Thanks for proving the point. That so-called proof is about as full of holes as you get, much more so then the theory of evolution. The Bible is NOT the definitive answer of why things are the way they are. The majority of people on earth are not Christians and/or do not follow the bible - why is it (people who beleive it word for word) correct while others are wrong??
I hear ya Manny. This point comes up quite a lot when people talk about genesis or why people like Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. I've always had trouble with this statement for a couple of reasons. For one, if days were thousands of years, that would mean that the earth's rotation would be crazy as hell, because a day is equal to one rotation on its axis, right? There are a ton of things that would be really wrong with the earth in this situation, first off, the rotation of the earth would have to somehow offset its orbit around the sun in order to slow the earth's days down to a crawl...in other words if the earth had NO rotation a day would be about 365 days long, but for the earth's days to equal 1000s of years it would have to rotate in synch with its orbit to match the sun's light exposure...highly unlikely and very unhealthy to any life forms that would live on the other side of the planet as they would'nt get a shread of light for 1000s of years! Anyways, these things obviously couldn't lead to a healthy environment as we know on earth now a days. It would somehow have to be 'jumpstarted' by God, which of course we have no proof of. I'll go into more detail in a little bit. Sorry for the half-reply. This thread seems to have died, so I won't bore you with my jibba-jabba Manny, basically days would have to be relatively similar to today's time for the earth's organisms to be stable. But many people argue that God could've 'up and changed all that', but then there is no way to prove it...its the end all statement where discussion can't continue.
That is false, but who is counting, right? Greeks said the Earth was a sphere and that understanding continued. They just thought all of the land was at the top, as did medieval Christians. I won't touch the rest of the stuff. Pointless.
The essential issue for me is this, I personally find it illogical to believe that the physical universe, and all the living organisms within it are the result of a meaningless, mindless, designless, random, natural process. There is far too much complexity (DNA for example) for me to believe that there is no Creator. The rest is in the realm of mystery and revelation. The Logos is the Source of all things, and the Fourth Gospel, the Book of John declares that Jesus is the Logos. The Creator came to earth, and we killed Him, which is the Final Commentary on the nature of man.
See thats where I think differently. If things are so complex and designed by this perfect, all powerful being...why are there mistakes? DNA is a perfect example. Besides the replicating errors(not many thankfully) made by cell division(which could lead to cancer in some) , why are there genetic diseases that kill people simply because the parents had the same dangerous(some dominant, most are recessive) gene? Its complex but flawed...hardly the work of all powerful(I'm getting tired of using that term) being, lol, who knows, maybe it was one of His off-days in creation . Is that what the loving creator 'planned'? Do you think a perfect being would want to(or even could) create something imperfect? I hope not. People don't know how everything came about, and my guess is that we'll never know. But I'm not going to believe in something that has no proof and is based solely on faith. I could never do that.
So this God of love sets up the world so that all his living things will experience pain, sickness, dimemberment, being eaten alive, high risk procreation, starvation and death. Woah, what was he thinkin'? I know, I know that was the devil, but didn't God see that coming? By the way one can counter the intelligent design theory with the argument that in a universe of infinite possibilities all things possible including the random development of life as we know it. Or, if a trillion monkeys banged on a trillion typewriters for a trillion years atleast one of them would type the script for Battlefield Earth.
Why did God create bacteria to live in my ass and create foul smelling gases that would embarrass me when they escape from my rectum? What a cruel thing to do.
The odds are so slim, that the human brain cannot possibily see the number in his head. It's like a 2, then with trillions of 0's following it. The guy who suggested that example, has a better chance of going to NYC and winning the big lotto 20 times in a row.
Dude, I think your missing the concept of Infinite possibilities . With infinite possibilities one would be absolutely guaranteed to win every lottery. In other words there are billions and billions of possible planets out there, some of them may evolve silcon life forms, on some algae might develop conciousness, on some there might be green bubbles named Bob. On Earth life evloved to what we can see around us. It seems to us to be utterly complex because of we only have the human perspective. We relate to only a human size scale and a human time scale. If we could see at the atomic scale for the entire history of the planet we might say, "oh yea, that's really the only way life could evolve because molecules tend to organize according to a pretty specific set of principles". But you need to break out of your preconceptions to open yourself up to other possibilities to consider it. Or don't, it doesn't really matter. If God seems logical and comforting to you , go for it. Uh, just don't team up with your buddies and and burn me at the stake because I have questions.
