inconsistent Creationists

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The term "just another theory" reflects the common use of the word "theory," not the scientific definition. To scientists, theory is the essence of science. It is scientific explanation.

Newtonian gravitation is spot on in weak gravitational fields. Which is why it predicts the motion of the planets sufficiently far from the sun. It is slightly off for Mercury.

In addition Newton's law of gravitation enable correct navigation of our space vehicles. Not bad for "just another theory".

Theories are exactly as good as the correct predictions they make.

ruveyn

Being a French, college student the fact that some extreme theories about creationism are gaining ground is surprising, odd and raises my concern.
I don't like very much the fact that the word "creationist" is now commonly used to refer only to the extreme theories of creationism. It can lead to excesses sometimes.
These extreme theories have now some little effect in Europe, even in my country. At least we have not many people who try to promote it here.
I just really don't understand people who say "I believe in God" and make him look like a wizard from a children book, who actually builds the Universe in six days as the magnificent text of the Genesis tells it in a poetic and illustrative manner. I'm sorry if I offend some but wake up. Even people who don't believe in God or in a god or gods are able to say that this is the weirdest way of thinking you're doing something that would "please him". If I were the deity, I would have a prolonged facepalm, telling myself : "So I make the Bing Bang billions of years ago, manage to get a system that works, that is utterly amazing and that can at least up to a certain extant be understandable by my creatures, and they depict me like this (and they even lie about the facts, and they don't use their reason any longer) !"

I found out there are people who kind of say "God put fossils of dinosaurs so that we can think Earth is older than it really is, because actually he created it with everything else 6000 years ago, and wants to test our faith by making this as a trap". By all the angels of Heaven, what is that !? It's a way to make sense out of nonsense : because they take the Bible altogether literally, they've enormous problems when it comes to the fact their reading of it is conflicted by reality, so they distort everything so that their belief in biblical inerrancy can still seem workable in their system...
Hum. Hum.

However, the concepts of creationism and intelligent design, when you consider them outside the ways they can have appeared in religions, sects or whatever, are a very different thing, and I would not say as some can have done here that they're out of the question. By the way, there are some scientists who work on fields that are by essence close to this kind of interrogation, who are deists, for example.

This, but...
The Bible says man was made from dust, and that does not really conflict with science. It's just that the dust went through many chemical transformations to form organic molecules, living systems, and then evolved through apes to become human. Ditto for snakes eating dust, although in that case it's probably more of a poetic expression. Oh and by the way, the origin of the universe and the origin of life are NOT addressed by evolution. Some people think that if evolution doesn't have the answers to everything, then it answers nothing.

Some anti-evolution people quote Michael Behe (author of Darwin's Black Box). He is the leading scientist of "intelligent design," even though his ideas of irreducible complexity and such have been debunked. What many people who quote him don't realize though is that, when pressed, Michael Behe admits that the evidence shows the earth is billions of years old and humans share common ancestry with apes and other life forms. On page 72 of a more recent book by Behe titled The Edge of Evolution he admits this, but says it is "trivial." Go figure!

What I have found from decades of studying this "controversy" is that those who argue against evolution do not have accurate information on which to base their decision. Creationist web sites ignore much of the evidence for evolution, and they deny or distort what they don't ignore. This is dishonest. What's worse though is their practice of "quote mining", where they take a scientist's words out of context in such a way as to make it look like his quotation supports their viewpoint where, if you check the original source, you will find most of the time, in the context around the quotation, what is being said supports evolution and destroys creationism.

And, as others have said, it is important to note that "creationist" is not a bad word, but those who LIE for Jesus trying to support a young earth creationist viewpoint make Christianity look really stupid to nonbelievers and may turn people away from Christ. Augustine of Hippo warned about this problem a LONG time ago (about 415 A.D.) when he wrote The Literal Meaning of Genesis.

Humans are just matter, but we are not descended from a man who was "formed from dust" by God, certainly not in a literal sense and not before plants had evolved. We are descended from a group of apes who decided to get out of the trees (if I may paraphrase Douglas Adams).

I would like to address some UU misconceptions from earlier in the thread. UU is not anti-Christian, there is a subset in the congregation I attend that are Christian. We do indeed welcome people of all faiths, but that doesn't mean that some of us don't find some organized doctrinal organizations incongruous with the spiritual growth that UUs seek, and at that level some individuals may speak poorly of mainstream Christianity.

Personally, having spent significant time in various Christian churches, some time in leadership, I find it difficult to understand how the UU Christians reconcile spiritual openness with the exclusivity that saturates the Bible, but I haven't yet asked any of them. That is more due to my nature than avoidance of them specifically. But as long as they hold to the principles of UU, which is basically to respect others, I am happy to join them each Sunday. I don't need to understand their spiritual path in order to feel that we have a kindred spirit.

In our congregation, it is announced that if a person is visiting, they should attend more than once, because each service is different. A few weeks ago the sermon was by a nun, last week and this week were by different members and next week will be a local Rabbi.

I can find something of value from each speaker...

