Help Me Understand

[Shuffle]

What would of stopped him from not using evolution? Maybe not wasting billions of years for a product he could have made in a split second.

Nothing. He could have done it either way...even to the point of putting dinosaur bones in the ground for us to find. If He really wanted to.

I just think the evidence suggests that He chose to use evolution.

Finally. Progress.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

It's not just the Catholics who have no issues with evolution, and don't feel the need to go around "quote-mining" real scientists out of context to make them say what they didn't say, in order to feel like they're doing the work of the Lord.

My fiancee is an evolutionary biologist (in genetics), and is a churchgoing Methodist. The head of the Human Genome Project is an Evangelical (Baptist, I think) Christian, and staunch proponent of evolution and our descent from ape-like ancestors. He wrote a whole book about it (then tacked on the teleological argument about the "fine-tuned universe" to make it still Christian-friendly), in which he openly mocks Christians who refuse to understand what evolution is and how it works... or who deliberately misunderstand it, and then refuse to learn when people who do understand it try to explain it to them.

By the way, I'm an atheist and a former biologist, and I don't think Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) is our ancestor, either. I think it was their sister-species, Kenyanthropus platyops, or something very near to that. But saying that because Lucy is not our ancestor, she is not a hominid, and that we did not descend from creatures like her is a bit like saying that because your grandfather had a brother, but you are not the brother's direct genetic descendant, you are not family to your great uncle.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

The Catholic Bible teaches animal evolution by giving examples of it.  The Protestants believed in magic.

Wisdom 19:18-19 (CEB) = "18 If we are careful to observe events, we can see just how the elements of the universe are transformed. It’s the same transformation that happens when someone changes the sounds that a harp makes by changing the key while continuing to play the same melody. 19 In this way, land animals were changed into underwater creatures, while animals that swam in the waters now moved onto the land."
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se...ersion=CEB

They also believed if you placed spotted sticks in water troughs for the animals, that the non-spotted animals would breed spotted animals. Actually, it’s not a belief, it’s a story in the bible that’s told as if it were true. It definitely sounds divinely inspired to me.. No chance that this is something that some idiots made up.

Genesis 30 37 Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. 38 Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, 39 they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted.

Well, someone nailed it in Wisdom 19:18-19.  Whales evolved from land animals.  Sea snakes are evolving from land snakes at this very minute.  And salt water crocodiles are making the transition to sea animals.

[Thumpalumpacus]

None of what you have written above has ANYTHING to do with the doctrine of infallibility.

No, what I demonstrated is that your church is fallible. Your church argued that the Earth does not orbit the Sun. It argued against what is a physical fact. That really puts a kink in its "infallibility". I don't care about your indoctrination; I don't care what you think. History shows that the Catholic Church got it wrong, and that renders your "doctrine" of an infallible church nugatory.

You can either argue against your own church's records, or you can argue against physics; that choice is yours, the leisure of shooting it down is mine.

[Whateverist]

I can't recall now who said God created the earth and all as a scientist, not a magician. This sounds like the watch maker analogy. But anyone who believes we started from nothing believes that God did more than gather the materials. He also created those material to hear the fundies tell it.

[Catholic_Lady]

None of what you have written above has ANYTHING to do with the doctrine of infallibility.

No, what I demonstrated is that your church is fallible. Your church argued that the Earth does not orbit the Sun.  It argued against what is a physical fact. That really puts a kink in its "infallibility". I don't care about your indoctrination; I don't care what you think. History shows that the Catholic Church got it wrong, and that renders your "doctrine" of an infallible church nugatory.

You can either argue against your own church's records, or you can argue against physics; that choice is yours, the leisure of shooting it down is mine.

I understand what you're saying, PT. But what we refer to when we say "Church doctrine" are official matters of faith and morals. That's the only part of the Church that is "infallible." The earth being the center of the universe was never official Church doctrine.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

The biblical creation story is a jumbled mess of competing ideas.  The primary idea is that it's about the progenitors of the Israelites/Hebrews/Jews.  After all, the Bible is not about all of humanity but only about one small slice of it.  That's why thinking that the Adam & Eve story is about all of humanity is completely wrong.  Assyria, Persia, Arabia, and Ethiopia were just down the road from the Garden of Eden where Adam & Eve were running around naked.
There is no God creature in this solar system.

