But facts about what may have happened billions of yrs ago would need some sort of a presupposition. The earth has evolved and evolution has occured therefore for this to occur the earth is billions of yrs old. This is a framework and presupposition. Building your evidence upon a belief of origins etc.
theories are built on evidence, not the other way around. this is the fundamental problem with creationism, that they try to build their evidence on a predisposition.
the only major assumption in evolutionary theory is that things are as they appear to be. it's like i have three pictures of a car, and at one point it's at a certain position on the road, and in the next picture it's another 20 feet up the road, and in the next it's another 30 feet up the road. is it safe to assume that it was moving when the pictures were taken? or did the car blow up, and a new one magically appeared 20 feet up the road? what if the images of the car had a little motion blur?
what he have of the fossil record is snapshots. but we have ALOT of snapshots. it's pretty easy to piece together what happened given all the evidence. enough still pictures one after the other does in fact make a movie.
Ultimately all the facts are the same for creation and evolution. Its the same earth,same universe, same plants, same fossils. The only difference is how you interpret them and this depends upon your belief about history.
how about egyptian records dating back 5 thousand years, with no mention of either hebrews or a flood significantly larger than their yearly one? remember, they kept accurate records of these things, farming the nile delta half the year was how they lived.
how about continuous tree-ring data that goes back at least 40,000 years?
the dozen isotopes that all date the earth at 4.3 billion years?
For example, consider the science of genetics & natural selection. Evolutionists believe in natural selection which is real science in the present. Creationists also believe in natural selection. Same science same facts. However interpretations now come into play after the facts have been discovered. Evolutionists believe that over millions of yrs one kind of animal has changed into a totally different kind.
where's the big leap here, exactly? natural selection is the method that darwin described: evolution. the theory of evolution is "evolution BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION." the bit about animals changing gradually over time has been observed. heck, look at every purebred pedigree animal. these are all animals that humans specifically bred to bring out specific characteristics. we even have records of how such animals have changed over the years. photographic ones even. purebred cats and dogs today look markedly different than they used to 50 years ago. 100 years ago. the only difference is that that is artificial selection, and in the wild it happens on its own.
and i can forsee the argument, "but they're still dogs and cats."
i'll repeated the standard response: 1+1=2. still single digits! 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1=12! uh oh, double digits. changes add up. there's no glass barrier there to stop it and make things stay always to same by some arbitrary human definition.
this happens and has happened within the span of recorded human history. it doesn't rely
Creationists believe that God created seperate kinds of animals and plants to reproduce their own kind,
if that's the case, god sure went to a lot of trouble, and still makes animals today, curiously enough, out of other ones.
Therefore one animal will not turn into a totally different kind
doesn't follow. gradual changes in "kinds" can happen. and do. all that verse means is that animals mate with the same species.
So you can see how they are both science
no. this bit: "Creationists believe that God" isn't science. it's not testable. it makes no testable claims. it cannot be observed.
but what one believes about what happened in the past can dramatically change how you will view and interpret the evidence.
or how you choose to ignore it.
What did Stephen Jay Ghould mean when he wrote this...
"Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. Science is a quintesentially human activity, not a mechanized, robot-like accumulation of objective information, leading by laws of logic to inescapable interpretation"
certain theories acceptably predict facts. for instance, the fact that things fall can be read using newtonian physics, or relativity. it doesn't change the fact that things falls, it just has slightly different meanings in each theory.
the facts however outright contradict literal young earth creationism in every aspect. in claims that clearly contradict facts and observations, they most certainly do speak for themselves. a theory has to accurately explain the observations, and make accurate testable claims. creationism does neither.
This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 06-16-2004 01:34 AM
). What you haven't done is describe what a positive missing link would look like. This is important because otherwise you can just sit back and keep blurting out "it's human" or "it's an ape". For your judgement to have weight you must first describe what the missing link SHOULD look like.
™ Version 4.2