Science & Religion

[buffalo]

Which tells me nothing, unless you can give me the “likeness of God”. Does God have two arms? Humans have two arms, but so do Chimpanzees. Are God’s arms hairy? Chimp arms are hairier than human arms, but male humans generally have hairier arms than female humans. Where do we draw the line?

Or perhaps the “likeness of God” is not physical at all, in which case it is of no use in evaluating fossils or the physical evolution of the human body.

rossum

For the sake of argument let’s drop the image and likeness part for now.

 

[Lui]

As I posted previously, no evidence of Peter Pan’s non-existence only means that there is the possibility that he existed.

Fortunately, science does not have to deal with Peter Pan.

I know. I just mention it as an example to the logic: science can’t prove that Adam and Eve didn’t exist.
My point is: so what if science can’t prove if Adam and Eve never existed? They also can’t prove that Bozo the Clown, Willy Wonka or Tinkerbell didn’t exist. What does that prove?

Please note that the possibility of Adam and Eve’s existence is all that is needed for true belief.

Fair enough. THAT I can accept.

 

[buffalo]

Here comes my Peter Pan theory again. There is no evidence that he never existed, so that means he must have existed.
I bet if Neverland was in the Bible Buffalo could cough up a perfect map that proves its location

That’s not the way it works. There is history about Adam.

Yep - I could. ( you do know that a bunch of places that doubters just a few years ago said were fictional have been uncovered?) Archaeology has been backing the Bible with each and every discovery.

 

[buffalo]

Why do humans even have body hair remains? It doesn’t serve any purpose unless it is the remains of our ancestors who had a fur. Did God have to create Adam with body hair, toe nails(for what are they good?) and other features that are similar to primates? We even have the same body language as chimpanzees. Must be a coincidence then…

Oh boy - here we go again. Goose bumps too. Until we recently discovered they are useful today. Hair is an adaptation. Did you know the bodies reaction to sunburn is to grow more hair to prevent more damage?

 

[buffalo]

Being in the “image of God” refers to the fact that human nature in itself is an unique unification of both the material and spiritual worlds. Because of our spiritual souls, we can share in the life of a transcendent, pure spirit, personal God.

I knew you would pick that up.

 

[grannymh]

Evidence of impossibility is evidence of absence. It is impossible that the human population has fallen as low as two individuals since our separation from our LCA with the chimpanzees.

rossum

Having read the research, the evidence is limited to what is available and the methods in use. The evidence itself is not capable of giving an account of what every species was doing every day, everywhere, going backwards. Thus, the possibility of Adam and Eve does exist. It is perfectly acceptable if you call this possibility improbable. Even highly improbable does not negate the possibility.

This does not imply that the science research is wrong. What is being said is that the valid results are limited. This means that the limited evidence and the limited valid conclusions cannot jump to an universal conclusion which excludes the possibility of two founders of humanity.

 

[rossum]

According to most evo’s nothing is impossible for evolution.

You are being mislead by creationist websites. There are plenty of things that are impossible for evolution, starting with those noted by Charles Darwin in 1859:
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection.

• both from Chapter Six of Origins.
  The first of these was the trigger for Professor Behe’s work on Irreducible Complexity. A valiant, though failed, attempt to meet Darwin’s challenge.

Another assumption. It is speculated that chimps and humans split. I do not agree we had any separation from the chimps and more science is coming in to back my position. Chimp vs human similarity is now below 70%.

There are many different ways to measure similarity, and the 70% figure applies to a small part of the two genomes. Measuring overall similarity over the entire genomes gives figures in the range 95% to 98%. Again your creationist sources are lying to you. There is no scientific support for YEC so YEC websites have to rely on lies. Why do you trust liars?

rossum

 

[grannymh]

And how do I apply this to a particular fossil I find? We are talking about the physical development of humans, and you are not giving me anything physical I can work with.

rossum

It takes a human being using the tools of reason to work with the “non-material” capabilities which can distinguish good from evil, make free choices, and love beyond reason.

