UK bans teaching of creationism in any school which receives public funding

[RACJ]

You’re still confusing evolution and evolutionism. Read any of the papers on the evolution of those features - in each case, they are traced back to an early proto-form. For example: Hearing seems to have originated with swim bladders that were more sensitive to vibrations in the water. Evolution - properly understood - only works with existing organisms. It isn’t a process of creation, it’s a process of change.

“Seems to have” theories should not be presented as fact. Sorry to inform you that I think that the idea of “sensitive swim bladders” evolving (through billions of years) into magnificent human ears capable of distinguishing many thousands of sounds, strains credulity. Blessings, Rob

 

[Kelt]

“Seems to have” theories should not be presented as fact. Sorry to inform you that I think that the idea of “sensitive swim bladders” evolving (through billions of years) into magnificent human ears capable of distinguishing many thousands of sounds, strains credulity. Blessings, Rob

What is your take on the discoveries of DNA, which reveal even more clearly how closely, or not, various species are?
Like I’ve said before, evolution is much more magnificent than just bringing it all down to magic tricks. Do you believe that we all got our different genetic make-ups from one single pair of newly created humans? Because we know what inbreeding does. There would have had to be lots of humans created at the same time - black/white? Evolution sounds more plausible, before you even look at the evidence!

 

[Rau]

Rubbish. I know of no one complaining about studying any of these fields, OR biology, for that matter. But revealing contrary evidence in any of these fields would be a good thing. Rob

You said: “If it can’t be hypothesized, tested and successfully repeated, it ought not be taught in schools as “science”…Rob”

Cosmology is also not testable, nor can it be repeated.

Finding contrary evidence is always good. It is is how science improves.

 

[Rau]

“Seems to have” theories should not be presented as fact. Sorry to inform you that I think that the idea of “sensitive swim bladders” evolving (through billions of years) into magnificent human ears capable of distinguishing many thousands of sounds, strains credulity. Blessings, Rob

The earth revolving around the sun is a fact. Evolution is presented as a theory (supported by copious evidence).

Many things strain incredulity. That a human, including those ears, can develop from a couple of zygotes. You believe that because you can see it. I assume you find it incredulous that so many scientists could give credence to evolution…and yet they do.

 

[Monkey1976]

“Seems to have” theories should not be presented as fact. Sorry to inform you that I think that the idea of “sensitive swim bladders” evolving (through billions of years) into magnificent human ears capable of distinguishing many thousands of sounds, strains credulity. Blessings, Rob

I said “seems to have” because - being soft tissue - we’ll never be able to find evidence of the first instance of a nerve transmitting information about a vibration to the brain and it being interpreted as sound. The swim bladder hypothesis is the most likely to me, because of its physical similarity to the melon organ in cetaceans: A cavity with a significant difference in density to surrounding tissue or bone, creating a discontinuity where vibrations can be more easily detected. The melon is - obviously - more sophisticated than that, as it can be used to focus sound as well, but the principle holds. It’s not that incredible if one thinks about it - most Deaf persons are able to “hear” low-frequency sounds because of the vibrations in their body, or by placing their hands on an instrument.

I would also note that - once again - your assertions rest on an argument from incredulity.

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

Well Kelt, I can’t justify violence against women or homosexuals, period. All I know is that if my neighbor’s killer KNEW that he life would have ended within months if he shot him, I think that most likely there would have been only a robbery. I think that the death penalty is perfectly just.
But what does any of this have to do with origins of life, and the banning of everything that doesn’t fit the “Holy Gospel of Secularism”? Rob

Because your argument against evolution is based on the ills of philosophies that take its ‘logical extensions.’ If this thread is being derailed, it’s only because you keep firing off every schoolyard falsehood against the theory.

You might do Jack Chick proud but I doubt anyone else.

 

[RACJ]

You said: “If it can’t be hypothesized, tested and successfully repeated, it ought not be taught in schools as “science”…Rob”
Cosmology is also not testable, nor can it be repeated.
Finding contrary evidence is always good. It is is how science improves.

Good point about cosmology. In this field as well, though, subjects such as the Big Bang are treated without curiosity. If Big Bang is true, the fact that there is something there from which an “explosion” takes place usually is ignored in the classroom. Do I think that God created the universe via a “Big Bang”? I have no idea. I do predict that by the end of the century, a new theory will quietly replace the Big Bang. Rob

 

[RACJ]

The earth revolving around the sun is a fact. Evolution is presented as a theory (supported by copious evidence).
Many things strain incredulity. That a human, including those ears, can develop from a couple of zygotes. You believe that because you can see it. I assume you find it incredulous that so many scientists could give credence to evolution…and yet they do.

