Creationism vs. Evolution...

In conversing with the "science" teacher...a long-term sub the other day, about how she would teach this subject, I was surprised to hear her reply that she "doesn't believe in Evolution." The conversation stopped there for me, as I see scientific and archaeological evidence to the contrary. This does not affect my belief system, though I am rather an outsider when it comes to such stuff.
I'm employed in a school of primarily Fundamentalist Christians, and realize I'm rather an outsider there, even being ostracized, not because I've stated my opinions, but they just sense it!
I'm going to post another thread about the conversation at the lunch table today.
Patty

i have no idea what on earth she could mean by her statement.

she must be meaning to deny some particular claims, but i'm not sure which ones...

I personally don't believe in the theory of evolution. I am a believer in the Lord Jesus. It tells me in the Bible that He created man in His own image. There has always been a huge debate among believers and non believers about this. I guess it will always be that way.

( Wondering why this is in this forum rather than the relationships or general forum. ) TC!

why can't God have used evolution by natural selection as the means by which to create man in his own image?

I don't see that believing in God rules out belief in evolution, and I don't see that believing in evolution rules out belief in God either.

Though... There are some particular claims that conflict.

E.g., If one is a literalist about Genesis then I guess one believes that God made each of the species individually. That conflicts with the 'common ancestor' claim made by evolutionary theorists.

Do you believe that evolution by natural selection is a natural process that works on every species aside from human beings or do you mean to deny that there is a process of evolution by natural selection altogether?

I think Evolution is a fact, though i am still a believer...

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
As a reminder, this is specifically not a place to debate issues of religion.

Welcome and enjoy!
DocJohn


</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

changing your judgement from

hijacking!

to

debating!

doesn't really help your cause.

how about leaving just leaving the thread alone if you don't want to discuss whether evolutionary theory and creationism are incompatible or not?

thanks.

Debate...Hmmm.
Who can deny the evidence of Evolution?
This thread can be locked...that's fine, but it doesn't mean I am an unbeliever.
I think a higher power could choose to create our existence in whatever time frame he chooses...millions of years.
Patty

there are different varieties of creationism. some of them are consistent with the theory of evolution by natural selection (on this account god made the world with the natural laws and evolution by natural selection was the process by which he made the diversity of life that we see before ut). other varieties of creationism directly contradict some evolutionary claims, however.

e.g., the 'young earth' people who maintain the earth is much younger than what scientists have estimated - in virtue of some passage in the bible.

there are people who are literalists about Genesis too. They think that God literally made the world in 6 days and that when he made the animals and plants he made each 'according to its kind' (which they take to mean species). this is an outright denial of the common ancestor claim. it denies that natural selection results in speciation. denies the cladestine classification system in biology (where different species are given their place in the evolutionary tree according to how long ago they speciated / diverged from other lineages).

trouble with denying this... is that we can see evidence of evolutionary processes. moths, for example... start off with a population of black ones and white ones... black ones get eaten more 'cause white ones are camoflagued on white bark... eventually... the population consists mostly of white moths. that is a process of evolution by natural selection. you have natural variation in a trait (colour) that is heritable (passed on). you have competition (in this case to avoid predators) and the result is... differential reproduction (the white ones produce more offspring on average) and over time... the white trait will become far more prevalent in the population. then all of a sudden along comes the industrial revolution and the rise of factories. the trees are covered with black soot. eventually you get the shift back in moths colouration.

i don't think creationists mean to deny this - do they?

it is more some of the specific claims that are made within evolutionary theory (e.g., that natural selection can result in different species rather than merely changing traits within a species or that natural selection isn't able to explain such obvious adaptations as the eye or the feather).

didn't you ask basically for opinions on the subject? if so I simply stated my opinion but feel like it is an attack on those that do not believe in evolution. I was taught both in school many moons ago. as far as evolution goes I do believe as time has gone on humans have become more intelligent as the ages go. but to think that humans came from apes is beyond my belief.

i'm not seeing any attack...
i did see a request for clarification.

> to think that humans came from apes is beyond my belief.

and you did clarify :-)
thanks for that.

nobody thinks that humans came from apes.
evolutionary theorists think that BOTH humans and apes have a common anscestor in a prior species that isn't around anymore.

do you think that that is beyond your belief?