 

[Lui]

Oh boy - here we go again. Goose bumps too. Until we recently discovered they are useful today. Hair is an adaptation. Did you know the bodies reaction to sunburn is to grow more hair to prevent more damage?

Then why do men have much more body hair than women?

Again your creationist sources are lying to you. There is no scientific support for YEC so YEC websites have to rely on lies. Why do you trust liars?

I’m also pretty sure YECs KNOW that all their theories are lies just like a snake oil salesman knows his potion heals nothing.

 

[grannymh]

There are many different ways to measure similarity, and the 70% figure applies to a small part of the two genomes. Measuring overall similarity over the entire genomes gives figures in the range 95% to 98%. Again your creationist sources are lying to you. There is no scientific support for YEC so YEC websites have to rely on lies. Why do you trust liars?

rossum

I personally distrust percentages. It should be obvious that vertebrates would have similar genes. But this (the material side) is as far as science can go in comparing human nature with non-human nature.

 

[grannymh]

In my position as a human being, body and soul, I wish you all a good night and sweet dreams.

 

[Lui]

In my position as a human being, body and soul, I wish you all a good night and sweet dreams.

Isn’t it daytime in the US?

 

[buffalo]

You are being mislead by creationist websites. There are plenty of things that are impossible for evolution, starting with those noted by Charles Darwin in 1859:If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection.

• both from Chapter Six of Origins.
  The first of these was the trigger for Professor Behe’s work on Irreducible Complexity. A valiant, though failed, attempt to meet Darwin’s challenge.

There are many different ways to measure similarity, and the 70% figure applies to a small part of the two genomes. Measuring overall similarity over the entire genomes gives figures in the range 95% to 98%. Again your creationist sources are lying to you. There is no scientific support for YEC so YEC websites have to rely on lies. Why do you trust liars?

rossum

Don’t play this card with me. You should know me better than that.

 

[buffalo]

Then why do men have much more body hair than women?

I’m also pretty sure YECs KNOW that all their theories are lies just like a snake oil salesman knows his potion heals nothing.

Did you know that until 1900 or so it was a sing of inferiority for woman to be out in the sun? A very white complexion was desired, not so in out tan crazy world of today.

 

[tonyrey]

             *

A human being is a person, i.e. a rational being who can distinguish good from evil, has self-control and a capacity for unselfish love.

You have unwittingly hit the nail on the head! It is impossible to find out from fossils anything about the precise number of our ancestors but that’s not the real issue. It is an undeniable historical fact that a person must have grasped** for the first time** that what he intended to do was wrong - and went ahead nevertheless**.**

There must have been an **original sin **-unless one denies the reality of good and evil altogether.We can only speculate as to its naturebut it must have beenvery serious, i.e. a mortal sin. Otherwise it would not have occurred to some one who had been amoral until that moment. It was probably an act of murder given the savage environment. It is also probable that the killer was a man but a woman was also involved because they would not have lived alone. At all events there is no doubt whatsoever that the bloodstained record and **guilt **of humanity had a beginning in time and space. That is not a gratuitous theological belief but a rational philsophical conclusion based on inexorable logic…

 

[Lui]

Did you know that until 1900 or so it was a sing of inferiority for woman to be out in the sun? A very white complexion was desired, not so in out tan crazy world of today.

The world is huge. Don’t mistake the culture of a white western society of the 19th Century with the whole world as a universal custom that took place at all places and all times. It was a social custom because upper class white people demonstrated their social status with the whiteness of their skin while a tan was the sign of a person working outside doing physical labor.

On a side note: I noticed that YECs have an answer to any skepticism. The thing is so do all other people who have a belief system. vegans argue that humans are natural vegetarians/vegans. They point at the teeth of humans that are made for vegetarian food and say the hands are made for picking fruit. They also compare the digestive system of carnivores and herbivores as proof.
Followers of the paleo diet do exactly the same. It’s always the same pattern no matter what the belief system is.

