Is Darwin's Theory Of Evolution True? Part Two

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If an atheist rejects that God created the Universe, does that mean the atheist cannot study the Universe? This is like saying that if I don’t think Picasso was real, I cannot analyze a painting made by him.

“Some live, some die - oh well.” I’ve already addressed this with another poster. Things can appear to be chance to us because our powers of understanding are too limited to see why genetic mutation, premature births, etc. are part of God’s plan. But there’s nothing to say that the Creator isn’t directly involved in 100% of all those things.

There is no conflict between the idea of Creation and the idea of adaptation unless you think God is too limited to have His hand in all those gazillion interactions between animals and their environment.
 
benjamin1973 said:
nobody should be surprised that if God is involved in everything, a lot of things appear to be chance-- obviously the Creator of all existence, and all the things He brings about, would be beyond our ability to observe and comprehend.
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Exactly a point I’ve tried to make countless times. No one has sought to refute it.
 
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I’ve read all the same arguments, over and over and over. Science is over there, keep your religious beliefs in your Church buildings and homes, and don’t you dare bring up God. Science is the source of all knowledge, not some collection of alleged holy books written by a bunch of ignorant people. Science will take you by the hand and tell you that everything, from your body to your mind just self-upgraded somehow. A creature is alive because it’s suited to its environment through rolls of the dice.

God forbid.
 
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Evolution doesn’t figure things out. It is simply a description of how large numbers of members of a species change over time due to environmental factors.

Let’s make an easy-to-follow example. Let’s say I, a white guy, marry a black woman, and we move to a hot African country to start a family. Our children will vary in color-- some darker, some lighter. The darker-skinned ones will-- assuming no other differences be healthier than the lighter-skinned ones. They’ll be able to stand in the sun longer, their energy levels will be better, they will have a reduced chance of getting skin cancer, etc.

This is the hard thing to understand. A trait that makes a 1% difference seems to have very little effect in one generation or even several. But over a long enough time, any slight advantage that a trait has in a particular environment will eventually lead to almost all members of the species having that trait. Multiply out enough 1% chances, and you will eventually approach 100%.

(and like I said before. . . “chance” means not calculatable by us people, not necessarily that God doesn’t have a hand in it at every step of the way)
 
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You are still confused by true chance and the appearance of chance due to God’s complexity over us. We do not have the capacity to follow every single living thing, watch all its interactions with its environment, watch it reproduce, figure out which sperm meets which egg, etc. Our only way of dealing with complex interactions is statistical.

But that does not mean that God cannot be in the picture, guiding literally 100% of everything according to a plan. They are not incompatible.
 
Yeah, and she’ll be complaining all the time about how hot it is, and she’ll be grumpy and won’t want to have sex as much. 😃
 
Ender said:
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IWantGod:
Objection noted, but utterly irrelevant. Evolution is being taught everywhere including the catholic educational system. The Pope supports it. You have already lost the war.
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The issue is not with evolution per se, but with its mechanism. The real question is whether it is directed or whether it occurs by blind chance.
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In a sense, that question, as important as it is to our philosophy, is not a proper question for science to try to answer. I have heard the term “apparent design” to counter the ID theory. How about a different term: “apparent randomness?” It can be used to support the philosophical position of intelligent design without necessarily challenging the scientific position of evolution. That is, one can posit, as a purely philosophical premise, that an intelligent force (i.e. God) is actually directing all random events, but doing so in such a way that it appears random to any direct scientific observational effort on our part. This should satisfy everyone.

Even if randomness is totally controlled by God, as long as God is doing so in such a way that it conforms to all scientific expectation of true randomness, for the purposes of science, we might as well go right on formulating theories based on true randomness. All that matters to science is “does it work?” Science should not be concerned with whether the randomness is real or designed to look like blind randomness.

I am reminded of an analogous situation with regard to encryption technology - something I am quite familiar with. A well-designed cipher has the property that the ciphertext has all the appearance of a random sequence. There are no observable patterns of any kind - statistical or otherwise. Unless you have the key. Then the ciphertext becomes meaningful. Think of evolution as God’s excellent cipher and only He has the key for decryption. The only thing I object to in current intelligent design theory is the claim that God’s cipher is not perfect, and ID scientists have discovered patterns that expose God’s hand in what should have been hidden from us. I don’t believe God is that inept.

I do believe God performs miracles that break the laws of nature that He wrote. But when He does it he does it big time. There is no doubt about it. For the most part, it seems that God wants us to experience a world where almost everything works according to fixed patterns - laws of nature we call them.
 
edwest211 said:
Hot places have dark-skinned people? This took, what? A few months or less? Otherwise they would have to cover their bodies until evolution, without intelligence, figures out they need dark skin? If I’m hungry, I need food today, or in a few days, or I die.
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And where’s the fur evolution is supposed to provide for cold Humans ?
 
May I?

“Hi. I’m an atheist and I believe in evolution.”

“Hi. I’m a Christian and know evolution can’t be verified.” Or “I believe in evolution as written in the biolgy textbook which is 100% pure science.”

The difference? Atheist and Christian. God is just a word. He can’t be studied by science. Conclusion, no supernatural force guided anything.
 
Yep. People have clothes, air conditioning and sun screen now, and the white people in SA are rich enough to afford good shelter from the elements.
 
“Satisfy everyone.” Go to the National Academy of Sciences web site and find evolution and religion.
 
edwest211 said:
Hot places have dark-skinned people? This took, what? A few months or less? Otherwise they would have to cover their bodies until evolution, without intelligence, figures out they need dark skin? If I’m hungry, I need food today, or in a few days, or I die.
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The situation you are analyzing - a sudden shift from not much sunshine to lots of sunshine - has never happened. We probably started out with dark skin because that’s where Man first appeared - in the sunny places. Then as man spread into northern Europe, etc. he began loosing the need for such dark skin, and so the skin became light. But if you took a family of Eskimos today and transplanted them to the jungles of Kenya, they could not go around with their skin exposed like the natives. They would suffer medical problems for generations. They would not become naturally dark skinned at birth like the natives for a long long time. The sunburn they would get would not the be same as a native dark skin.
 
Red herring = logic fail.

I never said any of the things you just said, and I haven’t argued either side of the thing you just argued. In fact, I’ve specifically said that there’s plenty of room for God in evolution.

Not only that, I could give you a few other scientific areas which I think support a belief in God. I don’t want to be insulting, but I get the sense that you’ve avoided learning about evolution, and that this is hurting your ability to argue against it.

My position is this: the Bible, however perfect it is, cannot cover all the details of the Universe. It’s a fairly short book, and the Universe has a lot of things in it to learn about. If God created everything, then learning more means understanding more about what God has created, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But refusing to learn more is to reject at least some of the Truth of creation, and it seems to me that a devout Catholic or Christian should never want to do that.
 
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The Dark ages were called that because there is not much written that we have.
 
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