Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part 4.0

[ratio1]

If you really think that there is something wrong with the conclusions drawn by scientists-- not because of your world view but because they are not doing science right, then that’s a different issue entirely.

but that’s the problem with evolutionists. they accept it as fact when in reality it is really very poor science or not even science at all. but just because the alternative is intelligent design, they would rather accept something as ludicrous as evolution as a fact. Their mistake is that they forgot the a priori assumption of science that there is no divine intervention.

as I mentioned the analogy before, just because I can’t think of a better way to argue against bloodletting as a cure for diseases does NOT mean it is wrong to question the validity of bloodletting.

 

[Glark]

Glark, who equates his personal conviction with Catholic dogma, declares infallibly that miracles are by definition irrational, but I disagree with him.

If miracles were rational, they’re wouldn’t be miracles. It’s not rocket science.

 

[ratio1]

I’m not a champion of science as opposed to the God idea. I see learning about the Universe, at least for Christians, as an avid and sincere study of the mind and will of God. Refusing to accept evidence, or the conclusions of the best minds when presented with it, is to me tantamount to blasphemy.

I suppose as a Christian you believe in a soul.
but if a scientist comes along and says there is no soul because he has dissected the human brain and found neurons but cannot find a soul, and then he says this is now a scientific fact you must believe in. what scientific evidence do you have to prove there is a soul? Aren’t you just as crazy as creationists?

 

[Techno2000]

Everything is interconnected in a complex ecosystem that supports life.The big eat the small, the theory of evolution has got it backwards…the small eat what ?

 

[benjamin1973]

We don’t even need to go to soul. We can stop at mind, specifically our ability to subjectively experience the world. Not only do scientists not have a compelling theory of mind, there is not even any ability to physically determine whether any given structure, including the brain, HAS a mind.

This is the “hard problem of consciousness,” and it is a very uncomfortable issue for a physical monist world view.

 

[Glark]

I’m certain that given a whole world of warm watery places and a couple of million years, such an organism is not only possible, but inevitable.

So now you’re claiming God wasn’t needed to begin life! Are you sure you’re Catholic? What is the name of the priest who baptised you and in which parish did this occur?

Anyone who believes life can arise naturally from inanimate matter is a either a scientific ignoramus or a irrational dreamer. Francis Crick estimated that the probability of even one protein forming by chance is one in 10^260 - well beyond Borel’s Law of Mathematical Impossibility - one in 10^50. So the chance of an entire organism arising by chance is effectively zero.

 

[Glark]

I believe in all the Biblical miracles

This is a blatant falsehood; you’re not being honest and you’re not fooling anyone. Do you believe God miraculously halted the flow of the Jordan River in the book of Joshua? No. Do you believe God miraculously parted the Red Sea in the book of Exodus? No. Do you believe n Noah’s Flood. No. Do you believe Jesus feed thousand with a few fish and loaves of bread? No. And there are umpteen other Biblical miracles that you deny.

Your belief is, almost all the miracles described in the Bible weren’t miracles at all, but have rational and natural explanations. They are recorded as “miracles” only because the writers doing the recording were primitive, scientifically-ignorant and superstitious. Or other miracles are simply fabricated lies.

In effect, you oppose not only the Church’s teaching on the divinely inspired nature and thus inerrancy of the entirety of Scripture, but the testimony of the Bible’s author - God Himself.

The late Paula Haigh, bless her, was not a theologian of any kind, by education, qualification, or experience. She was a librarian

Einstein was a patents clerk and the first Pope was a fisherman.

believe everything I say is either supported by, or at least not incompatible with, the orthodox teaching of the Catholic Church.

Are you familair with the word “delusional”?

By claiming that various popes are “barking up the wrong tree”, you (unwittingly no doubt) imply a contempt for the Catholic Church

It is a fact that Popes are not infallible in matters of science. To state as much hardly implies “contempt for the Catholic Church”.

Furthermore, it is only a matter of time before genetics proves that microbe-man evolution is impossible. And when it does, it will become apparent that those Popes who believed in said evolution had well and truly barked up the wrong “tree of life”.

 

[Glark]

You keep saying that. But in order for you to say that, you have to ignore the millions of pages of contributions available with a simple google search, the many thousands of pages of published articles with interesting finds, the developments in dating techniques which help us understand the world better

Do you realize that what you mean by “understanding” here is mostly a bunch of theories that can’t be test and verified? In other words, they’re just empty talk … followed by more empty talk.

