A Teacher on the Front Line

Well I was really looking for page 9 when I got to the end of that story! Poor Bryce was pretty easy to convince. I just figured maybe he answered the question because the teacher was trying so hard to convince him in a pleasant way and he did say you need to understand it even if you don't believe it. I had to go back and find the part where he initially didn't answer the question to get the gist of what this all meant to the poor hopeful teacher.There was quite a lot of religious overtones there as well. Especially when the teacher thinks to himself -"If I do this wrong, I'll lose him." That sounds like a priest concerned for the kid's soul. This sounds like there is nothing to do with scientific evidence involved in believing in an intelligent designer. The argument is always made to sound like religion vs science when in actual fact it is two different interpretations of the same scientific evidence. So you see this is not about religion at all -Darwinism may not be criticized scientifically or any other way.It reminds me of the Chinese paleontologist (Can't remember his name right now)that said 'In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government; in America, you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.' ID proponents only want to be allowed to give the evidence against evolution, they have no intention of introducing religion into the science class but it always gets taken as religion when somebody finds Darwinism unsatisfying as an explanation for life. No problem there,the more the merrier - as long as the downside gets a hearing as well. Not when it comes to evolution. We ask the same questions -what are we doing here? Where did we come from? For a religious viewpoint to have any validity, it has to resonate with reality -they are not two different realities. What happened and why we are here -the answer has to be the truth not just what makes you happy. So what? So we evolved from something like a chimpanzee, what's the difference? That sounds to me like a con job. No, refined diets, less function, less growth. That's why we don't often have the space though plenty people fit them in just fine and in the ones where they are impacted, they often partially erupt -so space is a bit short in a portion of the population.
As for being prone to lower back pain. I'd love to see the evidence for that.It sounds like an evolutionary assumption derived like the wisdom tooth problem from imagination. I say we're built to walk upright with anatomical features that support that ability. So you see the lack of evidence for evolution is just as easily explained as the so-called evidence.
What do you mean there are no transitional forms?!! Everything is transitional! Deceptive logic that.10/10 for lack of the usual mocking aggression. Edited by Beretta, : A positive point

Why is it that nobody has ever seen me mention any evidence, no matter how many times I mention various lines of evidence?Lets see, how about
-the fossils, sudden appearance and general stasis
-the Cambrian explosion -sudden appearance of practically all phyla
- the information rich genetic code
-the inability of ”science’ to explain how the information got there
-the lack of transitional forms (don't bother to tell me everything is transitional, that's just a dodge)
-the continually rehashed icons of evolution that despite being a collection of old worn, some fraudulent, others thoroughly discredited, most out of date somehow never seem to change in the textbooks. One would think with all the vast network of science, something more convincing would come along, but no.
-mutational load, absence of beneficial mutations being demonstrated, surplus of examples of negative effects of mutation
-the specified complexity of living things.I suppose now I’ll be off topic so perhaps we need another thread but since adminnosy is asking the same questions perhaps off topic can be tolerated for the meantime. Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Add note at bottom.

Well that's the common belief in this day and age and it sure is sinking in with so many people. Actually a religious belief that is not consonant with reality is not worth having.If your religious belief is just a myth or a legend apart from reality -why bother?You see science should be answering questions about things that are repeatable and experimentally verifiable but they have ventured far from their turf by answering historical and religious questions and making their own religion which is then foisted on the world as fact. We came from chemicals that somehow (we really don't know how) got together and made proteins somehow and learned how to reproduce all at once (because NS and mutation can't come into play until we have a reproducing cell remember).Then somehow new information came about through random mutations and where there was no information for a functioning leg or wing, genes self-organized to make those sorts of things turning a primitive ancestor into more and more complicated forms of biological life until voila -here we are with a brain (which is definately not a random piece of equipment)and some very complex hardware which are our bodies and we know that it all happened by chance and natural law because....what else is there after all!!Of course this is definately not provable because all that mutations do (that we can actually demonstrate) is create disorder and mutations (disorder) is accumulating in the human race but luckily we have a philosophy that says we are still evolving by natural means and getting better and better all the time but we can't see the evidence of this because it happens far too slowly, you see. And this is 'science's' best shot at striking a compromise with religious believers because we are talking about 'different realms of reality;. What they actually mean is science and reality say this and religion says that and you have your happy little religion although it is certainly not true (-how could it be- only science can say what is really true) and we can all relax and have our 'own truths'.You realize of course that the truth exists quite apart from what anyone believes and either we were created or natural law managed to throw us together into a state of order via NS and mutation or whatever other mechanism we can come up with to explain it. Science offers us their natural philosophy of life and expects us to accept that it is truth.Before any evidence is put together, only natural law is permissable and it is a philosophy not a fact. Well if it isn't, why bother about it all all?

