Help Me Understand

[Randy Carson]

Is god still creating today? Maybe so. To punish all the sexual sinners, creation of antibiotic resistant STD's?

Not six-day creation type stuff, apparently. (Though if a few new species were created on some remote island to be discovered next year, who would know?)

More likely, things are STILL evolving just as they always have. (Though it normally takes so long to observe that type of change, who would know?)

[Kingpin]

Can all christians that don't believe in evolution explain to me your problems with it. It is just really hard for me to rap my head around someone not believeing in evolution in the 21st century, so it would make it easier if I understood exactly why you don't. And maybe I can help you through your confusions, maybe not.

Thanks!

I think I may be the only one that falls in to this category and while my objections to evolution are many and deep, I don't think we can cover all of it, I'm also curious why you care?  You state you want to help through my confusions, but confusion is far from my objections.  Does it matter to you that I accept evolution?  I see some have stated that Christians deny evolution because it goes against Creationism.  I have logical issues with the theory of evolution, irregardless of Creationism.  

I will get in to these objections when I have a few, though I know I did this fairly recently.

[drfuzzy]

Well, since I don't see any Creationist Theists showing up yet, I'll jump in the pool.  

Here's how I was raised: the xtian school I went to had science books that showed pictures of God creating the world, and of God walking with Adam as he named the animals, and the creation of Eve from Adam's rib.  When asked about fossils and dinosaurs, my parents told me that they were lies by the evil scientific community, who hated God. If they found any real bones (that the scientists hadn't buried themselves) then those fossils were placed on the earth by Satan and his demons to try to confuse mankind.  Any fossils that were found could not be older than 6000 years, because scholars had dated the age of the earth from God's Word.  Darwin was an agent of the Devil.
Humans could not possibly be descended from apes, because we still have apes, how silly!

<my brain hurts now>

When I transferred to a public high school, I was careful not to bring my science book home.

Edit: Just to be clear -- I am no longer a Creationist! I love science. I believe that man created god.

[drfuzzy]

oops sorry Kingpin - we must have both been typing at the same time!

[downbeatplumb]

Can all christians that don't believe in evolution explain to me your problems with it. It is just really hard for me to rap my head around someone not believeing in evolution in the 21st century, so it would make it easier if I understood exactly why you don't. And maybe I can help you through your confusions, maybe not.

Thanks!

I think I may be the only one that falls in to this category and while my objections to evolution are many and deep, I don't think we can cover all of it, I'm also curious why you care?  You state you want to help through my confusions, but confusion is far from my objections.  Does it matter to you that I accept evolution?  I see some have stated that Christians deny evolution because it goes against Creationism.  I have logical issues with the theory of evolution, irregardless of Creationism.  

I will get in to these objections when I have a few, though I know I did this fairly recently.

I am curious as to what your objections could possibly be. There is zero doubt in my mind that evolution has been true. Not belittling you in any way just genuinely curious.

[Pyrrho]

oops sorry Kingpin - we must have both been typing at the same time!

You should not apologize.  You have given an answer to the question, and he has merely said that he will at some time in the future give an answer to the question.  Your answer is similar to how I was taught as a child.  It can be summarized thusly:

The Bible is the true word of God.
The Bible says that God directly created all species.
The theory of evolution contradicts that.
Anything that contradicts the truth must be false.  (This, by the way, is a tautology.)
Therefore, evolution is false.

The argument is logically valid.  Its soundness (or lack thereof), however, is another matter.

One can easily avoid deciding that it is unsound by never properly examining the theory of evolution (and by not examining the reasonableness of the Bible too carefully either).  One of the very striking things about reading Darwin's On the Origin of the Species is how very reasonable he is.  It is understandable to an educated reader; one does not have to be a specialist to understand it.  Some of the examples are likely to be unknown to the general reader, but the overall argument and discussion is very understandable.  Of course, I did not read it when I was a Christian, only after I became an atheist.

