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Author | Topic: Evolution or Creation | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
As the others have amply pointed out, the "choice" you describe is a false dichotomy, a fallacy which is used to deceive and manipulate people.
Who taught you that you must make that choice? Who taught you that those are the only choices avaiable to you? Not science. It was "creation science". "Creation science" has lied to you over and over again regarding what science is and what the evidence is. It's also lying to you about this. The real choice is choosing between lies and seeking the truth. Why do you choose lies?
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Another benefit is that it allows you to understand the rest of biology much better. As Theodosius Dobzhansky said in the title of his famous paper: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" (I suggest you read that paper if you can get it; Dobzhansky was a theistic evolutionary biologist). Without evolution, the only explanation is "That was how it was created", but with no 'how' it came to be. Dr. Eugenie Scott told of the biology seniors who would take her anthropology class to satisfy general education requirements and for an "easy A" ("the poor fools", since it was not an easy class). The biology department didn't teach much about evolution, but she did. Year after year she would see these biology students as, part-way through the semester, the light would suddenly go on in their heads as they would say to themselves "So that's why ... ". It quite literally wasn't until they had learned about evolution that anything they had studied and learned in those past four years made any sense to them.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Whether some supernatural entity did it or it happened naturally by physics (or even if some supernatural entity used physics to do it), the results would be the same. We wouldn't be able to tell which it was.
Does that prove "Goddidit"? No. All it means is that science does not eliminate the possibility. Because science can say nothing about the supernatural. Which is exactly what science has been saying all along. It's the creationists who've been insisting that science disproves God. That if science is right then God is wrong. That's a creationist claim, not a scientific one. Whether God (or whichever supernatural entity was responsible) had created the universe or it had happened naturally (acknowledging the the difficulty of speaking about "nature" and "physics" before either had come into existence as we understand them) makes no difference to science. It it the goal and enterprise of science to study the universe and to try to understand how hit works. Even if God or Whomever had caused the Big Bang, science still needs to follow the evidence and try to figure out as much about it as it can. Or else discover that the evidence leads elsewhere instead. But to make contrary-to-fact claims about the universe, as "creation science" constantly does, is quite another matter.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Now if I am correct that there is a God and a Heaven to gain and a Hell to avoid. Many of those people may go to Hell because of the hoax. Because they took it as the missing link and refused to believe God. Uh, no. It wasn't science's fault, nor the hoax's fault, if anyone had decided to stop believing in God. It was their religion's fault. Because it was their religion that had taught them that such a "missing link" would be proof that their god didn't exist. Case in point: D. Jon Scott. A young YEC (young-earth creationist) who was so active in the debate that he ran his own creation/evolution forum. His story is at the "What is the Inspiration for the Genesis Panthesis Website?" link of his "Genesis Panthesis" site at No webpage found at provided URL: http://genesispanthesis.tripod.com/main.html (because of the way that the site is constructed, you have to click on the link yourself -- sorry, but tripod pops up a few extra windows). Remember that "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds that made the cover of National Geographic? Later turned out to have been wrong, two different fossils put together by the Chinese farmer who had sold them to the paleontologists. But before that information got to him, he was faced with fossil evidence that his religion had taught him disproved his religion and he then did what his religion had taught him; he become an atheist. Not because of anything that science taught, but rather solely because of what his religion taught. From his own personal witness:
[quote]Then, in september of 1999, the bomb dropped. I picked up my issue of the National Geographic and saw what else on a page advertising an upcoming issue; but Sinornithosaurus millenii! It had long steak-knife-shaped teeth like a T. rex, a long, muscular tail, hyper-extendable "switchblade" claws on the hind legs like Velociraptor mongoliensis, a narrow snout that looked almost like a bill, a bird-like pubic structure, and worst of all - feathers! I simply stared at the page for a few moments, muttered "oh shit!" to myself a few times, and got up to check the N.G.News web site. This wasn't just some artistic depiction of what a reptile/bird might look like - and it was no hoax. It was a small dromaeosaurid ("raptor") with killing claws, razor-sharp teeth, and a pair of wing-like arms complete with plumage. My heart sank, and my gut churned. This was it - the one proof of evolution I had always asked for but never thought would come to light. In my mind, I was betting that even if evolution were true, the chances of finding such a beautiful example of transition would be slim enough to be dismissed as impossible. And yet here it was - proof. I stepped outside to compose myself, and stood there looking at the world around me. Weeks later, I began making plans to dismantle to the Talk.Science Archive, all the while researching the Christian religion. I soon came to the conclusion that since much of the first ten or twelve chapters of genesis had been plagiarized from Chaldean fairy tales and mythos, the truthfulness of the Bible must be strictly spiritual rather than spiritual and historical. It wasn't very long before I began to realize that since the 'historical' sections of the Bible, particularly those stolen from Chaldean mythos, were intended to influence spiritual truth - that the early Israelites must have simply been making up their own "spiritual truths", trying to make the fairy tales of their Hebrew (Chaldean) ancestors match up. I was faced with the realization that the Bible could not even be taken as