inconsistent Creationists

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Only if the individual is completely ignorant to science and its methodologies. There is no evidence for creationism, simply put. It is not a science or a legitimate field of study, it is a weak religious/political ploy to gain more power over the minds of people whose interest in religion is waning. Every scientific theory struggled through peer review and research and experiment to become accepted and taught. Creationists want us to take their word for it without regards to any methodology. Why do you guys deserve special treatment in the face of the scrutiny that all legitimate sciences undergo? Creationism deserves nothing but the highest contempt

Darwin said no such thing. Apes and man have common biological ancestors.

Darwin claimed all living things on Earth now came by way of descent with modification from prior life forms and life started out from one or at most a few primordial life forms. Read the last two paragraph of -Origin of Species-.

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

ruveyn

He implied that humans and and living apes have a common ancestor- which was an APE- a non-human primate. A "simian" - in the words of General Pickett. Same difference.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McxGZyBBXMY[/youtube]this is what happens when a creationists tries to teach people at a museum! epic fail I am sorry first off Dinosaurs that had sharp teeth ate meat they were sharp for a purpose furthermore animals with sharp teeth eat meat. Anoither thing the earth being only 6000-10000 years old? I am sorry they have proven it is a lot older than that. Sorry I couldnt help myself I am a geology major. Religion and science clearly do not mix!

What I am pointing out is that this particular creationist ministry claims to accept certain facts of nature because of the "preponderance of evidence" (their own words), but they don't accept evolution as the fact it is in spite of just as much a preponderance of evidence as exists for gravity or inertia. I also point out that their concept of scientific law seems colored by their view of a lawmaker sitting on a throne making up rules for the universe to follow, and that this world view is also probably why they say they "believe" in gravity instead of saying they "accept" gravity as a law of nature.

As for the creationist being right in this case (about Unitarian Universalism), that too is debatable although for that argument I don't have tons of evidence of many different types as I do for evolution. That evidence for evolution does pertain indirectly though. Put yourself in my shoes for a moment. Imagine you have studied this subject intensely for decades and KNOW, absolutely KNOW, that the creationist web sites are full of distortions of the truth and out and out falsehoods, in addition to their ignoring some of the most significant evidence for evolution, asking silly questions, and quoting people out of context in a blatantly dishonest way to misrepresent their meaning. Since I KNOW they are so very very wrong about something like evolution that has so much physical evidence of so many different types clearly showing they are wrong, how can I possibly trust their opinion on spiritual matters not so easily checked?

Would you trust the opinion of someone on any subject if that person insisted the earth is flat in spite of all evidence to the contrary? That is exactly how ridiculous and stupid this "controversy" is. Creationists may be right on some other subjects besides evolution, but since they are so very wrong about evolution it damages their credibility tremendously at least for me. Since I know they are spreading falsehoods (whether or not they do so deliberately I cannot say), they are at the very least ignorant, possibly stupid, insane, or wicked (or possibly some combination of the above). They are NOT reliable sources on any subject so far as I am concerned. This is exactly what Augustine warned about in 415 A.D.

Please note that my criticism is not aimed at Christianity in general, but at Young Earth Creationists as represented by the fundamentalist evangelical denominations here in the USA. I'm not saying they are wrong either, but if they are right then God must be a malicious prankster to plant so much false evidence that says otherwise. What I do say is that, in spite of what the YECs claim, all the evidence found so far, all of it, supports evolution. None of the evidence found so far, NONE, supports the YEC viewpoint. No evidence yet found, NONE, falsifies evolution. Some YEC ideas (those that are testable) have been falsified.

It is incredible how one-sided this argument is. ALL the evidence on one side, NONE on the other, yet half the adults in the USA doubt evolution because of the LIES they have been told. Frankly, it pisses me off. I love truth and hate dishonesty. I don't think it's right the YECs keep trying to spread their lies to everybody else's children and destroy the science education of American schoolchildren. If they get their way, it could be disastrous for our country, our species, and our planet. The funny thing is that so many of these hardcore fundie Christians claim to also be patriots and claim to love the USA, when without realizing it they are doing their country great harm and certainly bringing no honor to Christ.

Apes (as they are now) and humans have a common ancestor.

The common ancestor of all living things on earth was a single celled living being which emerged from a watery chemical mix 4 billion years ago. The stromatelytes are fossil remains of such one celled archea as give rise to all life on this planet.

ruveyn

Im proud of you for getting through kindergarten and grasping all of that!
And Im proud of you for being able to parrot back the very point I just made.
So go run along and play now so I and the big people can go back to talking grown up talk.

If that was the point you made, you made it poorly.

ruveyn

ruveyn, naturalplastic, you're both on the side of sanity at least even if quibbling over nomenclature.

