I couldn't agree with you more

Yeah, neither could I. Heh, heh.

 

Sadly, there are still some people that believe that idiocy even with no proof whatsoever.  Nothing at all to substantiate their claims.  Just ideals, assumptions based on those ideas, and religion. Which of course has no place in the scientific world. It scares me that a religion only 2000 years old thinks that they know everything.

~Zoo

it doesn't make sense to me to that beings this complex weren't guided by a higher power.

I can see how it happens.  It's really not impossible to imagine.  Billions of years is a looooooooooooooong time for lots of accidents to happen taking into account the trillions and trillions of little organisms that existed.  When the first organisms developed, they had free range of the entire world...well, at least the water portion.  There was nothing there to limit their reproduction so their numbers would have been vast.  On such a huge scale of individuals and time a lot of crazy things can happen in genetics.  It's entirely plausible.

I don't totally deny the existence of a higher power, something had to set off all these events.  However, I will not jump on the boat of "things just popped into existence."  I can't accept that at all.  Something big happened and after that things started going about their business.  There's a fraction of time we can't account for, Planck time: 10^-43 seconds, which convential physics can't explain.  Maybe that was a divine power's intervention.  Or a universe collapse and rebirth.  There's a lot of philosophies and theories out there. (Link for a bit about Planck Time- (http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae281.cfm)

Even though you may be at odds with me on this, I do commend you for at least considering that evolution can coexist with religion.  Most people that believe in ID don't want to even try.

~Zoo

...To this day, and in quarters where they should know better, Darwinism is widely regarded as a theory of 'chance'. It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch. Only God would essay the mad task of leaping up the precipice in a single bound. And if we postulate him as our cosmic designer we are left in exactly the same position as when we started. Any Designer capable of constructing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent and complicated beyond all imagining. And complicated is just another word for improbable - and therefore demanding of explanation. A theologian who ripostes that his god is sublimely simple has (not very) neatly evaded the issue, for a sufficiently simple god, whatever other virtues he might have, would be too simple to be capable of designing a universe (to say nothing of forgiving sins, answering prayers, blessing unions, transubstantiating wine, and the many other achievements variously expected of him). You cannot have it both ways. Either your god is capable of designing worlds and doing all the other godlike things, in which case he needs an explanation in his own right. Or he is not, in which case he cannot provide an explanation. God should be seen by Fred Hoyle as the ultimate Boeing 747.


From one of my favorite reads - Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins


WWW Link

I saw it.  It was really good, even dealt with the issue with the protozoa tail thingy.

So there's a higher power that is cool enough to start the thing off, because something had to start it off, but then he just sat back and watched the thing go for millions of years. Or maybe he just wanted that 'lived in' universe feel, so he created a universe with a history. Kinda like buying faded jeans. They're still new jeans, but they look old. In all honesty, Earth could've been created yesterday and you wouldn't know.

Zoo, and all the rest of you true-blue macro-Evolution Theory believers,

If you want to believe your ancestoral line goes back to the ape species and beyond, and believing that takes faith in junk science.


I believe my ancestoral line goes back to Adam and Eve who according to Genesis were created and wonderfully, intelligently designed by God Himself...and that's my faith...and if you think that's crap...well...I'd say you and the school districts that refuse to teach both sides of the Origin debate are scaredy-pants.




Catholics agree that evolution (small "e", what I call micro-evolution) occurs as change over time WITHIN THE SAME SPECIES.

The proponents of macro-Evolution have not offered anything but fanciful speculation that one species evolved into a completely different one...as apes to humans.

Hi Lula,
When one looks at the wreckage of a jumbo jet, it takes definite science to try and figure out how it happened. When one looks at the Universe and how it came to be, I am not sure if Science can do that accurately enough by itself.

We just don't have a black box to check the events...or do we ?

Aeryck.

Hi Zoo~,
Christianity may have only been on the map for 2000+ years but the roots go back to infinity and beyond. Calling all Trekkies.   