spiritually true...it was/is nothing more than a book of myths and fables from a time and place in which people had no scientific knowledge, and made up these stories to explain what was going on around them (though the people making up these fables probably thought that they were coming to revelations given by their God[s]). Then that day in 1999 came back to me. I remembered standing outside on my porch, looking at the natural world of which I had always known myself to be an integral part - albeit created as such. On that day, however, I began to look at the world in a new light. I looked at the trees, thinking about how they worked. Photosynthesis, receiving energy from the sun, these creatures had limbs which branched out in every direction, tipped with leaves made green with chlorophyl, drawing energy from the sunlight which they captured. As they fed on the radiant light, blocking the light from the ground below, I began to think of how they might exist without God. A tiny bacterium absorbs energy from both heat and chemicals. Plants are exposed to heat, feed on chemicals, and have chemicals that allow them to feed on heat more efficiently - on a much larger scale than primitive bacterial cell strands. I thought, perhaps, that since some algae is bacterial and other is plant-life, that some bacteria might have used chlorophyl to extract nutrients from the sun. Also, perhaps from this algae, primitive coats of slime would evolve and dwell on rocks near river beds. In a few million years, you'd have moss growing on moist soil. Millions of years could come and go, and plants which harness the power of the sun and extract more nutrients from the matter around them (whether it be water or dirt) would spread more abundantly and prosper over their contemporaries. I looked at the trees again. They were large, tightly-packed groups of cells, which over millions of years grew larger and larger, growing green leaves which act as solar panels. They were cell-colonies trying to survive in an environment where new oportunities are as ample as the number of possible combinations of DNA. So here they were, beautiful, and majestic, and sitting there because of the opportunistic nature of living cells - not because God put them there. They were green because they had Chlorophyl to absorb sunlight - not because God thought that humans would think it an attractive color. I looked down at my own hands, studying my finger prints. I pondered the reason God might have given them to me. I recalled to myself that only primates have finger prints, and that they used the blunt part of their fingers - rather than claws, to grip limbs and branches. They have traction-treds on their fingers and toes. This is probably why all primates also have flat nails. But then why do humans have finger prints? For indentification? We've only had finger print identification for the past hundred years or so. Even if the world were only six thousand years old, that's less than a thirtieth of a percent of the time since humans were first created. Why give us this feature, why design such intricate patterns, if God knew it would be an absurdly short amount of time between the first use of finger print identification and the creation of DNA fingerprinting, which is much more accurate? And what how would this be any different from believing that the bridge of the nose were created for sunglasses, or the opposable thumb designed so that our hand could fit into gloves? The only way these hands of mine made sense, with the gripping fingers, the traction-tredded finger tips, the flat nails, was if my distant ancestors - and the ancestors of all humans - were creatures who used their front limbs for climbing. And why such low body hair? Wouldn't it be more effecient to not have body hair at all? We use resources to grow this hair which appearently serves no purpose. If we evolved from hairy creatures, it would make sense that we evolved to use our resources more effeciently and wasted less of our reserves on this useless feature. That way, the hair wouldn't have to be completely absent, since the industrial age - when we could produce many of our own resources from previousely unavailable sources - occured at a time which vary well might have been before we had the chance to evolve a completely bald body. Of course it must have been a bit more complex than that, but I had a feeling I was pretty much on-track with this line of reasoning. I looked down at my hands again, and studied them for a few moments longer... "This is it..." I spoke to myself softly, "Welcome to the real world." [/quote] He didn't stay an atheist for long. It wasn't on that site, but after Google'ing about a bit, I found another web page of his (No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.geocities.com/thewaysofold/corvun/). He's now an Odic Red Witch and is still strongly anti-Christian. Because of what his Christian teachers, worshippers of "creation science", had taught him.
If I am wrong and there is no God, no Heaven, and no Hell they did not miss anything. Lets see I have a 50 50 chance of being right so What IF? Your numbers are way off. It might be proper to say that it's a 50/50 chance of whether the supernatural exists or not. But if it does exist, then the question becomes one of which verson of the supernatural is true? Even if we were to assume (which ia all we can do with regard to the supernatural, BTW) that all versions of the supernatural, or at least the overwhelmingly vast majority, involve the existence of gods, then the question becomes one of which god. Out of all the gods who have ever existed, they all have equal probably of actually existing. What's so special about your god, except that it happens to be yours? How many gods have there been? Many thousands, at least. So YHWH has one chance in many thousands of being the right one. After having factored out all the scenarios that don't include gods. Low probability. And even if you choose the right god, you then have to choose the right theology. How many different theologies are there attached to your god? And if you don't choose the right theology, then you still lose. Lowers the odds even more. Edited by dwise1, : D. Jon Scott
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
dwise1 writes: Uh, no. It wasn't science's fault, nor the hoax's fault, if anyone had decided to stop believing in God. I was not refering to people that already believed in God but people that were born after the hoax and was told it was the missing link therby believing in man evolving from nothing and never giving God a thought. Remember this hoax lasted 41 years. But like I said if there is no God it didn't make any difference.