[Kingpin]

Ok, As I thought I did discuss this in another thread by Shuffle title "History Repeats itself"

Here are my views:

I would disagree despite the "consensus". Label me as you will but I think there are immense leaps being made and assumptions based on presuppositions. I'm sure I will be flamed for taking a presupposition to God's existence as a refutation for evolution, but that's not the case. The mathematical improbability for increased complexity by gene mutation and natural selection does not lend any credence to the "macro" evolutionary model in my mind.

This candid admission is from the evolutionist journal Nature:

"Darwin anticipated that microevolution would be a process of continuous and gradual change. The term macroevolution, by contrast, refers to the origin of new species and divisions of the taxonomic hierarchy above the species level, and also to the origin of complex adaptations, such as the vertebrate eye. Macroevolution posed a problem to Darwin because his principle of descent with modification predicts gradual transitions between small-scale adaptive changes in populations and these larger-scale phenomena, yet there is little evidence for such transitions in nature. Instead, the natural world is often characterized by gaps, or discontinuities. One type of gap relates to the existence of 'organs of extreme perfection', such as the eye, or morphological innovations, such as wings, both of which are found fully formed in present-day organisms without leaving evidence of how they evolved."-- Reznick, David N., Robert E. Ricklefs. 12 February 2009. Darwin's bridge between microevolution and macroevolution. Nature, Vol. 457, pp. 837-842.

The extrapolation of macroevolution being possible because "there is enough time" is a presupposition that falls flat on its face. There have been many discussions regarding it. I understand it's still a highly debated topic, but I firmly believe it is based on unfounded assumptions. Here is a good scientific peer reviewed article discussing it:


http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/...O-C.2012.4

Little snippet:

"Converting an enzyme to a new function is the kind of thing that should have occurred thousands of time in the course of evolution, given the vast array of biochemical functions carried out by extant enzymes. Yet recent work has shown that converting an enzyme encoded by a 1,200-nucleotide gene to a genuinely new function4 is likely to require seven or more coordinated mutations. This is true even though the starting and target enzymes have common three-dimensional proteinfolds and active-site chemistries— just no shared reaction [29].5 Getting seven specific changes in a gene 1,200 nucleotides long is a 1-in-10^22 event, not a 1-in-10,000 event. Even then it is by no means clear that significant changes in gene function can be had with just seven base substitutions."

In 2007, Durrett and Schmidt estimated in the journal Genetics that for a single mutation to occur in a nucleotide-binding site and be fixed in a primate lineage would require a waiting time of six million years. The same authors later estimated it would take 216 million years for the binding site to acquire two mutations, if the first mutation was neutral in its effect. But six million years is the entire time allotted for the transition from our last common ancestor with chimps to us according to the standard evolutionary timescale. Two hundred and sixteen million years takes us back to the Triassic, when the very first mammals appeared. One or two mutations simply aren’t sufficient to produce the necessary changes— sixteen anatomical features—in the time available. At most, a new binding site might affect the regulation of one or two genes.

As for the hominids, some overzealous scientists have been rebuked by University of California (Berkeley) paleontologist Tim White, as he attempts to rein in the tendency of fossil hunters to classify every find as a new species. He said, "To evaluate the biological importance of such taxonomic claims, we must consider normal variation within biological species. Humans (and presumably their ancestors and close relatives) vary considerably in their skeletal and dental anatomy. Such variation is well documented and stems from ontogenetic, sexual, geographic, and idiosyncratic (individual) sources."

Dr. Charles Oxnard completed the most sophisticated computer analysis of australopithecine fossils ever undertaken, and concluded that the australopithecines have nothing to do with the ancestry of man whatsoever, and are simply an extinct form of ape (Fossils, Teeth and Sex: New Perspectives on Human Evolution, University of Washington Press, 1987)

One of the world's leading authorities on australopithecines, British anatomist, Solly Lord Zuckerman has concluded (based on specimens aged much younger than Lucy) that australopithecines do not belong in the family of man. He wrote "I myself remain totally unpersuaded. Almost always when I have tried to check the anatomical claims on which the status of Australopithecus is based, I have ended in failure."