To me, scientific understanding means one thing - the discovery of facts, which are established by observation and experiment. Surely you have the intelligence to appreciate the difference between demonstrable facts and unverified theories, and also their respective worth.

 

[ratio1]

Furthermore, it is only a matter of time before genetics proves that microbe-man evolution is impossible.

I can’t wait.
I’m really getting sick of being told to believing in crazy ideas as if it’s a scientific fact.
In the past it is bloodletting, then we get evolution. And now we are getting things like gender fluidity ideas forcing down our throats.

 

[Glark]

I can’t wait. I’m really getting sick of being told to believing in crazy ideas as if it’s a scientific fact.
In the past it is bloodletting, then we get evolution. And now we are getting things like gender fluidity ideas forcing down our throats.

The truth will set us free.

 

[ratio1]

The other general issue I’ve noticed about evolutionists is that they seem to think all the answers must lie in science. They just can’t accept that there may be areas in life where science just cannot know the answer.
This belief in science …is as dogmatic as a religion.

God has already shown has science has its limits.
On the large scale: humans look to the sky, then we discover solar system, then we discovered galaxy, then we discovered the universe. But then we cannot know what’s outside the universe. We also cannot know what’s inside a black hole.
The parallel can be seen on the small scale:
First we thought atoms were the building blocks. Then we discovered protons and neutrons. Then we discovered quarks. And then maybe gluons etc. surely it would stop somewhere where our instruments simply cannot measure such a small scale. Like the black hole there are also things like uncertainty principle where one cannot know everything.
God has already given us lots of hints that whilst science is useful, it does not contain all the answers.
With this in mind, as Christians we can believe in sound science. But when it comes to voodoo science, we can say no and not have it thrust down our throats.

 

[ratio1]

The other problem that evolutionists forget is that science is based on observable facts. What is not observed therefore is not science.
We all know that God sometimes can be observed but sometimes he cannot be observed.
To suggest like @Hugh_Farey that God likes to work through “rational” means is limiting God to the observable sphere. I’d like to contend that observable data is infinitely smaller than unobservable data.
The analogy is like rational numbers vs irrational numbers. For those who study math you would know that the set of infinite irrational numbers are larger than the set of infinite rational numbers. So much so that rational numbers fill up virtually no space at all on the number line. Another hint from God as to how we think about natural events.

 

[benjamin1973]

“Testing” means collecting more information, with controls in place to make sure that your observations are valid in the context of your theory.

For example, evolution relies heavily on dating methods. To show evolution, you need to know the order in which this or that organism appeared in the Earth. If you can’t establish chronological order, you only know that the animals are related in features, but not which evolved out of the other.

So in the context of evolution, testing doesn’t mean having a bunch of living animals and watching them reproduce and die over a million generations. It means that you make predictions about what types of fossils you expect to find in dig sites of rock of a certain age, for example. Or you might say, “I bet if we go through the old fossils samples, we will find feature X, which we now know is a precursor to feathers.”

 

[ratio1]

I bet if we go through the old fossils samples, we will find feature X, which we now know is a precursor to feather

Notice you use the word bet.
I don’t have a problem with people betting a theory. What I find astounding is that this is accepted as fact and anyone who bets otherwise is ridiculed.

 

[benjamin1973]

You are putting together this scenario in a pretty strange way. Nobody requires that a hunch about what you will find in the field or upon re-examining old samples be “accepted as fact.”

For example, let’s say that I’ve often found fossils in old tar pits near mountains of a certain age. Then I find a new mountain of that age, and say, “I be there’s a tar pit under there somewhere!” That’s a theory, and it is tested by going to the site and searching for a tar pit. It doesn’t require me to make a tar pit and a mountain in a laboratory.

 

[rossum]

Do you really believe this planet was without any birds for 20 million years ?

No I do not. The earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Birds evolved about 150 million years ago. That means that this planet was without birds for 4.35 billion years. That is a lot longer than a mere 20 million years.

Those numbers will change a little if you count pterosaurs as ‘birds’ since they evolved before birds.

rossum

 

[rossum]

The platypus must be a transitional too.

It is. It is a transitional between egg-laying ancestors and other mammals which bear live young. You do know that platypus (and echidna) are mammals which lay eggs?

rossum

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Some good, some bad, and, thankfully, not too much ugly!

