Comments (19)

Christian,
I don't think the main issue is "who is Jesus?" at all. If you happen to be born into a different culture or in another country (or time) perhaps you would think the main issue is "who is Mohamed?" or "who is Buddha?" or "who is Zeus?".

The main issue, at least to me, is: do you look for real evidence to support the things that you hold to be true (believe in)through rational open inquiry or do you accept words in old revered manuscripts that have been pulled together by people from ancient times. These people obviously had considerably less information available to understand and shape their world view.

If you literally follow the bible or some other "holy" book you will continue to believe the same things about the world, the universe, and evolution that the authors believed 2,000+ years ago. That's "blind" faith and it's likely to leave you in darkness believing in ghosts and the supernatural (angels, saints, resurrection etc.) You'll risk wasting this wonderful life in blind pursuit of an after-life.

"Oh, and by the way Pam, you say evolution isn't concerned with 'origins'? Isn't Darwin's book entitled, The Origin of the Species?"

Yes. Repeat those words slowly to yourself...Origin..of...*Species*. "Species", Fred, not "life". It's very different.

And that website you directed me to, I notice is addressed as "talk origins."

I have no idea why the person who built that site chose that title - you would have to ask him. It certainly deals with a great deal other than the origin of life.

Since this is no longer a current thread, and you and I are the only ones here, I think I've spent as much time here as I care to. Please read at least a few things that don't directly feed into your fantasies - challenge your brain a bit. Perhaps after you do, we will meet on another thread.

Bye for now.

"Oh, Pam, but you are a staunch "believer." It takes much more faith to believe in evolution than to believe in a creator."

Fred, that is simply laughable. You are SO brainwashed. Religion is *entirely*, by definition, faith-based. Science deals with testable routes to knowledge of the real world.

"Evolution, as you admitted, has no answer for origins..."

That's not what I said. I said that the origin of *life* is not part of evolution's purview.

I also showed you that studies that are properly concerned with the origin of life are getting very close to cracking it. What will it do to your faith when that happens?

"... and despite what you say, Darwin did lack all the information we now have that so clearly points to a creator. I doubt even he would stand by his hypotheses if he were alive today."

Oh, please. There is nothing new in religion for 2,000 years. Darwin was a scientist. I think he would be fascinated and gratified by the things we've learned from DNA that completely validate his theories.

"DNA is one of the strongest proofs for an intelligent designer. It is a language that the intelligence of man is only beginning to be able to decipher. When you discover a language, is your first thought, "Oh that must have just occurred over time by chance?" If you are honest, you will admit that a language suggests a language developer."

The reason that man is "only beginning to understand" it, is that we've only begun to study it. Because the genome is quite long in even the simplest of living things, it takes time to sequence it. It's a relatively recent discovery after all, and you have to have a bit of patience.

As for suggesting a developer - not at all. I understand how natural selection works and the time frame it has had to work in. Natural selection is, though not conscious, quite "intelligent" all on its own - what works is saved, what doesn't, is rejected. No thought or planning necessary. Nothing succeeds like success.

"... I asked him why I should believe what he was teaching over creationism, and he didn't have an answer. He just said, 'you just have to believe.' He was intellectually honest enough to admit that his hypothesis had no more weight in science than what I believed."

I find this difficult to credit. Anyone teaching the subject should have been able to answer your question easily. If this is true, your professor was a moron.

"I challenge you to check out Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box, and see if evolution can be explained in light of irreducible complexity."

Already read it. It's just crap. The examples of "irreducible complexity" that he gives have been dealt with in spades by real scientists.

You see, Fred, I read *all* of it before I draw a conclusion. I've read Behe, I've read the Bible, I've read the entire answersingenesis Web site. I've also read "On the Origin of Species", and *many* other books about evolution, biology, geology, and the history of those disciplines. Can you say the same? Did you read at any of the links I sent? No? Didn't think so. I've run into so many like you. If you only read one side of an issue, it will sound true - you have to read it all before you can make a really informed choice.

I know that you haven't looked at the talkorigins page, because it answers all of the points you're bringing up (like irreducible complexity). And do notice that it gives sources for everything it says - unlike your site.

