(August 16, 2014 at 11:40 am)Rowan Wrote: First let me say that I am no expert in human biology or evolution but I came across this website that tries to explain why people were living to be 900 years old in the bible and now we struggle to reach 100It doesn't try to explain it at all. It just tells us what "the Bible teaches" and then explains what is (and isn't) known about human aging and life spans, then apparently decides that meh... god did it.
They claim that "(a)ccording to the Bible, God created the first humans—Adam and Eve—without sin and with the ability to live forever." But that's not accurate: Genesis does not say that Adam and Eve were immortal. Genesis 3:22 tells us that god evicted them from the Garden of Eden so that they would not be able to "take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever." It was the fruit of a tree that extended their lifespan, not an inherent genetic trait.
Given this, one wonders why god would need to further degrade the human genome in order to shorten our lifespan. He comes across as something of a prick, to be honest.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