OK, you did say that in message 191, to which I was responding:
ICANT writes: Now if I am correct that there is a God and a Heaven to gain and a Hell to avoid. Many of those people may go to Hell because of the hoax. Because they took it as the missing link and refused to believe God. But what was the cause of that line, "Because they took it as the missing link and refused to believe God." What's the connection? Why would anyone believe that a missing link would require them to not believe [in] God? Does science say that? No! Does anti-evolution religious rhetorics say that? Oh ja, you betcha! That was my point. So if you are responding to my post, then address my point! Basically, you've got three groups of people affected by Piltdown:1. Believers who refuse to look at the facts. They don't investigate, but rather reject everything out-of-hand that doesn't agree with their beliefs. Their rejection of Piltdown was because it was a missing link; it was only after scientists had exposed it as a hoax that they then switched to rejecting it because it was a hoax. 2. Believers who are willing to examine the facts. In this case, they fell for the hoax and they lost their faith because that is what their religion had taught them that they must do. 3. Non-believers who accepted Piltdown at face value and, because the religionists fervently preached that accepting evolution requires rejection of God, took the religionists at face value and rejected God. When people do exactly what you teach them they must do, basic common courtesy calls for you to not make such a show of outrage and surprise. If Piltdown caused anyone, believer or non-believer, to turn away from God, then the fault is that of what religion taught. The fault does not lie with what science teaches. Because science does not say anything about God, nor can it, nor does it claim to. You should read some of the essays that Dr. Allan H. Harvey, a working physicist and a practicing Christian, wrote for his Sunday School classes: No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/steamdoc/writings.htm. In "Science and Christian Apologetics" (No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/steamdoc/writings/apologetics.html) he tells of a co-worker from Taiwan, Albert, a non-believer just as you described:
quote: If you are so concerned about non-believers being misled into refusing to believe in God, then why do you insist on continuing to mislead them? PSOn the matter of children raised on "creation science" being especially vulnerable, we have a PowerPoint slide that Kent Hovind would use (from his seminar tape 4, at 42 minutes, 55 seconds): quote: No idea where they got their statistics from, nor what kind of a spin they tried to put on it. For actual cases, visit ex-YEC Glenn Morton's page of personal stories and testimonials at No webpage found at provided URL: http://home.entouch.net/dmd/person.htm. Steve Smith's story is a good example:
quote: When will the scales fall from your eyes, that you may begin to see? Edited by dwise1, : PS
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
I believe that man without the shed blood of Jesus applied to his spirit will spend a conscience eternity in the lake of fire with the devil and the false prophets. What about the followers of those false prophets? Even though those false prophets and their followers all claim to have "shed blood of Jesus applied to his spirit"? "Creation science" is a false theology and its creators and proponents are false prophets. We have witnessed their wicked fruit by which we know them.
You choose to believe man and man's wisdom. Which describes "creation science". Which you place above God in that you believe that if "creation science" is not true, then God does not exist. Before you offer to remove the mote from my eye, please first remove the boulder from yours.
But a word of warning, this world is the devil's domain until Jesus comes back and he is very deceitful and is the father of all lies. So can you really believe what you think you see? I've only seen that one used on me once before. A creationist emailed me suggesting that since Satan has dominion over the world, He had falsified all the fossil evidence in order to trick us into disbelieving in God. However, I replied to him, Satan never had to go through all that work. All He had to do was to leave the natural world as it was and instead invent a false theology that would trick its followers into believing that if the world really is as it truly is, then God could not possibly exist. That false theology is "creation science" and, true to its supernatural creator, it is based on and works through lies and deception. So by following "creation science" and by promoting its lies and deception, which Christian deity are you actually serving? And if the religion that you claim to be following is true, then you and your false prophets will have your reward. Off to the loch with yew, Nessie!
I thought I said my God had supplied everything I needed. Lets see I have a beautiful waterfront home, a 2007 Entourage van, a 2007 Nissan pickup, and a farm. They are all paid for all I have to pay is the taxes each year to the government to keep them. God paid for all that? And signed the deeds over to you? Could you please scan and post the documents so that we can see God's own Signature? So far, the only god actually documented to exist is Amaterasu. But then doesn't Satan pay His followers with worldly goods? Are you sure you checked the signature on those deeds?
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5952 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Seems to me that you are worshipping the Bible, not God. No, not the Bible. But rather his fallible human interpretation of others' fallible human interpretations of what the Bible says and of what they think it should say. Such that if any of those fallible human interpretations should prove to be wrong then God does not exist or at the very least is a pathological liar. Yeah, they won't even take responsibility for their own actions. If they're wrong, then it's God's fault. And all the time that they claim to be following the "Word of God", they are instead following the "Word of Man".
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