Read this: http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/icdmyst/ICDmyst.html#howmight

Oh, and by the way Pam, you say evolution isn't concerned with "origins"?

Isn't Darwin's book entitled, The Origin of the Species?

And that website you directed me to, I notice is addressed as "talk origins."

Hmmm.

Oh, Pam, but you are a staunch "believer." It takes much more faith to believe in evolution than to believe in a creator.

Evolution, as you admitted, has no answer for origins, and despite what you say, Darwin did lack all the information we now have that so clearly points to a creator. I doubt even he would stand by his hypotheses if he were alive today.

DNA is one of the strongest proofs for an intelligent designer. It is a language that the intelligence of man is only beginning to be able to decipher. When you discover a language, is your first thought, "Oh that must have just occurred over time by chance?" If you are honest, you will admit that a language suggests a language developer.

I, too, was indoctrinated in all my years of schooling with evolution, but now I see its failings.

In college I had a physics professor who, in explaining the theory of how things came to be got into a long discussion of matter and anti-matter decay rates. I asked him why I should believe what he was teaching over creationism, and he didn't have an answer. He just said, "you just have to believe." He was intellectually honest enough to admit that his hypothesis had no more weight in science than what I believed.

I challenge you to check out Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box, and see if evolution can be explained in light of irreducible complexity.

Fred wrote:
"Think of how challenging it would be for a human to create the genetic code needed to produce the fine-tuned nervous system that makes precise, coordinated muscular movements (like tremors, drifts and saccades) possible."

But no human did that, Fred. I'm certainly not claiming that. And you must surely know that not all eyes do the things that you describe. Fish eyes don't. This fine-tuning is a late development in the evolution of eyes. Anything that makes vision better is absolutely fodder for natural selection, and it has produced far more wonderful things than that.

"When Darwin made his assumptions about the origin of organs, he had nothing like the knowledge we have today. Had he been aware of the need for the tiny precision humming. Hopping eyeball motions that are going on all the time while we are awake, he may have abandoned his theory of evolution as foolish and impracticable speculation."

I doubt it. :) Every bit of knowledge that we've accumulated since Darwin has only served to reinforce his ideas. You do know that Darwin didn't come up with the *idea* of evolution, don't you? That had been around for a half century or more before his time. He only proposed the mechanism by which it worked.

Considering that he knew nothing of genes that natural selection acted on, his insight was nothing short of pure genius.

Linnaeus had classified biological relationships - a family tree of life - even before Darwin.

When Gregor Mendel's work on genetics came to light, it just served to explain how natural selection was able to work. Then came DNA, and that validated everything that Linnaeus and Darwin had postulated. Using DNA, we can literally go back in time and follow the trail of relationships. We still carry within us the gene sequences that have been "turned off" by evolution.

Here's something for you to think about: All of the great apes, with which we share a common ancestor, have one more pair of chromosomes than we do. Now nature doesn't allow the loss of an entire chromosome - such a thing would be fatal. So how to explain the anomaly? Biologists postulated that two chromosomes must have fused together in the line that led to humans, to make it appear that we had one less pair. And what did they find when they looked? Normal chromosomes have telomeres at each end (to regulate the number of times that they can divide) and a centromere in the middle (the attachment point when they pair up for meiosis). Humans have one chromosome that has telomeres at each end, and telomeric material in the middle. It also has two centromeres - one on each side of the middle telomere, about halfway to the end telomere. It is two chromosomes stuck together end-to-end, exactly as predicted.

It's endlessly fascinating, and the discoveries are coming so rapidly that it's hard to keep up. I feel sorry for those of you who dismiss it in favor of the supernatural - you don't know what interesting things you're missing!

"For more on this topic, go to answersingenesis.org"

Oh, puh-leese! No bigger piece of tripe has ever wasted bandwidth. Any scientist worth his degree can demolish any of their arguments with his brain tied behind his back. This site is run by religious fundamentalists - NOT scientists - and they haven't a clue what they're talking about.