Aeryck.

Why not argue with a Scientist who is not a Christian, who does not share your point of view ?   

Aeryck.

ps. It is my observation that Senor Dawkins spends a lot of time propping up his theories by attacking Christianity. I have often wondered if secretly he believes in Jesus.   

This is stupid. I think Dawkins might be advised to read Thomas Acquinas.

For example if I was living in the time of the great Albert Einstein and he explained his views in terms that were in no way reduced to the level of my tiny brain (being that I knew nothing of his terminology), I would definitely understand nothing. For a higher power to condescend to language to explain what is 'belangrik' might give a very light brush to origins and a more definite brush to saving a soul from Hell.

Mixing up theology and science is the Dawkins thing, he needs to stay in the bull ring or he is bound to lose the respect of all Scientists who don't deal in theories...oh theories...

Aeryck

It won't be the first time that the Church has wacked a Christian-Scientist....
It is not just Christians who were afraid that they might fall of the edge of the world ...

Aeryck (leaves the building...)

I'm sorry, but I can't believe that a being as complex as the human could have come by accident out of a little germ billions of years ago.

Very good. But evolution doesn't say anything about human beings coming by accident out of a little germ billions of years ago. I suggest you learn about evolution. You will find that it is not what you think it is. For example, it has nothing to do with "accident" (i.e. chance).

OTOH Creationism does claim that something as complex as the human came about very suddenly. There is even a more complex entity, G-d, that apparently came by accident without having any ancestors. If you don't like stories of things coming about by accident, you should reject Creationism and embrace evolution.

I am religious. I go the shul every week, I studied Hebrew, I live somewhat kosher (in Israel I am kosher, except in the Arab parts), I read the Bible (Luther translation, King James translation) and the Qur'an (English translation/interpretation). I believe in G-d.

But there is a limit to what I believe. If something contradicts what I see, I don't believe it. I am religious, but I am not a gullible fool. My religion tells me not to be gullible and, instead, to employ reason. The great Moroccon rabbi Mainonides said, in the 12th century, that man should believe only what can be supported either by rational proof, by the evidence of the senses, or by trustworthy authority.

There is no rational proof for something as weird and random as Creation of species out of nothing. My senses confirm evolution because I can see it happening in labs and I can see it having happened by comparing fossils. And a looney interpretation of the Bible is NOT a trustworthy authority. Some parts of the Bible were never supposed to be taken literally. If the Bible, even if written by G-d Himself, contradicts what we see in the world, also created by G-d, who are we to trust G-d's writing (which for all we know could have been tampered with easily) over G-d's creation (the world, which is less easily tempered with). To trust the source that could have been tempered with over the source that could not is to regard man's authority as higher than G-d's. And that is not allowed, not in my religion; I am surprised it is in others.

I don't really care what you believe, but I do insist that you not force children to study it alongside science if you cannot find evidence for it outside one interpretation of a translation of a 2500-year old book.

As for "intelligent design", looking at the human body, perhaps a more appropriate term would be unintelligent design:

"The vertebrate retina is a terrible design. The optic nerve comes into the eyeball at a certain point, and the nerve fibers spread out across the surface of the retina. Each individual nerve fiber reaches its assigned point, burrows down into the retina through several layers of epithelial cells, and ends with the light receptor itself pointing away from the lens of the eye, which is the direction from which the light must come. As a result, incoming light strikes the surface of the retina and must penetrate through multiple layers of inactive cells and then through the body of the nerve itself before it reaches the active point where it might be detected. This both diffuses and attenuates the light, decreasing the efficiency of the retina in accomplishing its function."

http://denbeste.nu/essays/humaneye.shtml

If we were indeed created or designed by someone, that someone must have been a really bad designer indeed. Since G-d is perfect, it cannot have been Him. Maybe it was a tribe of particularly stupid space aliens?