Book: The Hoax Called Evolution

[edwest2]

Of course! I assume God wills the universe and the appearance of morally sensitive and spiritually responsive life. I don’t *know *it, but I believe it.

Thanks. This further proves that there are two separate realities for some. John 3:12 "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?
3:13 “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man.”

This is however, consistent with the Carl Sagan saying: “I don’t want to believe. I want to know!”

It is also consistent with the Stephen Gould saying that if evolution could be rewound, things would have turned out differently. Sure, different (name removed by moderator)uts, different outputs.

It denies the physical Christ who was not believed by the people sitting across from Him. The Bible tells us faith is evidence, but this is also denied.

So, to summarize:

Belief is not knowing.

Science is knowing to a point, but believing nothing.

No wonder atheists are happy about the current state of affairs.

Peace,
Ed

 

[ricmat]

Those are your words, not mine.

So then you believe that God constituted the world with elements of design in it?

If you don’t like those exact words, please clarify it so we can all understand.

 

[ricmat]

It may well be both for them. It will be interesting to see whether the ID movement ever discovers the design for which it has been searching. Michael Behe’s colleagues at Lehigh are not too sure.

But then, as you say, science marches on. It is provisional. So it’s good for them to be open minded.

 

[edwest2]

I merely expressed the hope that he did so. I suppose what is coming to the surface is my distrust of a highly centralised organisation, with the world’s last absolute monarch at its head.

I understand why you would think that. It seems what is forgotten is that Christianity appeared, to a lot people, as a very iffy proposition in the beginning. A number of Christians were killed. Instead, the Church of today is looked at as this monarchy or corporation. Believe me, over the last 40 years, I watched as too many of my fellow Catholics gradually began to fall into lockstep with the secular world, to the point where the two are indistinguishable. One priest on Catholic Radio said that too many Catholics are living as Agnostics.

I assure you. If you miss Mass, no one is at your door the next day to scold you. In the Catholic Church, there is no minimum contribution. If a parish closes down, it closes down. There are no government bailouts. The Church is not too big to fail. It cannot fail.

I am far more concerned about a highly centralized media controlled by a handful of very wealthy people. People who literally get to decide what is news and what isn’t. I am concerned about people, in general, who have access to a powerful information storage device but refuse to use it, preferring instead to be spoon fed, or saying, “Dude. I’d look it up for ya but I’m just too lazy to do it.”

Peace,
Ed

 

[Thorsson]

I am confused by the argument put forth for or against evolution in this forum. Evolution is what you can prove, not what you believe. I love being a Catholic and cannot describe how much I enjoy the discussions, and perhaps most of all - the insights and depth of the discussions, but whenever I hear arguments regarding evolution (pro or con) it seems to equate faith and belief with the scientific method and data acquisition in forming hypothesis to explain the data. Thats where it falls apart, IMO. Its like two languages being spoken at each other not to understand but to talk at each other…or any tv ‘news’ show. Evolution has proven itself time and time again. You can reproduce the concepts to generate new organisms. Sloppy PCR using manganese rather than magnesium can generate mutants - then all you have to do is provide a selective environment. But evolution explains the physical presence, and not the Godly existence of the soul. We are both the animal and the angelic - the two providing us with the ability to exist in this world and transcend to heaven. Im not trying to oversimplify, but it seems we have disconnect that isnt real, but contrived by politicians and unscrupulous religious leaders for some type of gain. Help me out here…

 

[StAnastasia]

But then, as you say, science marches on. It is provisional. So it’s good for them to be open minded.

Yes, scientific knowledge is provisional. There is no hurry to find evidence of design – we have waited thousands of years, and a few more years or decades won’t hurt. And I doubt it will hurt if we never identify design.

StAnastasia

 

[StAnastasia]

So then you believe that God constituted the world with elements of design in it?

The fine-tuning cosmological arguments are very intriguing. However, I don’t believe chambered nautilus shells and bees’ honey combs and serrated leaves and bilateral symmetry bear indelible divine fingerprints. I believed God allows creation to unfold without periodic course corrections.

StAnastasia

 

[ricmat]

Those are your words, not mine.

The fine-tuning cosmological arguments are very intriguing. However, I don’t believe chambered nautilus shells and bees’ honey combs and serrated leaves and bilateral symmetry bear indelible divine fingerprints. I believed God allows creation to unfold without periodic course corrections.

StAnastasia

Like Mozart or Beethoven composed their music, and then didn’t actually conduct the orchestras which played it?

 

[mathematician]

I am confused by the argument put forth for or against evolution in this forum. Evolution is what you can prove, not what you believe. I love being a Catholic and cannot describe how much I enjoy the discussions, and perhaps most of all - the insights and depth of the discussions, but whenever I hear arguments regarding evolution (pro or con) it seems to equate faith and belief with the scientific method and data acquisition in forming hypothesis to explain the data.

My impression is that the problem arises when creationists take somebody like Richard Dawkins as their ultimate authority on evolution. From him they get not just a theory, but the atheist spin which he and his ilk put upon it. Creationists take the spin to be part of the theory, and the result is… why everybody who signs up to evolution is an atheist, of course.

It might help if it was occasionally pointed out that, contrary to Dawkins, Darwin himself explicitly said that his theory was not incompatible with Christianity.

 

[mathematician]

Given the legend, grown up around an article written by a hack journalist in the late nineteenth century, it might come as quite a surprise to some to discover who wrote the following comment upon the Origin of the Species:

The essay is full of Mr. Darwin’s characteristic excellences, It is a most readable book; full of facts in natural history, old and new, of his collecting and of his observing; and all of these are told in his own perspicuous language, and all thrown into picturesque combinations, and all sparkle with the colours of fancy and the lights of imagination. It assumes, too, the grave proportions of a sustained argument upon a matter of the deepest interest, not to naturalists only, or even to men of science exclusively, but to every one who is interested in the history of man and of the relations of nature around him to the history and plan of creation.