(i'm not at all laughing at you or attacking your view. i'm just trying to get clearer on what your view actually is to see precisely what aspect of evolutionary theory you disagree with)

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
Creation Model Passes Big Test
by Fazale Rana, Ph.D.

This past fall I took part in a pro football "pick'em" contest. For readers unfamiliar with this game, let me explain that the contestants demonstrate their football "smarts" by predicting the outcome of NFL games played each week. Even though I consider myself to be quite knowledgeable about football, I finished dead last. No matter what, I just couldn't predict the winners. (I guess there's always next year.)

In some ways, science operates like a football pick'em contest. Scientists develop hypotheses, theories, and models to explain some aspect of nature's workings. These ideas have logical consequences that lead to predictions about what scientists should have already discovered and what they will uncover in the future.

Scientists consider a theory to be valid only if it harmonizes with current scientific data and successfully predicts future scientific advances. Those theories that repeatedly fail to make successful prognostications must be reconsidered. They are not merely relegated to "last place," as I was; they are rejected.

As an example of how this process works, a new fossil discovery from an ancient rock formation in South Africa weighs in on the predictions game. In our book, Origins of Life, Hugh Ross and I developed a scientific model for life's origin based on Genesis 1:2 and Deuteronomy 32:9-12.1 Reasons To Believe's creation model makes several predictions that can be used to evaluate its validity. For example, the model predicts that life should appear early in Earth's history and that the first life forms should be inherently complex.

Evolutionary origin of life models, on the other hand, require a long "percolation" time, perhaps up to 1 billion years, before life can emerge from a primordial soup. These naturalistic scenarios also predict that the first life forms should be relatively simple.2

Numerous lines of fossil and geochemical evidence indicate that life was present remarkably early in Earth's history, possibly as far back as 3.8+ billion years ago.3 (Prior to about 3.8 billion years ago, life would have been impossible on Earth, because the planet's conditions were "hellishly" unsuitable for life.4) In spite of the weight of evidence in favor of early life on Earth, some origin-of-life researchers have questioned the authenticity of the most important and high-profile examples. These scientists maintain that the markers for early life are actually artifacts produced by inorganic processes.5

In the face of this challenge, RTB's model predicts that future discoveries will strengthen the evidence for early life on Earth. Such a discovery was made recently by two scientists from Stanford University.6 These investigators recovered new fossil and geochemical evidence for early life on Earth in a 3.416 billion-year-old rock formation from South Africa. Their data indicate that anoxygenic photosynthetic bacteria produced the biological remains found in these ancient rocks. Even though such microbes are single-celled, their biochemical makeup is remarkably complex.

In support of RTB's model, this new discovery confirms the early appearance of complex metabolic life forms on Earth. These facts find ready explanation if a Creator intervened to make Earth's first life forms. At the same time, this discovery of early life runs counter to the predictions of evolutionary models. I guess there's always next year¾but origin-of-life research isn't football pick'em.

References
Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004), 35-46.
Rana and Ross, 47-60.
Rana and Ross, 63-79.
Rana and Ross, 81-92.
Rana and Ross, 63-79.
Michael M. Tice and Donald R. Lowe, "Photosynthetic Microbial Mats in the 3,416-Myr-Old Ocean," Nature 431 (2004): 549-552.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
First Chimpanzee Fossils Cause Problems for Evolution
by Fazale (Fuz) R. Rana, Ph.D.

Where were you on September 1, 2005? Perhaps you missed the announcement of a scientific breakthrough: the influential journal Nature published the completed sequence of the chimpanzee genome.1

This remarkable achievement received abundant publicity because it paved the way for biologists to conduct detailed genetic comparisons between humans and chimpanzees.2

Unfortunately, the fanfare surrounding the chimpanzee genome overshadowed a more significant discovery. In the same issue, Nature published a report describing the first-ever chimpanzee fossils. This long-awaited scientific advance barely received notice because of the fascination with the chimpanzee genome. News of the two discoveries produced different reactions among scientists. Evolutionary biologists declared the chimpanzee genome as evidence for human evolution, but some paleoanthropologists were left wondering how humans and chimps could have evolved, based on where the chimpanzee fossils were found.