Well, I think it is a conformity and acceptance are common human desires. Few are willing to subject themselves to ridicule by standing apart from the crowd. I believe that a human, including his ears with 18,000 microscopic fibers which transmit sound messages to the brain, is possible only through Intelligent Design. The “blind watchmaker” i.e. nothing, could never accomplish this. I’d sooner believe that Mt. Rushmore resulted from wind and water runoff.

 

[RACJ]

I said “seems to have” because - being soft tissue - we’ll never be able to find evidence of the first instance of a nerve transmitting information about a vibration to the brain and it being interpreted as sound. The swim bladder hypothesis is the most likely to me, because of its physical similarity to the melon organ in cetaceans: A cavity with a significant difference in density to surrounding tissue or bone, creating a discontinuity where vibrations can be more easily detected. The melon is - obviously - more sophisticated than that, as it can be used to focus sound as well, but the principle holds. It’s not that incredible if one thinks about it - most Deaf persons are able to “hear” low-frequency sounds because of the vibrations in their body, or by placing their hands on an instrument.
I would also note that - once again - your assertions rest on an argument from incredulity.

Let’s assume that we COULD find that “first nerve”. That nerve would have to be not only successfully passed down through all succeeding generations, but it would have to have the capacity to create an massive network of other nerves which all work in harmony. And the “first nerve” of hearing presupposes that a brain has already been formed to receive the message and translate it! Rob

 

[RACJ]

Because your argument against evolution is based on the ills of philosophies that take its ‘logical extensions.’ If this thread is being derailed, it’s only because you keep firing off every schoolyard falsehood against the theory.
You might do Jack Chick proud but I doubt anyone else.

My goal in life has always been to make Jack Chick proud! :hypno:

 

[Monkey1976]

Good point about cosmology. In this field as well, though, subjects such as the Big Bang are treated without curiosity. If Big Bang is true, the fact that there is something there from which an “explosion” takes place usually is ignored in the classroom. Do I think that God created the universe via a “Big Bang”? I have no idea. I do predict that by the end of the century, a new theory will quietly replace the Big Bang. Rob

The arguments raised by people opposed to theories like evolution and the Big Bang seem to stem from misunderstandings about what the theory actually says. The Big Bang wasn’t an explosion from “something” - it was the sudden creation of the entire universe in a state smaller than a single atom. Unfortunately, humans are notoriously bad at visualizing shapes with more than 3 dimensions. With the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe, there is no “outside” for it to expand into - we’re seeing everything from the “inside”. In practical terms, the “explosion” was some 15 billion years ago everywhere, but happened nowhere and outside of time.

Why don’t the schools teach this? They do, in classes where it’s appropriate. We don’t tell a child that we’re not sure exactly why the sky is blue, though most of the explanation is Rayleigh and Mie scattering with some additional component that we have yet to nail down. We tell a child that the sky is blue because that’s how the sunlight scatters. In a similar way, teachers use generalizations to get the basic point of a subject across without either overwhelming students or getting bogged down in the technical details. In the case of the Big Bang, it’s accurate enough to call it an explosion, but classes in astrophysics or cosmology will spend weeks explaining how that’s wrong because we’re just not equipped to visualize (or fully imagine and understand) n-dimensional hypergeometric forms expanding at every point simultaneously. We can approximate them in 3-space to get some idea, we can even understand the equations that describe them, but we can’t “get” them.

Similarly in evolution - it’s accurate enough to say that humans evolved from monkeys, which evolved from squirrel-looking creatures, etc., etc. That’s enough for most people to get a handle on what evolution is and how it affects us. Combine that with the inability of people to really “get” how long 10,000 years is - much less 100,000 or 1 million - and we’ve got the misunderstandings that we see today. Again, the first thing that classes focusing on evolutionary biology do is spend a large amount of time explaining why that’s wrong. We didn’t “come from” monkeys. We, the great apes, the monkeys, and the lemurs all came from a single common ancestral species some 60-70 million years in the past. Chimps, gorillas, baboons - they’re just as “highly evolved” as we are. The difference is that we have - in naturalistic terms - an enhanced degree of self-awareness coupled with the ability to visualize multiple possibilities. You and I would simply say that we have a rational (as opposed to animal) soul.

 

[Monkey1976]

Let’s assume that we COULD find that “first nerve”. That nerve would have to be not only successfully passed down through all succeeding generations, but it would have to have the capacity to create an massive network of other nerves which all work in harmony. And the “first nerve” of hearing presupposes that a brain has already been formed to receive the message and translate it! Rob

Not necessarily. Several species of jellyfish have light-sensing organs and react to sound in the water, yet have no brain or anything that we could call a “conventional” nervous system.