If we were talking about any other type of animal, human beings would most likely not have a separate genus but would instead probably be classified as a third species of chimpanzee. We share a common ancestor (that was also an ape) with the other living great apes (Chimps, Gorillas, Orangutans) as well as with the extinct hominid species (also apes) who were ancestral to our species and with their extinct cousins (not direct ancestors but who were also apes). Of course if you go back far enough we share a common ancestor with more distantly related species. Go back far enough and your ancestor was a fish! I love that they found Tiktaalik, a fish with legs just like those Darwin fish you see on some atheists' cars. Note, accepting evolution doesn't automatically make one an atheist, but yeah, once you see certain denominations of Christianity or Islam are out of touch with reality, it is more difficult to trust them about anything.

There is abundant fossil evidence of this with more being found time to time, but even if there were no fossils at all there is still way more than sufficient evidence of other types to show this is so. The genetic evidence of nested hierarchies is especially compelling here. For examples, the patterns of endogenous retroviruses and pseudogenes found in the DNA of related species are things most creationists have never heard about. My favorite evidence though from the past couple decades is the discovery that two ape chromosomes fused together end to end to form human chromosome 2. That is practically a smoking gun showing common ancestry with chimps and other great apes. I bet most people who quote Michael Behe, the "star" of intelligent design, as an authority against evolution are unaware he admits that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor and the earth is billions of years old.

I have a new USB microphone and a USB guitar cable that has a computer chip built into the guitar plug. I hope to soon re-record my Evolution song for a higher-quality recording that will hopefully get some airplay somewhere sometime. I would love to see a video made for this song with scientists in lab coats, monkeys swinging, Bible thumpers, etc., but I will need someone else who already knows how to do that to do it. I don't know and may not have time to learn all the necessary graphics, animation and promotion skills to make the video myself, but it may come down to my doing what I can if nobody else does it.

"Poorly" for the peanut gallery!

My point was mud is just as unglamorous as apes. So whats the difference?

And then I went on to another point - if you go back far enough in time(beyond the apes) you get back to the first cell that was the ancestor of all life. And where did THAT cell come from?
Nonliving terrestrial matter. "Dust" or "mud" if you will. So actually both the bible and evolution start with mud. Darwin's simians (and fish et al) are just intermediated steps- between mud and man- so to speek. A little four billion year long episode of chemical and biological evolution that the bible kinda collapses down to "god fashioned adam and eve out of mud". I was making a joke that all darwin did was to expand that one sentence in Genisis into a recipe book of the blow by blow steps of exactly how god did the fashioning.

Have I connected enough dots for you?

Jeez!

While I agree in principle that it seems life arose from chemicals combining according to their nature in a particular environment, it is important to distinguish abiogenesis (life from non-life) from evolution. Many creationists dismiss evolution because it doesn't answer how life began or how the universe began. They seem to think that unless evolution answers everything, then it answers nothing. This again is probably because of the way religious people think. It is important to make clear that evolution does NOT address the origin of life nor does it address the origin of the universe. I have it on reliable authority though that the answer to that all-inclusive question is "42."

So far as I know, as of now abiogenesis has a long way to go (a very very very VERY long way) before it has explanatory power and supporting evidence like evolution does. There are many competing and perhaps conflicting ideas as to how life first started on earth and, so far at least, life has not yet been created in a lab (but apparently scientists are getting closer and closer all the time). Even if we did create life from scratch, a creationist would just say that is further proof of intelligent design. I am also reminded of the old joke about the contest between a scientist and God to see who could make a better man from dirt. As the scientist reached down to scoop up some dirt in a test tube, God said "Make your own dirt."

For what it's worth........you see natural's last post above mine? I derived all of that, from his very first post on the topic, so at the very least I understood it correctly.

It's also worth noting out that the various hypotheses of abiogenesis involve zero supernatural elements in them.

As soon as I typed "they both start with mud" I knew I was getting into trouble!
I was too tired to add a disclaimer that Darwin starts a little after the mud stage. Pond scum yes, but not actually mud.
Darwin didnt really address the life-from-nonlife question.

Of course not. Much has been learned since Darwin. Specifically DNA and more recently the discovery that RNA (the precursor to DNA) can spontaneously form from an amino acid soup - it is just another (non-supernatural) chemical reaction. At what point you call a bunch of chemicals with the ability to duplicate themselves life is a matter of semantics.

But it is a struggle. The Creationists and the Biblical literalists will never give up. They are like the Black Knight in -Monty Python and the Holy Grail-.

ruveyn

And even without a leg to stand on (metaphorically or literally) they continue, no matter how ridiculous and discredited their quest is.

At that point it is no longer a question of seeking the truth of the matter; they (the creationists) are simply interesting (for whatever reason) in stonewalling and in avoiding facing the facts. Maybe they have built their religious beliefs on a house of cards, the foundation of which is a literal interpretation of biblical creation. Rather than face the collapse of their belief systems they hang on with blind determination to that which is most dear to them despite all the facts to the contrary.