According to the evolutionary paradigm, humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. About 5 million years ago, this ancestral primate spawned two evolutionary lineages that led to humans and chimpanzees. Anthropologists consider the physical, geographical separation of hominids and proto-chimpanzees to be the "driving force" for the evolution of humans and chimpanzees. They postulate that the formation of the Rift Valley isolated the hominids in East Africa (a hot, dry savannah) from chimpanzees in Central and West Africa (with warm, wet jungles). The geographical isolation of hominids and chimps, presumably, sent these two lineages along different evolutionary trajectories.

Evolutionary biologists think that fossil hominids like "Lucy," Homo erectus, and Neanderthals document the emergence of humans.4 Yet, until recently paleoanthropologists had no corresponding fossils for the chimpanzee lineage.

Surprisingly, the first chimpanzee fossils were discovered not in West or Central Africa, but in East Africa, near Lake Baringo, Kenya. These fossils, consisting of three teeth, dated to 500,000 years in age--meaning that chimpanzees coexisted alongside hominids. The Rift Valley provided no geographical rift for separate evolutionary histories, and therefore foils a key prediction of the human evolutionary paradigm.

Sally McBrearty, one of the paleoanthropologists who uncovered the chimpanzee fossils, noted, "This means we need a better explanation of why and how chimps and humans went their separate evolutionary ways. The discovery that chimps were living in semi-arid conditions as well as in the jungles seems to blow apart the simplistic idea that it was the shift to the savannah that led to humans walking upright."5

If the discovery blows apart a "simplistic idea," maybe it's time for a simple (and testable) idea--the RTB creation model for human origins.

References
The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, "Initial Sequence of the Chimpanzee Genome and Comparison with the Human Genome," Nature 437 (2005): 69-87.
See Fazale Rana with Hugh Ross, Who Was Adam? A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Man (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2005) for a discussion of human-chimpanzee genetic comparisons from a creation perspective.
Sally McBrearty and Nina G. Jablonski, "First Fossil Chimpanzee," Nature 437 (2005): 105-08.
See Who Was Adam? for a treatment on how the hominid fossil record creates problems for human evolution.
Michael Hopkin, "First Chimp Fossil Unearthed," news@nature.com (August 31, 2005), http://www.nature.com/news/2005/0508...829-10_pf.html, accessed November 30, 2005.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

Not saying you're wrong, just posting some stuff you said you wanted.

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
The Unreliability of Hominid Phylogenetic Analysis Challenges The Human Evolutionary Paradigm
By Fuz Rana, Ph.D.

Recent work by two researchers from University College London (UCL) and George Washington University (GW) calls into serious question the capability of paleoanthropologists to detect and establish the evolutionary relationships assumed to exist among bipedal primates, or hominids.1

Evolutionary or phylogenetic relationships for the hominids are determined by comparing anatomical features of specimens found in the fossil record with those of extant species.

For the hominids, the available fossils in most cases are partial crania, partial jaw bones, isolated teeth, and infrequently, partial upper and lower limbs.2,3 Rarely do paleoanthropologists find a complete cranium, let alone a nearly complete skeleton. And only a few of the hominid species in the fossil record are known from an abundance of specimens. Typically a hominid species is defined by just a few fossilized bone fragments.4 Many times the hominid remains have been crushed, shattered and damaged prior to fossilization or have become deformed as a result of geological processes. This only serves to compound the difficulty of paleoanthropologists’ work.

Given the nature of the hominid fossil record, it is not surprising that most evolutionary biologists recognize that the best they can hope for are crude working phylogenies.5 (A phylogeny is believed to be the evolutionary pathway for an organism or group of organisms.) This becomes apparent when one examines textbooks and treatises on human evolution. The large number of proposed phylogenies shows that paleoanthropologists are far from a consensus on the pathway to human evolution.6, 7

The situation has recently worsened for those attempting to construct hominid phylogenetic relationships. Scientists from UCL and GW indicate, based on their findings, that evolutionary phylogenies postulated for human origins are hopelessly uncertain.8 These two paleoanthropologists compared phylogenies constructed from gene and protein sequences with those constructed from cranial and dental features for two currently existing groups of primates, the hominoids (gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans) and the papionins (baboons, mangabeys, and macaques).