The same way we do everything: We do experiments and rule out the possibility of a supernatural explanation, and inevitably a perfectly mundane one ends up being the truth. And, it's worth noting that the scientific community arrived at it's currently firm naturalist stance after centuries of each and every supernatural claim being demolished by experiment. It's not like we're just being hipsters here and suddenly decided to be anti-supernatural.



Correct. So we decided to examine the physical world instead, and have thus far come to the conclusion: "Yeeeeuuup, no supernatural stuff here. Everything so far seems explainable by non-supernatural means." If the supernatural exists, so far it has failed to produce any detectable effect on the natural world.



Also correct. But science has, so far, through perfectly falsifiable means, been able to explain things without needing to resort to supernatural claims. There are, of course, many things science still does not know, but the current trend of "All explanations thus far have had naturalist explanations, and zero explanations thus far have had supernatural explanations" leads most scientists to a naturalist standpoint, and to believe that ALL effects are explainable through naturalist means.



The burden of proof is only to prove the existence of God, which religious people have failed to do. Creationism failed, Intelligent Design failed, and whatever they decide to throw next is gonna fail as well.

AngelRho:

Creation "science" is focused entirely on disproving evolution. That is, they are trying to prove a negative. You CANNOT truly prove a negative. It can only be done indirectly by showing that the positive leads to inconsistencies with other proven positives. Until creationists step up and demonstrate that supernatural forces can violate physical law at will, by turning non-living matter into a fully formed living creature in the twinkle of an eye, then I call BS.

...and they do that by ignoring much evidence and denying or distorting much of the rest, also by quoting people out of context in a blatantly dishonest way to make it look like the person means the opposite of what is really being said. They also ask silly questions like why are there still monkeys, which only goes to show how little they understand about how evolution occurs. That's like asking if white Australians or Americans had ancestors who came from Europe, then why are there still Europeans. Many of the silly questions are because creationists don't seem to get that it isn't individual organisms that evolve to produce new species: it is breeding populations that evolve.

Besides, even if creationists could poke holes in evolution, that would not by itself provide any proof that their explanation of the origin of species is correct. There's lots of evidence that falsifies their explanation but they ignore that. There's no evidence that falsifies evolution, but they ignore that too and claim otherwise in crazy denial of what is observably and measurably real.

Last edited by TheBicyclingGuitarist on 04 Aug 2012, 8:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

An indirect proof is just as valid as a direct proof.

If a implies b then and only then not b implies not a.

ruveyn

I share General Pickett's deep disgust at this simian suggestion of evolution....

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFc3DDTPXXo[/youtube]

Raptor- are you being serious? If yes, why do you hold that belief?

Conventional creationism requires a lot of rationalization and even if you can find a way to get it to make sense doesn't mean that it is true. Most creationists believe that the Earth is only 7,000 years old, but it seems pretty obvious to me that it has been around a lot longer than that, based on what we already know about Earth. However, I don't believe that scientists can accurately estimate how old the Earth is either, even to the right magnitude, by stretching short trend-lines out to billions of years. The only way they can accurately approximate the age of the Earth is by observing how something changes over billions of years and collecting billions of data points. Even then it would be impossible to tell if the trend had changed from Earth's beginning to the current time due to atmospheric changes and other factors. I am an evolutionist but I see it from a pantheistic perspective, rather than atheistic perspective like most evolutionists do. A lot of creatures have enough in common that they must be related in some way. I don't believe that a lot of creatures, such as birds, with all of their coloring and detail, could have arose simply by eliminating recessive traits and adapting to meet survival needs over millions of years. There must have been an idea or spiritual change from somewhere that influenced the change, either from a higher power, such as a God, the collective conscience of all souls, or both.

Last edited by Mike1 on 04 Aug 2012, 12:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I would have a lot more respect for people who deny the fact evolution happens if they would say they do so because of their faith and in spite of the overwhelming physical evidence against their belief. I lose respect for them when they spread falsehoods that are easily shown to be falsehoods with just a few seconds research. Most people who argue against evolution are badly misinformed about this subject and are sincerely ignorant of the vast amounts of evidence of many different types that all produce the same tree of life.

I agree with Dawkins when he said "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." This does cover all the bases so far as I can tell. Undoubtedly most people against evolution are merely ignorant about this subject (even if they think they are not), mainly because they trust sources that are lying to them. Some may be too stupid to understand what science is and how it works. Some may be bat-shit crazy. Some, and I especially suspect some of those who make money peddling anti-evolution BS, may be wicked.

I am flabbergasted that so many people (especially in one of the leading supposedly-educated countries of the world like the USA) can be so ignorant about something that has so much evidence clearly showing it happens. It is just as stupid as saying gravity doesn't happen.

Darwin suggested that we are transformed apes.
The Bible says we are transformed mud.

Exactly why is the former more "disgusting" than the latter?

Actually they both agree on the mud part- Darwin just stretched the time span out and put in some intermediated steps between mud and man that included a simian stage.

He's right, it makes more sense that we just popped into existence at the whim of a bearded sky god. The overwhelming evidence against this was all just placed there by Him to test our faith