Maybe *you* should look at http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
(don't stop with this page - the whole site is good.) Or even the more irreverent
noanswersingenesis.org.au

Happy reading.

"Okay, Pam, since you are such a staunch believer and defender of the theory of evolution, please tell me where the intitial life form came from."

Sigh. That's the thing that you YECs always leap to, isn't it? Don't you know that evolution isn't concerned with origins at all? Wherever life first came from, natural selection worked on it to produce everything we see today - and a great deal more (99% of all species that ever existed are now extinct).

All the same, biological science is looking for the processes and conditions that might have produced the first replicating strands of RNA (the likely precursor to DNA), and they're getting very close. I fully expect this question to be answered in my lifetime (and I'm not that young). Here's an article about one of the most promising fields of research:
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/feb/did-life-evolve-in-ice/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=

Here's the thing, Fred - the first fossils were discovered only about 200 years ago, and the accumulation of knowledge since that time has been nothing short of amazing, especially given that for the first hundred years, not many tools for proper research existed. If every time humans butted up against a bit of knowledge that they didn't currently possess, they threw up their hands and shouted "God did it!", we would still be riding donkeys and herding goats for a living. You surely wouldn't be reading this on a computer monitor.

Scientific inquiry has proven utility - look around you in any direction and you'll see it. If religion has any, I've missed it so far.

One more thing - you say that I'm a staunch "believer" in evolution. I just want it to be clear that I don't "believe" in evolution the same way that you "believe" in God. I am convinced by absolute *mountains* of evidence. Not the same thing.

Pam, in response to your post about evolution of the eye, consider this:

Think of how challenging it would be for a human to create the genetic code needed to produce the fine-tuned nervous system that makes precise, coordinated muscular movements (like tremors, drifts and saccades) possible. When Darwin made his assumptions about the origin of organs, he had nothing like the knowledge we have today. Had he been aware of the need for the tiny precision humming. Hopping eyeball motions that are going on all the time while we are awake, he may have abandoned his theory of evolution as foolish and impracticable speculation.

For more on this topic, go to answersingenesis.org

Okay, Pam, since you are such a staunch believer and defender of the theory of evolution, please tell me where the intitial life form came from.

Fred writes:
"Uh...you got any proof of all this, or are you basing it on conjecture?

By the way, do you know how difficult it is to "evolve" an eye? And what do you think creatures did without eyes? Come on ... think. Don't just blindly accept what's being fed to you. Use some logic ... please.
"

Proof. The fish, Astyanax Mexicanus, commonly the Mexican Tetra, has two forms, one that lives in the light and has both pigment and eyes, and one that lives in caves and has neither. Draw your own conclusions. Further, if a lens is grafted onto one of the blind variety, it develops an eye, showing that the basic genes are still there, just turned off. [Sidebar: What geneticists once thought was "junk DNA" without function, is now being shown to be composed of sequences that tell genes when to turn on and off. Regulation of this kind can have amazing consequences.]

Even if there weren't a sighted form of the tetra, fossil fish have eyes, so it would stand to reason (you asked for logic) that the cave fish descends from fish with eyes.

Do I know how difficult it is to evolve an eye? Not very, apparently, since it's been done several times (insect eyes, for instance, are not part of the evolutionary lineage of fish eyes, but fish eyes do precede mammal eyes).

As for what animals do without eyes, ask all of the single-celled animals, and the ones that have devolved - not just the cave fish, there are eyeless snakes (for the same reason) and moles are just a short step away from eyelessness. There are others. There are also animals with only light receptor cells that tell them whether it's light or dark - no more. Check out the Planaria (flatworms). This was likely the way eyes first began.

Did you think I was saying that the cave fish *itself* evolved eyes from scratch and then devolved? LOL - no - I just mean that the species began with eyes, representing the evolution of its ancestors, and then evolved away from them.

Once a trait isn't used, it is no longer selected for. If this goes on long enough, the trait disappears - the ultimate case of "use it or lose it."