 

[ricmat]

I am confused by the argument put forth for or against evolution in this forum. Evolution is what you can prove, not what you believe. I love being a Catholic and cannot describe how much I enjoy the discussions, and perhaps most of all - the insights and depth of the discussions, but whenever I hear arguments regarding evolution (pro or con) it seems to equate faith and belief with the scientific method and data acquisition in forming hypothesis to explain the data. Thats where it falls apart, IMO. Its like two languages being spoken at each other not to understand but to talk at each other…or any tv ‘news’ show. Evolution has proven itself time and time again. You can reproduce the concepts to generate new organisms. Sloppy PCR using manganese rather than magnesium can generate mutants - then all you have to do is provide a selective environment. But evolution explains the physical presence, and not the Godly existence of the soul. We are both the animal and the angelic - the two providing us with the ability to exist in this world and transcend to heaven. Im not trying to oversimplify, but it seems we have disconnect that isnt real, but contrived by politicians and unscrupulous religious leaders for some type of gain. Help me out here…

Help you out here… OK.

You could start by reading this article.

And then this FAQ.

Before you know that ID is wrong, you should know what ID is.

 

[mathematician]

Conclusion: Irreducibly complex systems would be unlikely to evolve through a Darwinian process because there exists no evolutionary pathway wherein they could remain functional during each small evolutionary step.16 IC is a reliable indicator of design because “n all irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering played a role the origin of the system.”17 When ID researchers find IC in biology, they conclude that such structures were
designed.

The problem there is that they have yet to come up with an example of irreducible complexity which anybody outside of the ID community believes to be irreducibly complex. If they could do that, it goes without saying that it would be very bad news for people like Richard Dawkins, but there is no reason why Kenneth Miller, Francisco Ayala et al, should dismiss their claims as fallacious if they really did stand up to scrutiny.

Why are their claims dismissed as faith based? Precisely because of their undue readines to see “irreducible complexity” where nobody else can see it.

 

[rossum]

The problem there is that they have yet to come up with an example of irreducible complexity which anybody outside of the ID community believes to be irreducibly complex. If they could do that, it goes without saying that it would be very bad news for people like Richard Dawkins, but there is no reason why Kenneth Miller, Francisco Ayala et al, should dismiss their claims as fallacious if they really did stand up to scrutiny.

Their problem is slightly more complex than that. If Irreducible Complexity means “take away a part and it stops working” then there are many good examples of such systems, and known mechanisms by which they can evolve. In a few cases we even have the genetic changes that gave rise to those IC systems. While Behe is correct to say that IC systems cannot evolve by direct means, he is incorrect to say that they cannot evolve by indirect means. See Thornhill and Ussery (2000) “A Classification of Possible Routes of Darwinian Evolution” for more details on the possible indirect routes.A classification of four possible routes of Darwinian evolution is presented. These are serial direct evolution, parallel direct evolution, elimination of functional redundancy, and adoption from a different function. This classification provides a conceptual framework within which to investigate the accessibility by Darwinian evolution of complex biological structures.

If Irreducible Complexity means “something that cannot evolve”, then we have indeed found no such example in any living organism.

rossum

 

[buffalo]

But then, as you say, science marches on. It is provisional. So it’s good for them to be open minded.

But by sciences own definition they cannot be. It is a trap to be sure.

 

[buffalo]

Nobody is saying that God “could not” have so constituted the world so that bacterial flagellae evolve. The question at hand is “How did God so constitute the world so that we have bacterial flagellae?”

And you assume that “constitute” has no element of “design” in it. Why are you limiting God to (apparently) being unable to do (or unwilling to participate in) design?

Sure He could have, but then He sure could have been more clear in His Revelation. He could have Revealed more clearly that evolution was His way. He didn’t.

So we have a conundrum - Why Reveal and let us believe for so many years one thing only to overturn it. It does not make any sense. God cannot deceive.

 

[mathematician]

So we have a conundrum - Why Reveal and let us believe for so many years one thing only to overturn it. It does not make any sense. God cannot deceive.

Because:

a.) The Bible is there to reveal religious truths, not scientific truths.

b.) Because there wouldn’t have been much point in trying to deliver lectures on Quantum Theory, General Relativity or Biology to people living in the 10th century BC.

 

[mathematician]

But by sciences own definition they cannot be. It is a trap to be sure.

Exactly how do you work that out? A good way to become closed minded is to suppose that you have a source of infallible truth close to hand, but that is not the position of the physical sciences. If it was we would still be holding to the one time scientific orthodoxy that the sun orbits the earth.

You mean that scientists can’t be open to the possibility of the miraculous? As private individuals they can. As scientists they can’t. They can’t because the job of the PHYSICAL sciences is precisely to look for PHYSICAL explanations.

 

[buffalo]

Because:

a.) The Bible is there to reveal religious truths, not scientific truths.

b.) Because there wouldn’t have been much point in trying to deliver lectures on Quantum Theory, General Relativity or Biology to people living in the 10th century BC.

My point - where does it say that in the Bible? And exactly what year and what encyclical spells out that the Bible is limited to religious truths?

 

[buffalo]

More Berlinski on evolution David Berlinski Uncensored

 

[mathematician]

My point - where does it say that in the Bible? And exactly what year and what encyclical spells out that the Bible is limited to religious truths?

Well, I am an Anglican, but unless I am very much mistaken, the official position of the Catholic Church is that the Bible is infallible in matters of faith and morals. (Not science - not least because that is demonstrably not the case.)