About Dawkins, i have to say that i completely and utterly dislike that man. He is the most arrogant and angry individual ever!
Strange, I always thought he was mild mannered and rather genial
sex maniac.
i agree with you, but there is one small problem with this. Many of the scientists who do present a different view also happen to be creationists. and because they are creationists, they are not considered 'real' scientists.
'Many' is something of a poor choice of word here. Creationists who also happen to be practicing biologists are very very rare breeds indeed. I don't think I could name even a few. There are a couple of more that are Intelligent Design proponents.
So lets say you have five thousand electricians giving you one piece of advice and three that are giving you the opposite advise based on philosophical objections to the materialist electricity hypothesis. What do you do?
Im sure what will happen is less and less creationists will be in the field of science and this could lead to unbridled and unchallenged ideas.
You of course realize that for centuries Creationists dominated the field. Might there be a reason they are becoming less common other than some conspiracy to silence them? Maybe they are just not as good at convincing experts in the field that their arguments have merit. We could say the same thing here for any now largely forgotten idea. Those who have done any studying accept that world is at least somewhat spheroid and that in simple terms the common centre of orbit for the planets of the solar system is the sun, not the earth and that diseases are caused by bacteria and viruses rather than demons and spirits. Is this problematic in some way?
interestingly The science journal 'Nature' reported in 1997 that almost 40 percent of biologists, physicists, and mathematicians surveyed believe in a God. So where does that put the research of these individuals?
Well, lets get specific. Francis Collins believes in God. Let's see where that puts his research with a quick look at wikipedia:
quote:
Francis S. Collins (born April 14, 1950), M.D., Ph.D., is an American physician-geneticist, noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes, and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP). He was director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland until August 1, 2008.
On pretty good grounds, I'd say, no?
Does the fact that they believe in God make their research any less accurate then an athiest/evolutionary scientist??
Nope. In fact, Francis Collins is/was both a practicing evolutionist and Christian, he says, "I am unaware of any irreconcilable conflict between scientific knowledge about evolution and the idea of a creator God; why couldn't God have used the mechanism of evolution to create?
And to visit a different discipline John Polkinghorne, who played a role in discovering the quark in the field of physics is also an ordained priest.
quote:
astronomer Robert Jastrow said: “To their chagrin [scientists] have no clear-cut answer, because chemists have never succeeded in reproducing nature’s experiments on the creation of life out of nonliving matter. Scientists do not know how that happened.” He added: “Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation
I agree with him.
quote:
Astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe “The problem for biology is to reach a simple beginning,” “Fossil residues of ancient life-forms discovered in the rocks do not reveal a simple beginning. . . . so the evolutionary theory lacks a proper foundation.”
I have nothing much to say on Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. They aren't biologists as noted, but
they are exploring panspermia, good luck to them. (well to Wickramasinghe, Hoyle passed away some years ago)
quote:
Chemist Richard Dickerson comments on the chance that molecules could have formed in a primoridal soup: “It is therefore hard to see how polymerization [linking together smaller molecules to form bigger ones] could have proceeded in the aqueous environment of the primitive ocean, since the presence of water favors depolymerization [breaking up big molecules into simpler ones] rather than polymerization.”
And indeed it is difficult. What do you think he spent the rest of the article (titled "Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life") doing but trying to show how that might have happened? This is called a quote mine. It is somewhat standard to start a scientific article by explaining to the reader what the problem is that you propose to discuss and maybe even solve before going on to do that very thing. You'll excuse me if I don't go into the rest, why don't you try investigating a few of them yourself?
1. without the right atmosphere there would be no organic soup.
2.Without the organic soup there would have been no amino acids.
3. Without amino acids we would not have proteins.
4. Without proteins there would be no nucleotides.
5. Without nucleotides there would be no DNA and without DNA there are no cells that can reproduce themselves.
6. Without a covering membrane, no living cell. Meaning NO LIFE
7. without life on earth, no evolution of the species.
it all must come back to where it all began, otherwise its pointless isnt it?
What's pointless, exactly?
Evolution alone tracks the changes in species. I accept that. But evolution also discounts an intelligent designer by its very nature. According to evolution, a designer/creator had no hand in the species on earth
Again, not true. Evolution has no opinions since it has no brain.
Evolution is just the observed phenomenon that life changes over time. It might be the case that this is as the result of purely naturalistic causes or it might be the case that a supernatural agent is directing things. The modern evolutionary theory as yet has no supernatural agents included in its explanatory framework, to paraphrase Laplace: Peg, I have no need for that hypothesis. Some evolutionary biologists believe there is a supernatural guiding force, and that belief doesn't usually get in the way of them doing their job.
At this time, nobody has proposed a scientific method for discovering the actions of these intelligent agents that might be at work, nobody has proposed how they are changing life over time exactly and therefore there is no scientific theory.
according to evolution, the species on earth evolved from each other and this evolution began with simple celled organisms and progressed to all the species we see on earth today. With this in mind, evolution must by necessity be able to explain the origin of the first living cell and how that cell became a living organism, and how that organism developed and what it developed into ect
Explain why.
According to you, common descent (not evolution), is the proposal that all species on earth have evolved from other organisms and that all current life shares a common ancestry. Evidence from Natural History and the Theory of Evolution itself would suggest that this common ancestor was likely a single celled organism. From this, how does it follow that that common descent, the theory of evolution or evolution itself must by necessity be able to explain the origin of life. Can you show how they explain the origin of life - a Nobel prize await.
If God created the first life, then it stands to reason that the theory of evolution will never be able to explain the origin of life even if we assume it could otherwise. If Aliens created the first life, then we aren't going to get any closer by looking at how chemicals on prebiotic earth interact.
Obviously some evolutionary scientists see the need to offer such an explanation because many theories over the origin of life have been formulated by them.
The study of biological evolution and the study of biological origins are not unrelated studies. Indeed - I have already given you a simple ten minute video that explains how thermodynamics and other simple forces coupled eventually with ideas from the theory of evolution can generate a sort of proto-life form. I have not denied that the fields are related - it just doesn't serve well to say inaccurate things about what evolution is (the fact that populations change), the theory that explains those changes (inheritable changes acted upon by selective pressures etc) and the study of the history of nature (natural history) and the still somewhat disputed fact that all current living organisms are related by a single common ancestor.
As long as you don't get them confused we're doing fine.
Do we want to know how life might originate? Yes, that's why we spend millions researching it.
Do we need to know how life originated to know that Chimpanzees and Humans share a common ancestor? No.
Happy with that?
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