Creationism Vs Evolution

ZOMG RANT ALERT

It sickens me how many people in this country don't believe in evolution.  I heard a statistic that it's around half, but I doubt it's that many.  Science is about rational thought and testable ideas and experiments.  Rejecting the scientific theory of the origin of the human race is like not believing in friction, saying something like that it's god's will that things don't move infinitley.  Even though most fundamental scientific principles are proved indirectly at first (like the spherical nature of the earth), when we are able to directly observe it, we are right because it has been tested indirectly so much.  Religious extremists dismiss evidence like fossils as "tricks by god to test our faith" or something like that.  I bet if someone took a born again christian or another religious extremist in a time machine back 65 million years ago, observed dinosaurs, and returned, they would still reject their direct observations as "hethanistic trickery" or something like that.  Courts have ruled in some places that scientific arguments in favor of creationism can be taught in public schools, what will they have to show?  This intelligent design theory they yammer about is nothing more than pseudoscience, and a lazy underestimation of the power and magnitude biodiversity, natural selection, and time can accomplish.

It's simple to conceive a situation where both the scientific and religious theories are both accurate.

God creates the world in seven days, but for several days the Sun and Earth didn't even exist. How, then, can one day back then have been as long as one day is now? Maybe the first day was several billion years long, and the second several more billion. Furthermore, when God created Adam and presumably told him all this, which he passed on faithfully to his descendants, these simple people easily knew what a day was, but without God to tell them what was what, had no concept of "millions" or "billions". Hence each stage of creation ended up being broken down into one "day" in the creation story told to Adam, or at least it became so in the retellings. Any more complex than that and the story would not have been possible to retell to simple folk, and so, it was simplified to "the world was created in seven days".

Surely it is a miracle enough that God created the world from scratch at all, let alone in seven days? And even then, early people had no concept of evolution, or mitochondria, or anything but such very basic genetics as "a man and his wife have blue eyes, their son is likely to inherit his parents' blue eyes". How could they be expected to understand evolution?

And even then, is it not more impressive to create a world by commanding a bacteria to become human civilization in millions of years, rather than simply summoning every animal and creature into place?

Evolution versus creation is exactly the type of argument that Galileo was declared a heathen and incarcerated for, yet we now believe his theory to be true, and the biblical interpretation of the Earth being the centre of God's creation to be metaphorical.

American government nitpicks over the meaning of some passage in the Bible, then thinks Shock And Awe Bombardment on another country's capital city is perfectly okay regardless of the number of innocent civilians killed. This is exactly the kind of hypocrisy Jesus argued against.

A lot of scientists believe in God. The universe is just such an amazing place, it utterly defies any fiction.

Creationism is annoying, but I'd like to point out a few subtle flaws in >>1's argument (not that I disagree). First, evolution isn't "proven". We're just quite confident in it given the observations up until now. In fact, nothing is proven in science - other than we can disprove some theories.

Now, there is a remote chance that they're right. Maybe God really did make Earth in seven days and put fossils there to confuse us. Who knows? It's just by Occam's razor that seems unlikely.

Remember, science has nothing to say about God. The Western definition of God is that he/she/it is unknowable and thus unmeasurable. Science only deals with the observable. Thus science has nothing to say about the existence of God.

These are nitpicks, but the subtleties are important.

Evolution isn't proven, it's just the best idea we have of what's going on.  To a point, nothing can be proven since everything's only ideas.  Even when something's directly observed, can we fully believe what we are seeing?

>>5
The Matrix has you, Neo.

>>6 lol

>>5 you need lessions at articulating a reductio ad absurdum line of argumentation.... i.e. sux u fag

I wouldn't be too harsh on him. What he says is valid, although it's more a domain of philosophy than science.

Evolution is effectively proven, and has been for at least a hundred years.

As a Christian and a biologist I am disturbed to no end by this attempt of various Christian sects to invade the realm of science.

MRSA is living proof of the theory of evolution.  Our antibiotics killed off most bacteria in hospitals, but the few who survived evolved resistance to them.

>>10, that might merely be said to be natural selection - that a few bacteria simply happened to have the resistance.

But, here's another thought. Suppose that all the animals alive today really are descendants of what was brought over on the Ark. Couldn't both African and Indian elephants descended from one pair of elephants from the Ark, who then adapted?

Actually, no. Suppose all the PEOPLE are the direct descendants of Adam and Eve, via the Ark. What skin colour do you suppose they Adam and Eve had? If dark-skinned, where did white people come from? If pale-skinned, where did black people come from? If one of each, where did asian people come from? Hence, if we are all of the one ancestor, our race must clearly have genetically evolved somehow.

Even if God created all the creatures on Earth, there is nothing to say that he did not create them the ability to improve genetically over generations, to ensure their survivability.

..11 "Actually, no. Suppose all the PEOPLE are the direct descendants of Adam and Eve, via the Ark"

Well it sure would explain why the gene pool these days seems like a freaking paddling pool :)

Then let us smile at those who help us make the genetic pool of humanity better at http://www.darwinawards.com/

Yes, all hail those who are kind enough to remove their defective DNA from the gene pool before they can spread it.