 

[ASimon]

ASimon

The assumption would be along the lines of "When there’s nothing to be seen, felt, or in any way tested for, it’s silly to go on presuming that there’s something there regardless.

Once upon a time there was no way to see, feel, or in any way test for the existence of atoms. Must it be a silly presumption then to infer they might exist?

I think the really silly presumption would have been to assume they do not exist.

That is the silly assumption you are making about God.

It would’ve been remarkably silly to presume the existence of atoms before we had any way of knowing they were there. If you had asserted the atom’s existence prior to having ability to test for it, you would’ve been right by accident.

If you want to presuppose the existence of people, places, or things, in the hopes that you’ll one day be proven right by accident, that’s fine with me. But why do you stop with God?

 

[SGWessells]

SGW

and since there is no reason to interpret the passage metaphorically except that modern science makes it absurd to do so, and since the rest of the Bible gives no reason to believe the passage was intended to be unhistorical, I believe the writer of Gen. 1 intended to present the creation account there as literal history****.

A day would be counted as twenty-four hours, from sunrise to sunrise. But the sun was not created until the third “day”. How then could the writer intend the account to be taken literally as twenty-four hour days?

How could there be “morning and evening” without the sun? I didn’t write that nonsense, so I have no obligation to defend it. I think the alternate explanations people have devised to preserve some shreds and tatters of literalism, such as the “gap theory”, the “day - age theory”, and the “progressive creation theory” seriously distort the text and reason. Obviously the writers of Genesis knew hardly anything about the heavens or the earth, or how they came to be. Just the statement alone about day four, “and he made the stars also,” combines abysmal ignorance with unfathomable arrogance, as if all the billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, were made as a kind of hand-waving afterthought to provide Us, the Crown of Creation, on our little backwater planet, with lights in the nighttime.
But let’s say the “days” were not 24 hour periods (although God could measure that exact duration of time without a sun, couldn’t he?). What were the days, then? And why should we care? The order in which Genesis says creatures were made is all wrong anyway; for instance, fish and fowl are millions of years apart in the fossil and genetic record, yet Genesis puts them in the same time period.
The only refuge anyone with any pretensions to rationality has is to call Genesis metaphorical. But that your church forbids you to do. Fortunately, that isn’t my problem any more.

 

[SGWessells]

SGW

**Nevertheless, it is not entirely by chance but by a **rigid absolute orde****r that it occurs.

Did this **rigid absolute order **occur by chance?

You know, if you bothered to read some popular books on evolutionary theory as scientists understand it, such as Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, or Shubin’s Your Inner Fish, you wouldn’t have to ask these questions. But the short answer is that natural selection is a rigid ordered system that exists by the necessity living creatures have to survive and reproduce. It is possible, despite your theology, for order to exist without any supernatural being to do the ordering. Creatures acting from the impulses of their own nature, and adapting to their environment as various unplanned changes dictate, can create the appearance of design and intricate order by themselves, by gradual and incremental improvements. Read Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker for details.
Take the eye, for example. Evolution never said the eye at the human level of complexity came about all at once; that would be silly. It came about by gradual, minute improvements to a primitive light-sensitive cell over millions of years.
What good is a light-sensing cell, you might ask? It’s better than nothing at all, because it allows the creature to sense movement and respond better than a creature without it, thus enhancing its chances for survival. The next improvement might specify the direction of movement and provide another minute but vital advantage; and so on.
Ever heard of a flying squirrel? They don’t have wings, but the membranes between their limbs and torso allow them to escape predators by gliding from one tree to another. So half a wing can be good for something.

 

[StAnastasia]

In other words, in spite of mountains of research papers, there is still the possibility that two, sole, true human beings founded the human species. That possibility is all that is needed for belief.

Sorry Granny, it is not scientifically possible that only two human being stand as the sole source of the human race. If you think this is possible, I encourage you to present your theory to the American Society of Human Genetics for professional evaluation. Otherwise it will remain your private hobby expressed here on Catholic Answers.

StAnastasia