Hello Rrhain - sorry - been struggling with the connection. The problem is I'm not talking about the non-objective stuff; what I'm saying is that if I believe that my God created all kinds of biological creatures spearately in the beginning and specified that they would create after their own kind, then that is an objective claim that has nothing to do with pie in the sky differing descriptions of the same thing -like wavelength etc vs music.
I'm also saying that if that is a fact then evolution is not a fact no matter how many Christians try to marry the two and compromise.
The question is not whether or not an explanation is based on a personal belief, but is it true?
An explanation may be based on a personal belief and true.
Personal beliefs are rarely based on nothing.We have a book that says this is what happened and these are the first two people and they gave birth to this one who lived this many years and gave rise to that one who did this and that and then died -the whole history of the planet supposedly by the ONE who did it, who was there and who knows what happened.
Now either that book is true or it is false and how can anyone be bothered to put the two, evolution and creation into the same box and change the story to suit themselves? If I can't even believe the first chapter of the history of life given by the creator to the people who were there in the beginning , then why should I believe any of it? Why bother with a myth when the truth would be so much better even if it was a hard and hopeless truth to swallow.Science should be answering questions about light and gravity and things that they can test, experiment with and duplicate and use for the advancement of mankind. Those are the sorts of things that they can answer. What happened in the beginning may make for some interesting possibilities but they can't be known and tested, they can only be assumed and guessed at. What science has done is they have said lets see how far we can go with the hypothesis that only natural causes can account for what we have on this planet and the stories they come up with on this imaginary starting point may be complete and utter fabrications because they have started with a philosophical assumption that there is no creator who plays any part in it. The most amazing part for me is that they write out intelligence as a possible starting point totally arbitrarily despite the complexity of what exists and our inability to say anything at all about how life got started.
Even people like Francis Crick has basically said that DNA formation by chance is undoutably impossible so he hypothesizes about seeding of life from another planet which only pushes the problem back a step rather than allowing the possibility of an intelligent agent, like God.It's amazing what people will do to keep even the possibility of God out of the picture. Billions of years ago, there was nothing, absolutely nothing and nothing exploded out of nowhere and gave rise to everything, planets, stars etc. Life began somehow in a dark warm pond when amino acids formed spontaneously and ignored the right handed AA's in the process of self assembling themselves into a chain that somehow learned how to replicate itself so that mutation and natural selection could begin to play a part in the organizing of new forms of life - and whether this or some other story is true, we comfort ourselves that thereafter only natural processes account for everything that exists because that is our arbitrary non-objective starting point from which we proceed to explain everything.Since we are scientists no matter what actually did happen we must limit ourselves to natural explanations (whether true or not) or it would not be science.This is the alternate religion you see - no creator, no intelligent ordering just natural processes that somehow existed after the big bang and could be used to explain everything thereafter.
Now whether your story or mine is closest to the correct one, lets just say that something is true and did happen and all the other stories are not true by the law of non-contradiction but truth is out there. Well origin of life researchers are working on it actually and there's only one problem with what they're doing and that is that they assume that life is possible from natural law alone so they may never get anywhere because of that one big naturalistic assumption. Actually evolution only tells us what they think happened -all they have to do is supply the details and make the creation story hang together on some sort of plausible beginnning.God may have had something to do with it but that would not be 'science' so we have to exclude that from consideration. In other words natural processes -no God required. Really. But that would be intelligent design, wouldn't it. We need them to do this by themselves so lets not complicate the issue with intelligence shall we? How do we know that mutation is the exact thing that makes it happen? Well we're here aren't we so even if the probability of making one protein by chance is completely off the scale we comfort ourselves that it must have happened like we say it does. That is 'science!'. Well we can watch finch beaks showing oscillating variation but that says absolutely nothing about how the finches got there in the first place. Remember years and years of mutating bacteria and fruitflies only ever produced mutated bacteria and fruitflies and saying that we haven't had enough time is as good as saying we do not actually know for sure, we have no evidence for what we contend did in fact happen. Yes but that does not mean they self-create -where do they come from? Information. And you think that somehow these neutral mutations slowly but surely put things like legs and wings together? No plan, just random errors and no morphological change obviously because they are neutral. Natural selection can only preserve what is already created.Actually NS can only "preserve" by destroying what is not preserved, and, therefore has no power to create. So if there's a chance element in there -then chance really is the vital ingredient. Because nature seems to choose to reject what is not right by NS rather than making something new. But experimentally the only advantageous mutations that have ever been demonstrated were ones that showed a loss of information; for example bacterial resistance where something missing in the bacteria happens to turn out to be an advantage in a particular circumstance.
Nobody has ever demonstrated morohological change due to new information being generated and we need lots of that if the theory is to be remotely feasible. We can't just assume it happens because we believe that the fossil record shows it.
Can you give me one example of an information increase that demonstrably occurred due to mutation? Actually it does require that you believe in evolution in order to make up the story of how it all happened by natural processes. You mean all the mythical stuff that science can't deal with by virtue of its lack of fact. And luckily because most of them seem to believe in evolution, you should be just fine if you stick with the acceptable party line.