Evolution is presented as fact, yes, but there is not a consensus. There is an entire site dedicated to scientists who wish to sign their scientific dissent from the darwinian model of evolution. http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org/ and the 22 page list (updated and released June 2015) of scientists who publicly denounce the Darwinian model can be viewed here: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/...oad&id=660

This is bold because as soon as they do this they are essentially written off as intellectuals in the scientific community. Look at atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel for example: http://news.nationalpost.com/holy-post/w...-darwinism

Evolution as presented for the origin of all species has enormous gaps and holes and scientists fill those gaps with assumptions and presuppositions that it must be a natural process but it is far from "proven" or "consensus", irregardless of religious beliefs, but based on pure science.

This does NOT mean that creation theory can be proven or must be true. I'm not saying that. Yes it is what I believe, but I'm pointing out what I see the problem evolution theory has.

[Kingpin]

Well, since I don't see any Creationist Theists showing up yet, I'll jump in the pool.  

Here's how I was raised: the xtian school I went to had science books that showed pictures of God creating the world, and of God walking with Adam as he named the animals, and the creation of Eve from Adam's rib.  When asked about fossils and dinosaurs, my parents told me that they were lies by the evil scientific community, who hated God. If they found any real bones (that the scientists hadn't buried themselves) then those fossils were placed on the earth by Satan and his demons to try to confuse mankind.  Any fossils that were found could not be older than 6000 years, because scholars had dated the age of the earth from God's Word.  Darwin was an agent of the Devil.
Humans could not possibly be descended from apes, because we still have apes, how silly!

<my brain hurts now>

When I transferred to a public high school, I was careful not to bring my science book home.

I've always gone to public school and didn't go to church as a child so I was not taught those creation stories as fact at a young age.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

oops sorry Kingpin - we must have both been typing at the same time!

You should not apologize.  You have given an answer to the question, and he has merely said that he will at some time in the future give an answer to the question.  Your answer is similar to how I was taught as a child.  It can be summarized thusly:

The Bible is the true word of God.
The Bible says that God directly created all species.
The theory of evolution contradicts that.
Anything that contradicts the truth must be false.  (This, by the way, is a tautology.)
Therefore, evolution is false.
 
The argument is logically valid.  Its soundness (or lack thereof), however, is another matter.

One can easily avoid deciding that it is unsound by never properly examining the theory of evolution (and by not examining the reasonableness of the Bible too carefully either).  One of the very striking things about reading Darwin's On the Origin of the Species is how very reasonable he is.  It is understandable to an educated reader; one does not have to be a specialist to understand it.  Some of the examples are likely to be unknown to the general reader, but the overall argument and discussion is very understandable.  Of course, I did not read it when I was a Christian, only after I became an atheist.

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

[Catholic_Lady]

You should not apologize.  You have given an answer to the question, and he has merely said that he will at some time in the future give an answer to the question.  Your answer is similar to how I was taught as a child.  It can be summarized thusly:

The Bible is the true word of God.
The Bible says that God directly created all species.
The theory of evolution contradicts that.
Anything that contradicts the truth must be false.  (This, by the way, is a tautology.)
Therefore, evolution is false.
 
The argument is logically valid.  Its soundness (or lack thereof), however, is another matter.

One can easily avoid deciding that it is unsound by never properly examining the theory of evolution (and by not examining the reasonableness of the Bible too carefully either).  One of the very striking things about reading Darwin's On the Origin of the Species is how very reasonable he is.  It is understandable to an educated reader; one does not have to be a specialist to understand it.  Some of the examples are likely to be unknown to the general reader, but the overall argument and discussion is very understandable.  Of course, I did not read it when I was a Christian, only after I became an atheist.

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.