Well, this again is not any form of valid logic. For general consumption... the idea that a human tries to sit back and calculate the odds of certain physical parameters having their current values, versus other random values strikes me as equivalent to the idea that a single microbe of plankton can sit back and calculate the odds that the ocean has air above it instead of stone. The plankton is in over his head there, but it could use the scientific method to, say, notice that air is less dense than water. Interesting... I hope the point is obvious. Not only will the plankton learn more about its ocean if it keeps asking questions it can answer, but it should not assume that the unanswerable questions wouldn't be answerable if it had a different perspective or a great deal more knowledge. Who are we to calculate the odds? Who are we to know the mind of god or gods or the void? Let's have our various faiths, and let's also take a crack and learning about the universe through science. I continue to fail to see what's wrong with that. edit: this goes well with Gene's post, I think. In terms of arguments of scale. I don't like that he compared me to green bubbles of gas though.
But just because the odds are slim that a series of coincidences could happen does mean that they are impossible. Practically everything that happens in existence is the result of an odd series of coincidences. 10 years ago how could anybody calculate the odds that a 7'6" basketball player from China would play for the Rox and miss the second to last shot of a game against the Lakers in an arena called the Toyota Center? Or perhaps more mundane but even just as likely impossible to calculate is to try to calculate from 10 years ago that you might have pizza for dinner on the night of March 3, 2004 instead of pasta. Every event that happens is predicated on the result of coincidences that are impossible to calculate yet here we are. I don't see how this in anyway rules out that evolution is more than likely the process that led to the differentiation of species anymore than we can say that God had a role in getting Yao Ming to play tonight for the Houston Rockets. We can look back and see an understandable progression of events and the mechanism that led to Yao Ming playing tonight for the Rox against the Lakers and to me that is no different than an understandable progression of evolution that led to the differentiation of species. Yao Ming playing for the Rockets makes sense. For someone who hasn't followed the NBA very closely for the last 5 years and suddenly wathing the Rox playing the Lakers tonight having Yao Ming out there might seem equally miraculous as seeing the vast diversity of life but not following the evidence of how it got to be this way.
Sirshir- We're not talking about something so simple as an athlete playing a sport or a particular food we're going to have tonight. I mean the chances arent that odd that I'll have pizza tonight, I mean for heaven's sake, I'm going to have some kind of food. But just think, the chances that a prebiotic soup formed in the earth's waters and the gases in the universe that somehow could make human life possible, on the only planet where human life COULD exists, somehow the Earth is positioned in the PERFECT positioning to the sun, and its tilted at a precise degree which makes the crops all over the world grow as needed. People who will NOT believe in God as our Creator a long time ago wanted God to actually SPEAK to us in a way that would scientifically show that only he can create such craftmanship with the complexity of the DNA (otherwise referred to 'The Language of God'), and something so small as the human eye, which not even Darwin could begin to explain how Evolution MIGHT HAVE CAUSED (nearly impossible) the eye to form. There are so many things that my book talked about in nature, as in some species of animals and plants that are on the earth as of today that bring many questions to evolution forming them. FOr example, the Dolphin. Back when submaries were first invented, they moved very slow and wasted millions of bucks worth of gas because of the dynamics, until Scientists looked at the dolphin and how gracefully and easily it flows through the water, the engineers made the submarine in the shape of the Dolphins nose, and it moved up to 200% faster and used less gas, and the material the dolphins skin is made up of (thick-slick-rubbery coating) made the dolphin cut through the water easier, so they did that to the submarine as well. The Amazon water lilly is a unique plant that grows in the deep mud of the Amazon's swamp that grows up to 30 foot tall, and when it reaches the surface (it needs sunlight to grow), it expands up to 6 feet in diameter and gets to a very bright color that attracts this certain beattle that lands on the pod, and it closes it up like a venus fly trap for 24 hours to pollenate it. It then lets the beattle go to fly onto other water lillies to reproduce. After letting the beattle escape, the lilly then turns a bright pink to reject the beattle from coming back to the same water lilly. (the book "Creation" has tremendous reports in specific detail on all these species and characteristics of plant and animal life) It just baffeling after thinking of the odds and seeing the lack of evidence supporting evolution how someone can reject the fact of a supernatural Creator. THe Bible says in the last days, there will be men to come forth and invent a "fable" that the world will believe. Thats happened with the world and in schools today. I'm not a good debater. I've read all of these replies in this thread, especially about being taught things when you were a kid and you'll listen. My mom has ALWAYS told me about the Bible and God like every parent who believes should. But I've never really "listened" to her until I discovered for myself how easy it is to believe in the Lord and how he created us all and everything in existence. I wish some of you would open your mind to read the book I'm reading. In fact, if anyone wants to read it, I will ship it to you free of charge just so you'll read it.