Evolution theory is right and very scientific.
But how can we explain the differences in skin colors among nations.

Well...it's not like skin color is divided between nation borders, it there? Skin color is a defensive mechanism that has been engineered through evolution, so that people who are the most exposed to sunlight and UV radiation are shielded from this (Africa, black skin and brown eyes).

The opposite is the pale-skinned, blue-eyed people of the north, where sunlight tends to be scarce, thus provoking an evolutionary reaction to let them take advantage of whatever lifegiving rays they can.

It's not that difficult, when you think of it. ^.^

That's easily done. The tricky part is for a creationist to explain how it came about without evolution. Even if you do believe in creation, there's nothing to say that evolution did not occur after creation, the only sticking point would be the theory that humans evolved from animals, or that animals evolved from anything except other animals.

god created the entire world in 6 days
and on the 7th day he took a break for a beer run

National Geographic recently had a good prank where the cover said "IS EVOLUTION WRONG?" as if to lure in creationists, but then when you bought it, it just basically said "NO IT'S NOT STOP BEING CRAZY".  I thought it was very funny.

>>19
Here's the cover of that issue and the first page of the article:
http://www.ironcircus.com/blog/000267.html

>>19
Wow, that blog has some really good replies.
Some guy was going on about "omg why aren't there any mid-stage animals is speciation can occur, like fish with feet and stuff
 - rockpants" and the responce was
"Also, rockpants, if you want fish with feet, they're called amphibians. There are quite a few of them."

Creationism can be explained easily.  Um.  There was a guy.  And he wrote a book.  And a bunch of guys added stuff to that book.  And people kept editing it.  And they argued.  And fought many wars.  And here we are today. 

Oh my.
Someone that anyone interested in these things needs to read is Dr Stephen Gould.  If you only read one book then "A Wonderful Life:  The Story of the Burgess Shale."  If you don't have time for that then the 12 page paper he co-authored titled "Punctuated Equibribium" for which he shared a Nobel Prize
For as long as he lived he challenged every creationist to debate.  None ever accepted.

the bible keeps contridicting itself all the time anyway, It states that the Human was created first and animals were created to serve him and a few pages away it is said that that fish, birds etc. were created first
how can you take this for granted?

>>24

Most people who believe in creationism haven't actually read the bible...

sa

>>24
also, most people who believe in evolution haven't actually read anything since they graduated from high school...

>>27
"believe" in evolution? Troll alert!

>>27
True, and this was my first thought, as well.  However, since evolution has actually been exposed to rigorous testing by any and everyone who would like to prove otherwise, and creationism has not (as it cannot), there is actually a reason for Joe Layman to believe that evolution is probably right, just "on faith".

>>29
lol "(as it cannot)"
more liek "(as i'm too lazy to get off my ass and do it)" am i rite

You can't. In one corner you have rationality, on the other you have a caricature of God.

You can make all the well-reasoned arguments you want. If you really get them in a corner they'll pull out their trump card: God can do anything.

People believe what they want. Unless you somehow convince them to stop ascribing everything to an actively-interfering higher presence you're just wasting your breath.

Ethica More Geometrico Demonstrata

I think that When god explained the beginning of life, he intentionally made it "dumber" so the people of thousands of years ago,could understand. Something similar to a parent teaching their 7 year old kid about how babies are made. (The bee and the flower kind of thing) I mean, people knew almost nothing about science, how is he going to explain in to them?

I think that is why the bible doesnt explain the beginning of life in a scientific way, meaning that it isnt possible to compare "theories"

Darwinism = +/- 100 years old theory
vs
Creationism = thousands of years old...         
=nonsense

If god were to explain the beginning of life to the people of today, he would describe it according to the actual scientific terms, don't you think?

Y'all need to read Feyerabend's "Against Method". Maybe you'd become less of an arrogant and ignorant bunch.

In the bible it does mention that animals were here LONG before us. So that is crap about the fossils being dismissed

>>35 - If by long you mean a day, yeah.

They day thing is "explained" by some as meaning a long time period, such as millions or billions of years.  Moses wouldn't expect the Hebrews to comprehend such a length of time.  JRR Tolkien does something similar in The Silmarillion- the days of the gods and the creation of the sun gives no reference to time.

Of course, what Bible readers can't explain is why Dinosaurs are never mentioned.  Or why we have carbon dated human skeletons that predate the timeline of the Bible (Adam & Eve begat so and so etc begat etc up to Moses, even with the extended lifespans given, would only be a few thousand or hundred thousand years long.  Plus you have mention of farming, clothes, tools, and things during the time of Adam & Eve, Cain & Able, and Noah that would be more contemporary to Moses' time than to a prehistoric human.  Scientists place the earliest human civilization at around 10,000 BC) 

All contradictory evidence has been falsified by the World Jewish National Conspiricy.  The bible has been shown to be 100% historically accurate.

>>38
And let me guess: evil evolutionists came in their black helicopters and stole all of your evidence because it, ZOMG, proves the bible, right?

Some bible stories are figurative. If we understand it, it is againt our faith. But if we say all stories are based on historical facts, it will be against our faith. For instance is there anyone that believes the sun moves around the earth?