 

[Rau]

Well, I think it is a conformity and acceptance are common human desires. Few are willing to subject themselves to ridicule by standing apart from the crowd. I believe that a human, including his ears with 18,000 microscopic fibers which transmit sound messages to the brain, is possible only through Intelligent Design. The “blind watchmaker” i.e. nothing, could never accomplish this. I’d sooner believe that Mt. Rushmore resulted from wind and water runoff.

You would be better served by asserting that you believe God created the universe, and evolution looks to be a theory well supported by the evidence. You don’t need to figure out how God creates.

Why are you comfortable that the progress of two zygotes into an adult human is a natural process? Is that process subject to the continuous intervention of the clockmaker?

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

Why are you comfortable that the progress of two zygotes into an adult human is a natural process? Is that process subject to the continuous intervention of the clockmaker?

That’s what I keep telling him. They don’t believe an organism as insignificant as a cell could transform into an entire species over the course of billions of years…

… yet they accept the same process happening in just a span of nine months. :ehh:

I don’t even wanna know how these people explain metamorphosis.

 

[Elizium23]

It seems simple enough to me. Occam’s Razor tells us that the simplest explanation is the correct one, all things being equal. So we find ourselves in a world of infinite complexity, with precise laws of physics and biology that hold the planets in motion and keep our bodies working for decades and holds all beings and creatures together in such delicate balance, how can this not occur without someone intelligent at the helm? Random chance is inadequate and absurd on the face of it, as a simple explanation… To me, creation itself is ample evidence of the existence of a God.

 

[Rau]

It seems simple enough to me. Occam’s Razor tells us that the simplest explanation is the correct one, all things being equal. So we find ourselves in a world of infinite complexity, with precise laws of physics and biology that hold the planets in motion and keep our bodies working for decades and holds all beings and creatures together in such delicate balance, how can this not occur without someone intelligent at the helm? Random chance is inadequate and absurd on the face of it, as a simple explanation… To me, creation itself is ample evidence of the existence of a God.

And yet the discussion is not at all about the existence of God! Most, if not all participants believe in God as creator.

 

[Kelt]

My goal in life has always been to make Jack Chick proud! :hypno:

Who IS Jack Chick??

 

[Kelt]

Oh yuk, Well you’ll be glad to hear he hasn’t reached here!! I’d have thought he’d probably get short shrift in UK…

 

[Kelt]

He won’t be taken seriously if he makes it out of London…

 

[lightbeamrider]

I don’t understand the fundamentalist connection. Any average person who reads that the current theory is fully sufficient to explain the development of life on earth is likely to correctly assume that natural causes alone did this, and God (of any sort) is unnecessary. It is intrinsic to the whole theory.

The frequency of threads like this leads me to conclude the following: (a) they mean something but I don’t think it has anything to do with science, (b) they usually degenerate into name-calling and finger-pointing based on guesses, i.e. it must be a Protestant infection or some such, people are clueless/ignorant and education will solve the “problem.” The problem being a lack of acceptance, with universal acceptance being the goal, and (c) what does it matter on a practical level that anyone could care less about the theory or conclude that it excludes God? Why are there so many threads here, on a frequent basis, as if this issue was so important? In the grand scheme of things, for the average layperson, life goes on with or without it.

Finally, I have concluded, based on a long list of threads, that something other than science is being promoted. It appears to me that a lack of compliance is the issue. Therefore, I doubt science regarding this topic a little more as threads like this continue to pop up. Scientists and Professors will continue on - I’m referring to an ongoing campaign here to promote an idea, as if all must comply or, if not, just get more of the same from others on a regular basis in future.

Darwinists come across like third world dictators who must eliminate all competition. We were talking about this very same subject at work as it relates to public education. The stranglehold atheistic Darwinism has on public education and all that. Here is my question. If Homo Sapiens have been around for 200,000 years then why did it take them approx. 194,000 years to write anything down or to develop the wheel?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel

A depiction of an onager-drawn cart on the Sumerian “battle standard of Ur” (c. 2500 BC)
A figurine featuring the New World’s independently invented wheel

Evidence of wheeled vehicles appears from the second half of the 4th millennium BC, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia (Sumerian civilization), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe, so that the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle remains unresolved and under debate.

The oldest securely dated wheel-axle combination, that from Stare Gmajne near Ljubljana in Slovenia (Ljubljana Marshes Wooden Wheel) is now dated in 2σ-limits to 3340-3030 cal BC, the axle to 3360-3045 cal BC [3]

The earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (here a wagon—four wheels, two axles) is on the Bronocice pot, a c. 3500 – 3350 BC clay pot excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland.[4]