I've always found the "racial origins" stuff in Genesis to be the most laughable, in terms of it being obviously based on no more than the info available to the Hebrews in the ancient Near East. They describe three races (Ham, Shem, and Japheth), the ones which were in range of knowledge of those writers... but somehow God didn't "inspire" them to know about the Chinese/Japanese/SE Asians, or the Native Americans, or the Indians/Dravidians, or the Polynesians, or the Aboriginal Australians. Funny how "God" never knows about things beyond the realm of the human authors of the book, while they're being "divinely inspired" to write this stuff down.

I'm sure it sounded reasonable to the ancient Hebrews, but that anyone could think this is more than a Bronze Age mythology today simply astounds  me.

That's very true.  Most people are reduced to one of two choices: the ethnocentric Middle Eastern Jewish religious fairy tale or the ethnocentric Middle Eastern Arabian religious fairy tale. They are the perfect examples of how billions of people can be brainwashed  with pure BS and swear that it's all true just because some unknown guys said that it actually happened.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

The Catholic Bible teaches animal evolution by giving examples of it.  The Protestants believed in magic.

Wisdom 19:18-19 (CEB) = "18 If we are careful to observe events, we can see just how the elements of the universe are transformed. It’s the same transformation that happens when someone changes the sounds that a harp makes by changing the key while continuing to play the same melody. 19 In this way, land animals were changed into underwater creatures, while animals that swam in the waters now moved onto the land."
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?se...ersion=CEB

Lol, your posts are always really weird.

Haven't you ever read the secular books in the Catholic Bible?

[robvalue]

Although evolution is an incredibly complex subject in its entirety, the basics of it are very simple.

1) Small changes happen (we see this all the time, people and animals are similar but different from their parents).

2) Those changes which give some small advantage for survival in whatever the current environment is will be favoured, because such animals will live longer and have more chance to produce offspring. This will move the "averages" in that direction.

3) A lot of small changes, over a very long time, add up to big changes.

People who don't understand it generally fall flat at the bolded part. We're talking hundreds of thousands of generations, at least, before you see any obvious big changes. I understand it is hard for the human mind to think in such long time spans when we are ourselves only here for a century or less. Also, people who say "evolution says dogs give birth to cats" don't have the slightest clue at all what evolution is. It would me like me saying Jesus was a roller coaster in Essex. Yes, what you think is evolution is false; but that's because it's not evolution. It's your misinformed ideas about evolution.

Really, that's all there is. To me it's incredibly obvious that this is the only sensible explanation. Evolution happens. We know it happens. Picking holes in the theory of evolution is not the same as picking holes in evolution. Our models are never going to be perfect, we work on them all the time to improve them.

It's also a huge jump from picking holes in the theory of evolution to rejecting not just the theory but evolution itself, and jumping instead to "magic". It's all kinds of logical fallacies including non-sequitur, magical thinking, false dichotomy, argument from ignorance/incredulity and simply giving up on science and reality. The correct scientific response would be "let's see if we can improve this model to account for these apparent problems" or "let's try and find another sensible explanation and build a new testable hypothesis".

If there was enough evidence to discount the whole of the theory of evolution, someone is keeping it tightly under lock and key because there would be immense fame for anyone who could produce it and the internet would be rife with it.

The Catholic approach seems to be "Science has it right, but god did science". It is an unnecessary assumption which explains nothing, as I pointed out in my other thread, and has no logical basis. The only step missing is abiogenesis (which people who don't understand evolution often mix up with evolution) which science isn't far from understanding. This is the only gap for magic to be inserted, and is so far removed from actual religious accounts that it's absurd. It's suggesting an all powerful god took the most laborious, inefficient, risky, long whinded, painful, pointless method to do something he could have done instantly (like the holy texts said he did). Sure, he "could have" done that; argument from ignorance. If you understand evolution, you understand it doesn't need any external guidance. We are not the "goal" of evolution, we are just what happened. Anything else is rationalizations after the fact.

[ignoramus]

The Catholic approach seems to be "Science has it right, but god did science". It is an unnecessary assumption which explains nothing

Too right... In 2000 years, I don't think the "God" variable has been needed or required in proving anything?
If anything, this unnecessary variable only convolutes possible solutions to problems and has ultimately slowed down man's progress.