From eight hours ago…

edwest211: at last something susceptible to sensible comment. I think you’re correct that publications supporting evolution do often use words like “must have” and “most likely”, when “must” implies irrefutable proof and “most likely” implies a calculation based on it. This does bother creationists, and to a certain extent I sympathise with them. There are reasons for it; in scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals it is a kind of shorthand, as the premises upon which most of the readers work, even if they know they are only hypotheses, are taken as fact. People who discuss Star Wars or the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter adopt a similar shorthand, and it would be foolish of me to wade into a discussion forum about the off-side rule in Quidditch by complaining that it was all made up.

More reprehensible, perhaps, are some of the more popular books on evolution, especially those which reality do have an atheist agenda, and regard all creationists as stupid. In such a forum (including this one), then the metaphysical fringes of science are explored, and we should all be very careful about making dogmatic remarks about indisputable scientific fact without bearing in mind that other interpretations are logically possible. However, a quick glance at the last fifty or so posts will show that, if this thread can be taken as typical, “dogmatic science” is by a long way more a feature of creationism than of evolutionism.

Some will jump in to say that creationism does not have to be defended by science, and is a dogma, and I agree with them. However, creationists very rarely defend their beliefs by any positive statements about creationism, they mostly spend their time making negative statements about evolution, and for that, they too ought to avoid the kind of "“must have” and “most likely” statements that edwest211 so deplores.

 

[ratio1]

Let’s look at examples of how scientific theories is usually treated in other areas:
(i could pick many examples, but let’s start with these two)

1. who wrote the dead sea scrolls?
   most scholars accept the qumran community are the essenes. this is the most popular theory. now there are evidences which suggest it’s not that simple. so another theory is that the qumran community is only a sub sect of essenes. Now people who believe this are not ridiculed, as the cannot be disproved with evidence. Now some suggests the qumran community was a christian sect, now this can be ridiculed as there are firm evidences that suggest otherwise.
2. Trickle down economics
   right wing governments believe in trickle down economics but there is actually some evidence against this. No one talks about trickle up economics, but that is just as logical. now no one can claim either of these theories as facts as economists cannot disprove with a randomised controlled trial. No one is ridiculed for believing in any of these thoeries, because they are just theories. You cannot prove or disprove as a scientific fact.

BUT when it comes to evolution, common sense just goes out the door.
The evidence for evolution does not definitely prove it. they are probably less strong than the evidences for the two theories above. you cannot disprove intelligent design scientifically. Yet one has to believe evolution to be a scientific fact, otherwise you are branded as some pre-historic low life. This, again, i find astounding.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Glark:

I can see you’re trying to keep it light, so well done. We obviously differ about the definition of miracles, so it would be wrong of me to argue against you using my definition. So I won’t. I will say that I believe God behaves rationally, and that such a belief, as I demonstrated, is fundamental to Catholic theology.

You were, of course, quite wrong to suppose that my certainty that life was an inevitable result of chemical coincidence was “claiming God wasn’t needed to begin life.” In fact, it was exactly the opposite. An atheist could not have used the word ‘inevitable’; he could only say ‘highly probable’. I say, ‘inevitable’.

You have, again (!), selectively quoted from a convinced evolutionist in a cynical attempt to show that evolutionists don’t believe in evolution. Oh, well, never mind. Feel free. A more honest approach would be to find out why, as a convinced evolutionist, he said it; but that’s never been the creationist way.

Einstein was indeed a Patent Office clerk for a while, but his science was based on his education, qualification and experience. He was a highly qualified mathematician before he became a Patent Office clerk, and afterwards spent the rest of his life in senior positions in the science and mathematics departments of universities. The late Paula Haigh was not a theologian of any kind, by education, qualification, or experience… She was a disciple of Duane Gish and convinced of her own version of a literal interpretation of the bible, including a literal six-day creation period and a geocentric solar system. There is no sense in which the word theologian can apply to her.

It is indeed a fact that Popes are not infallible in matters of science. That’s why I don’t feel too guilty about not agreeing with Humani generis in all its details. However, a cursory dismissal as “barking up the wrong tree” is, in my opinion, an over-contemptuous disparagement.

“It is only a matter of time before genetics proves that microbe-man evolution is impossible.” Splendid. I very much look forward to being proved wrong.

“To me, scientific understanding means one thing - the discovery of facts, which are established by observation and experiment.” Ah! To you! Well, that explains it. To scientists, scientific understanding means something completely different.