Rev. Dowd is on a roadshow worth seeing. I've read the book and seen his presentation. As a recovering religious literalist myself, I've never yelled Hallelujah! so many times alone in my own home. This guy gets it, and is doing more than his part to help humanity remember our divinity. He turns religion right-side up and reality inside out to reveal a way of experiencing rather than just explaining God or whatever name you use. The whole evolutionary process is holy. All water is holy water. All land is holy land. We are all children of a living Universe however it came into begin to begin with. When we look out into space, we're actually seeing back in time, just like when we dig up bones and artifacts. Dowd has it dialed. We can trust Reality, and we can trust God, and not in some out there esoteric way, but in a real world, right here, right now way. In other words, we can walk "with God in Christ," if you will. This is transformation stuff with the power to heal society as we get that evolution isn't chance, it's a choice. And it's not something to believe in or not believe in. It just is, like water and gravity. I'd be nutz to say that don't "believe" in either of those since we're made of one and held on Earth by the other. I recommend his book (Thank God for Evolution) and presentation to everyone, true believers or skeptics alike.

Pam posted: "Duh - of course there are examples - blind cave fish are one - they evolved eyes - then they lost them. Whales are another example - they evolved legs to walk on land, then lost them to go back to the sea."

Uh...you got any proof of all this, or are you basing it on conjecture?

By the way, do you know how difficult it is to "evolve" an eye? And what do you think creatures did without eyes? Come on ... think. Don't just blindly accept what's being fed to you. Use some logic ... please.

One more small point - we tend to look at ourselves and think of life as having gotten more complex, but we should bear in mind that in terms of both sheer numbers, and in the variety of occupied habitats, bacteria are the most successful life form by far - and they're little more complex than they were billions of years ago.

We talk about "the age of dinosaurs" and "the age of mammals" because they're a size that's easy for us to perceive; but in point of fact, it is, and always has been, the age of microbes.

Duh - of course there are examples - blind cave fish are one - they evolved eyes - then they lost them. Whales are another example - they evolved legs to walk on land, then lost them to go back to the sea.

"Evolution, however, goes from a state of disorder (bad) to a state of order (good)."

This isn't actually true. On this planet, it went from a state of simplicity to a state of complexity - but that's only because life was as simple as possible at the start - there was only one direction in which to go. It can as easily go in the other direction, if conditions on the ground favor more simplicity - which is quite possible, and may well have happened, although I don't have an example to offer.

More than a few species have become extinct because thay were too specialized. The Giant Panda is in grave danger of that today - he can eat only bamboo, unlike his remote ancestors, which were broadly carnivorous. If the bamboo goes - so does he. Evolving to a less specialized stage would be to his benefit.

Evolution only means "descent with modification" - it doesn't imply "progress" or movement toward some ultimate goal.

Roll on Reverend! There is hope for humanity yet.

"The entire Old Testament points to the need for a redeemer precisely because man, who was created "good," sinned and all of creation was cursed ever since. Evolution, however, goes from a state of disorder (bad) to a state of order (good). The exact reverse."

So you're saying you want the whole world to go to pot so you can avoid reinterpreting your book...

The main issue is, who is "Jesus." If you believe he was just a man, a good teacher, or prophet, then you're probably okay with accepting evolution as fact.

However, as C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, if you believe Jesus was just a man, "He would either be a lunatic---on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else would be the Devil of Hell." In other words, how could you hold him in high esteem if you do not believe what he said of himself? He claimed to be God; he said no man comes to the Father but through him.

And you would have to discount most of scripture if you believe evolution. For instance, in the book of John, it is written that in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made....And the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.

When John the Baptist saw Jesus he said "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world."

The entire Old Testament points to the need for a redeemer precisely because man, who was created "good," sinned and all of creation was cursed ever since. Evolution, however, goes from a state of disorder (bad) to a state of order (good). The exact reverse.

So for anyone who claims to be a Christian yet accepts evolution as fact, I would say they are either ignorant of the scriptures or they have decided to reject scripture. In which case, they have rejected Christianity.

Heh.

Well, there are certainly problems when 'moral behavior' is pursued while denying the nature and origins of that behavior: you can enlighten human instincts, but you can't just spank them away as though they were just a bad idea. :)