The point about the odds of whether someone will have pizza versus pasta for dinner is that if you start from any distant point in time it is impossible to calculate everything that occurs. Even if you accept everything in the Bible has true can you calculate what the odds of what I had for breakfast yesterday? Never the less I still had an english muffin which is a fact. That I had that was the result of a long chain of coincidences that if I explained it to you make sense but in the realm of all possibilities from the beginning of time even Biblical is impossible to calculate. Would you then argue that since it would seem so unlikely that all of time would proceed to the point where on 3/2/2004 I would eat an english muffin at 7:30AM Central Time in Minneapolis, MN that it has to be the work of a divine creator? When talking about Dolphins argument for selective breeding and survival of the fittest leading to differentation of species. As you may be aware while dolphins look similar to fish they are metabolically and genetically vastly different and if they are the product of enlighted creation that creator has left them with one glaring weakness that shows they came originally from land dwelling ancestors. They don't have gills and still have to breathe air. The fact that there are animals that go extinct often when even a minor change in their environment happens while others survive argues against an intelligent plan. Why waste time on creating animals that are so fragile they can't survive a minor shift in climate or other condition? As I probably should've realized this debate is moot There is plenty of the most thoroughly researched and peer tested evidence supporting evolution. ON THE CONTRARY. It is creationism is what is lacking in exhaustively researched and peer tested evidence. Gootan's attempts to counter that have instead shown the paucity of anything remotely near scientific support for creationism. You obviously won't accept the compromise even that the methodology of modern science shows evolution to be likely course but that doesn't mean there isn't a God. Science can't answer the ultimate question of why there is existence as we know it in the first place which is the realm of faith. You would rather instead rely on faith to explain even that which science shows it can explain. Frankly since you have no willingness to consider the vast amounts of evidence regarding evolution I have no interest in reading your book. I've read other tracts claiming to be "scientific" proof of creation and found them to be lacking in providing a logical and testable alternative to evolution and I bet your book is too. Howabout this though. I will read your book if you will sign up at a local accredited college in your area and take a course in evolutionary biology. You can prove you did it by posting your coursework here on Clucthfans and I will prove I read your book by posting a book report.
I would love to make a deal of some sort with you but taking a course in Evolution isnt possible for my work scheduele isnt flexible, and I can't afford to cut back on my hours. Do you have a book explaining the theory of Evolution and how it isnt impossible its the cause of the state of life itself? I'll do a book report on it as well.
wait...i think there might be some misunderstanding here. i'm not talking about the odds of life developing in a universe like ours... i'm talking about the odds against the universe we know developing at all in the way it developed...2 entirely different things...and you have to get past that first before you can analyze the odds of life developing on any given planet. if the "big bang" happens even marginally different, there are no planets to even speak of.
I would rather you take a course because then you will get the breadth of the evidence out there on evolution and understand the methodology behind evolution rather than read one book. If you were going to read one book I would recommend Darwin's "The Origin of Species" because that was the first and also because contrary to what you might've heard Darwin wasn't an atheist or an agnostic and believed profoundly in God. Some books by Stephen J. Gould might be good like the "Panda's Thumb" too. I'm sure there are many here who could recommend several books on evolution. I will see if I can find the book you cite at the local library or barring that will look on Amazon. Unless its ridiculously priced no need to ship me a copy.
