Message 1 of this topic, in its entirety:
This thread began life as Message 23. It was off-topic and so was used to begin this new thread. --Admin
"Anyone who doubts this is a religious issue need only spend a little time here watching the less experienced Creationists talk about God and the Bible in threads that are strictly about science."
This is the real crux of the debate. It is a God issue. Evolution requires a staggering amount of faith, moreso than creationism in my opinion, and since God alone, or nobody if you are an atheist, was present "in the beginning," neither side will be able to "scientifically" prove their assertion. It is from this viewpoint that I am contemplating the practicality of participating in these discussions. It really is a God issue.
I imagine that I will be criticized for the following unsupported statements, but please permit me a few cursory observations regarding this site:
1. Horizontal variation within a genotype is quite a different thing than vertical evolution. Genetic mutation leading to increasingly complex processes/organizations is illogical and "unscientific." While being overly simplistic, reading about the assertion that taking 200 steps backward (negative result of a mutation/Devolution) and one step forward (some perceived "beneficial" mutation/evolution) has resulted in intelligent life from a primordial soup is outright comical, except for the fact that it has so many proselytes.
2. When you boil evolution down to its quintessence, all you really have is spontaneous generation standing upon some magical amount of time that is "theorized" to overturn everything that current, repeatable, observable, scientific inquiry tells us - life does not come from non-life, or for that matter something from nothing, which would by definition speak of a First Cause, but I digress.
3. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. It's a bit late, so I'm not going to elaborate. A rudimentary understanding of physics, I hope, will render this citation self-evident.
I apologize in advance if this post is a bit off topic and out of place.
Regards,
Bryan
This message has been edited by Admin, 02-06-2005 09:19 AM
Getting back to message 1, I see that (IMO) it was a rather poorly defined start to a topic. I also don't like the topic title. Had message 1 been run through the "Proposed New Topics" process, I think it would have been forced into a refinement into a better topic. I think this illustrates the problem of spinning a message of another topic off into becoming its own new topic.
Jman267 has apparently taken message 1, or the fallout of message 1, as a launching point to further diffuse the topic into way too many diverse themes. What can I say? - We got a mess of a topic here. The options are to either close it down, or to try to make the best of it that we can. My preference would be the first option, but I will for now go with the second option.
Participents beware - You are taking part in a "disaster area" of a topic.
Please make any responses to this topic, to the "General..." topic, link below.
Adminnemooseus
™ Version 4.2