In both cases, the molecular phylogenies differed significantly from those derived using cranial and dental characteristics. Since evolutionary biologists consider molecular phylogenies inherently more robust, the authors of the study are forced to conclude that craniodental characteristics cannot be used as reliable indicators of primate evolutionary relationships (including those of extinct hominids). As the researchers from UCL and GW put it, “Without a reliable phylogeny, little confidence can be placed in the hypotheses of ancestry…”9

In light of these results, the assertion that human evolution is a fact becomes scientifically untenable. What seems apparent is that evolutionary biologists have chosen to interpret their data exclusively within an evolutionary paradigm. From this framework, they then declare that their data supports human evolution. To demonstrate that humans evolved by natural processes, there must be rigorous evidence of clearly established evolutionary relationships with obvious transitions in the fossil record. This study shows that such determinations may never be possible, given that cranial and dental remains are the primary fossils available to paleoanthropologists.

Equally disconcerting for the evolutionary paradigm is the lack of congruence between molecular and morphological phylogenies. Truth demands internal consistency. The failure to establish consistency for molecular and morphological phylogenies calls into question the veracity of the evolutionary paradigm.

New discoveries in paleoanthropology increasingly undermine the plausibility of evolution as an explanation for human origins.

References:
Mark Collard and Bernard Wood, “How Reliable Are Human Phylogenetic Hypotheses?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97 (2000): 5003-6.
Roger Lewin, Principles of Human Evolution (Malden, MA: Blackwell Science, 1998), 117-18.
S. Jones, R. Martin, and D. Pilbeam, "The Primate Fossil Record," The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, ed.S. Jones, R. Martin, and D. Pilbeam, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 197-98.
Fuz Rana, “Up (and Away) from the Apes,” Connections 1, no. 4 (2000): 3-4.
Lewin, 296-307.
Lewin, 306.
Bernard Wood, “Evolution of Australopithecines” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, ed. S. Jones, R. Martin, and D. Pilbeam, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 240.
Collard and Wood, 5003-6.
Collard and Wood, 5003.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

yes that is beyond my belief also. the Bible says God created all the animals and man.

by which you take to mean that he created all of the different animal species and the human species ex nihilo (out of nothing)?

how about different varieties of horses or cats or dogs?

how about different varieties of apples or roses?

I suppose one could make a case for different varieties not being species...

I don't see why you couldn't maintain that on day one (so to speak) God fixed the facts of physics (made the bits of matter come into existence) and imposed the laws of nature (including the law of natural selection). And from there... The laws acted upon the matter to eventually result in all the species and varieties that we see today. God would still have made all the species and varieties its just that instead of making them one at a time he could have just made the matter and imposed the laws and let things run their course...

I don't know the specifics of the RTB model. I'll work with this claim, though.

> Reasons To Believe's creation model makes several predictions that can be used to evaluate its validity. For example, the model predicts that life should appear early in Earth's history and that the first life forms should be inherently complex.

The model doesn't predict that human beings should appear early in Earth's history?

Sorry, not debating, just gave info for review.

alex why can you not except my beliefs? it was a simple question on believe or not believe right? so why do you try to force me to believe your theory? it has been a debate for hundreds of years so you keep trying to make me isn't going to happen just like my belief is not going to make you believe mine right?

of course... answering a question is 'debating' whereas posting chunks of 'information' in direct contradiction to the thread starters post is perfectly acceptable.

good grief.

> alex why can you not except my beliefs?

i don't know what (aside from sky) makes you think that i'm not accepting your beliefs. what i was trying to do... is to get a little clearer on what it actually is that you do believe in order to actually see whether we are disagreeing or not.

> why do you try to force me to believe your theory?

i don't.

> it has been a debate for hundreds of years

actually... evolution by natural selection was put forth by Darwin last century. Probably less than 100 years ago.

As I said: I was trying to clarify what it is that you believe.

You don't actually have to answer my questions if you don't want to, you know...

Oh wait.... it was my understanding that no debate was wanted, but info on either side.

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
i don't know what (aside from sky) makes you think that i'm not accepting your beliefs

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post"> You just keep at it don't you? BTW, those remarks are wasted on me now. TC all!

but i thought that contrary info was debate. oh wait. thats only when i post it.

FFS.

The science supporting Evolution as a strongly embedded theory-- which means one that not yet been disproven in its general form, not necessarily its particulars-- is so vast and extensive, that it's hard to believe that any serious question of the validity of the theory is possible.

Of course, one can choose not to believe it-- but there really is no serious scientist who would attempt to refute the basic claim as of this moment in history.

Belief in science is not required; but if you believe in science-- well--

Balzac