Help Me Understand

[Pyrrho]

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

The Catholic Bible also has the creation story in Genesis in which God directly makes animals.  (Or I should state, "creation stories," as Genesis chapters 1 and 2 tell different and contradictory stories of creation.)

In the case of the Eucharist ceremony, it is the Catholics who have the magic beliefs, not most protestants.  And in that instance, it is far more insane than the idea of a being who can create the universe out of nothing decided to create animals fully formed.

Of course, I could also point out that not every protestant rejects evolution, so the exact nature of where a religionist will diverge from what is most reasonable is rather variable.  But one thing is sure, whenever someone is religious, they go off the rails somewhere or other due to their religion, and very often in very many ways.  Religion always has magic somewhere or other.

[Cato]

The official position of the Catholic church is to accept evolution, but with the caveat that one must accept as truth the absurd idea of Adam and Eve because if they don't the entire house of cards collapses immediately. No Adam and Eve, no fall, no original sin, no need for Jesus, no church. It's all rather silly.

[Regina]

I think you have have "objections" to evolution in terms of small details, like exactly which species you would start classifying as "early humanoids" or exactly how the evolution of humans came about for example.

It becomes silly when you try to dispute that the Earth is only a few thousand years old. There is now flat-out undeniable geological, paleontological and even historical human evidence (early tools/buildings) that the Earth is far older. Genetic evidence in humans alone proves modern humans have existed for at least 100 000 years, and didn't leave Africa until around 70 000 years ago.

[Thumpalumpacus]

God established an infallible Church

This is an empirically false statement.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

The official position of the Catholic church is to accept evolution, but with the caveat that one must accept as truth the absurd idea of Adam and Eve because if they don't the entire house of cards collapses immediately. No Adam and Eve, no fall, no original sin, no need for Jesus, no church. It's all rather silly.

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.  And they were all there after Noah's flood when Nimrod became the bigwig in Babylonia and built cities in Assyria.  And the king of Tyre lived in the Garden of Eden.  So only a crazy person will take the story literally.  That means that the creation story is actually a complex metaphor like so many other Bible stories are.    If a person was so inclined he could write his own national history using the same format that the Bible writers used.  A person who thoroughly knows his national history would understand such a story but distant outsiders would probably be completely clueless and think that the stories mean something else.  The fools would probably start a religion based on it.  

There is no God creature in this solar system.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

I think you have have "objections" to evolution in terms of small details, like exactly which species you would start classifying as "early humanoids" or exactly how the evolution of humans came about for example.

It becomes silly when you try to dispute that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.  There is now flat-out undeniable geological, paleontological and even historical human evidence (early tools/buildings) that the Earth is far older. Genetic evidence in humans alone proves modern humans have existed for at least 100 000 years, and didn't leave Africa until around 70 000 years ago.

It is anticipated that humans will look completely different 100,000 years from now.  Some of the dummies then will deny that they came from us.

https://www.quora.com/How-will-humans-lo...s-from-now

[Regina]

I think you have have "objections" to evolution in terms of small details, like exactly which species you would start classifying as "early humanoids" or exactly how the evolution of humans came about for example.

It becomes silly when you try to dispute that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.  There is now flat-out undeniable geological, paleontological and even historical human evidence (early tools/buildings) that the Earth is far older. Genetic evidence in humans alone proves modern humans have existed for at least 100 000 years, and didn't leave Africa until around 70 000 years ago.

It is anticipated that humans will look completely different 100,000 years from now.  Some of the dummies then will deny that they came from us.

https://www.quora.com/How-will-humans-lo...s-from-now

"People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species. The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures."

That's already happening in some areas of the UK, due to interbreeding. Slough, Essex, Stoke-on-Trent and Hull come to mind.

[Salacious B. Crumb]

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

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.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

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.

[downbeatplumb]

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.

Macro evolution is micro evolution over time. 

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:

I imagine that these are out of context because these are long refuted accusations against evolution.
Really the eye! This is one of the most common examples of evolution. Richard Dawkins did an entire Christamas lecture on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E

 

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.

Ok so according to this changes happen one at a time one after the other. Well lets put it this way you will contain many mutations and so will every other person and animal on the planet trillions of mutations happening all at once.

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."

If australopithicus is not a direct human ancestor it would mean that another hominid was, that is all, it does not contradict evolution but tinkering around the edges.

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

I can say with a high level of certainty that evolution is a fact.

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.

There is no competing theory that explains life as we know it. Intelligient design is as scientists say "not even wrong" it is in not way a valid hypothosis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

 
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.

These aren't real problems. The theory is not as fragile as you think.