesia up until just 13,000 years ago. Evolutionary pressures made them (and the elephants on their islands) small. Neanderthal man coexisted with homo sapiens until around 50,000 years ago. Beyond that you have to go back 5 million years to find the branch where we diverged from our common ancestor with the current chimpanzee. During that 5 million years there were numerous branchings, resulting in new species or subspecies, most of which did not survive. Among living creatures, chimps are our closest relatives. Genetic drift since our divergence from them has resulted in about 2% of our DNA being different from theirs.

To me, it makes God's creation no less marvellous to imagine it changing, just like the ocean is always changing. Why the Judeo-Christian culture is so fixated on sameness and eternity is beyond me. In Hindu thinking (I am Hindu), creation, existence, and destruction are never-ending processes.

Mariner.

P.S. I'm quoting all the above facts and figures from memory, so if there are small errors I apologize, but the big picture should be accurate.

 

[5stringJeff]

To me, it makes God's creation no less marvellous to imagine it changing, just like the ocean is always changing. Why the Judeo-Christian culture is so fixated on sameness and eternity is beyond me. In Hindu thinking (I am Hindu), creation, existence, and destruction are never-ending processes.

The reason behind it (at least from an evangelical Christian standpoint) is that God created man specifically as the steward of His creation, giving man dominion over the earth with the responsibilty to care for it. God also deliberately created man as the only part of His creation with an eternal soul. So mankind is special in the eyes of God.

 

[Mariner]

said "steward" rather than "dominion." Our eco-consciousness might be quite different now if we didn't have this sense that we were so special among the earth's creatures.

Yes, in your religion man is given special place among God's creatures. In mine, he is not. At my Hindu wedding (to my Irish Catholic wife), we prayed that not only all people, but all animals, all vegetable creatures, and all the rocks of the earth would be pleased with our marriage.

It's up to every Christian, I guess, to decide how far to take the Bible literally. Over the past two millenia, obviously, the church has ceded a lot of ground to science--but that has no in any way diminished its moral authority. So my tendency is to say to Christians, "Leave scientific stuff like biology and astronomy to the scientists, but don't stop being a moral guide--we need that now more than ever."

Unlike many liberals, I also take seriously Christians' concerns about stem cell research, late-term abortion, cloning, etc. But I don't think Christians get anywhere by opposing scientific inquiry and theorizing. The arguments have gone on for centuries, and science has always won out: Is the earth the center of the universe? You could have been burned at the stake by a self-righteous Christian for denying this a few hundred years ago. The lesson for Christians (and everyone, me included) might be to be careful when being self-righteous.

Mariner.

 

[-Cp]

One more thought on this topic..

There's a LAW in science called Thermaldynamics which, in part, states that all things progressively get worse.

This LAW aburptly stops all arguments for evolution as it's a THEORY that goes against that LAW - Laws are scientific absolutes that are irrefutable.

To say that evolution led to the creation of mankind would be like saying if I leave my aluminmum garbage cans out long enough, they'll eventually turn into an Acura NSX - after all, their both made from aluminum (NSX's have an aluminum body)....