Evolution vs Creation

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Originally posted by Servent of the Cross:
OK OK PEOPLES........I see that non of you are taking in what I am saying so I Give up.....obviously no one here beleives in creation so I am going to stop trying, cuz I know None of you people really care...so What ever..........believe what you want cuz I dont care N E more........Cuz there is no scientific evendence to prove my case there is only the bible and my faith. so I am done

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People took in what Servent was saying all too well, and responded to it carefully and thoughtfully. They took time to reply with references and examples and details and careful presentation.Clearly, people do care.I care because of the dreadful effect of this kind of misinformation on basic science education. Christians should care because of the dreadful effect this has on young Christians especially. They are being taught a linkage between blatantly erroneous science and their faith.Think about it: even young earth creationism does not really rely on most of the claims being made here: that the earth's spin is slowing, or that the Sun is shrinking, or that planets are evenly spaced, or any of the other supposed proofs that were offered. These were just some very bad arguments which are often made by creationists. Correcting these errors does nothing to refute the notions of a young earth or a recent origin to life or any of the basic concepts of creationism.We do refute those ideas as well of course, in many threads, but here it was mostly even more trivial errors being addressed.Yet look at the reaction!Good luck to you, servant. My hope is that despite the bluster, the shock of this thread will stay with you, and you'll start to care a bit yourself. I think you care more than you let on. I hope so.Cheers -- Sylas[This message has been edited by Sylas, 03-18-2004]

Servent of the Cross, I am afraid it's a whole lot more insidious than that. Creationists get their information like "sun shrinkage" from websites that DELIBERATELY present a false view to their audience.We call it "lying", not very christian, is it?Mark

What I would like to know is who decides what the species evolves into? Who came up with the plan gills work? Evolution suggests that nature would have to have some sort of thinking power in order to think of gills, and claws, and how we recycle air through trees, and how our bodies work. To think that nature thinks, of course, is not possible. If you want to argue this with "oh, the theory of natural selection of course decides what species evolve into" then take a look at how complex they are, and if you say well, nature made mistakes in evolution where gills didn't work, or claws came about because creatures needed something to defend themselves with. then you still run into my statment i made above about how does nature know the claws would work? I'm proposing evolution with a mind to it. Oviously if evolution does exsist, then it has to have some kind of thought behind it as to where to go. In my bielive it is God, you may bielive what ever higher being you chose.

The environment selects individuals best adapted to it. These individuals leave more offspring, so that their unique adaptations eventually spread through the population. There's no thinking power needed - just a source of random variety in organisms; aka random mutation. Of course it doesn't. There just has to be a source of variation and re-inforcement of beneficial traits, and both these things exist: random mutation and natural selection.You seem to have this idea that evolution is deterministic. This is not true. Evolution is random, sort of, so if we were to rewind time and let the story of life play out on Earth again, the results would be different each time.

Crashfrog, you are the most patient man I know. I can't imagine myself having to repeat over and over the same stuff answering over and over the same misconceptions about evolution from people that never bothered to look up the information in the first place.Was that a run-on? Anyway, you go you!

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The Laminator

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Every mistaken poster is a chance to explain it in a new way and, just possibly, increase my own understanding of the theory, which is amateur in the extreme.

Your missing my piont, I understand about natural selection and such, but what i'm asking is what decides the next mutation is going to work? Sure, they adapt to their surroundings and other species around them, but what decides the best mutation is going to be gills? and who thinks how should gills work in order to be a functioning part of that creature? don't get me wrong, I bielive in some form of evolution, i just bielive it was caused by god.

You have a bit of a confused picture here.There is no "best". The whole mess of mutation and selection doesn't do anything more than leave living things that work well enough in the environment of the time.There is also no expectation that things of some complexity would appear thought a single mutation. Gills can be produced through changes in simpler oxygen capturing structures.I don't know the pathway to gills ( I'm not sure it would preserve well) but here's a scenario:No mutation produced gills. Multicellular animals have a problem of getting food and oxygen to all the cells. At some point directed flow may prove to work well. That is, vessels of some sort. Once you have those a mutation which gets some in contact with more water will enable better oxygen pick up.Mutations could have produced a lot of different forms of this (say vessels lining the sides of the body). Maybe they did. Maybe they produced a lot of different pretty good tries at it.. At some point the tries were a lot like gills. These work well enough. They're still used.Our lungs aren't as efficient as they could be. They aren't "best". Gills might not be either but they're good enough.No mutation could be expected to produce gills as we see them now in a single step. There are lots of possible ways to get gills though.As for God, many would agree with you that if he used the mechanism of evolution he is a much more creative God than the literalists seem to believe in.

Remember, too: Mama Oyster lays 100,000 eggs, and 99,998 of them, on the average, never grow up to be full-grown, reproducing oysters. Any of the 100,000 that have those little variations to give them just a little better chance of doing so are the ones that are most likely to be the two. The same applies to rabbits and australopithecines, only the number of offspring is less. But with any organism, more offspring start the race than get to the finish line.That's half of natural selection: having a large pool to select from.

ok, now that i know where your all comeing from i just have one more question, do you bielive in punctuated evolution or gradual? also, the response earlier saying that they could of made a gills and other breathing aparates for that, my response is who decided that air was a good source to live off of and how to collect it into a breathing aparateus? did the creatures just do it volintarly? Also a response to earlier posts about christians being biast to there faith, many of you are biast to your beliefs as well. Thank you all for reading my post and explaining some of your bielieves to me.P.S. there is a serious lack of people supporting creation in this forum, lol, it makes it hard for a debat with out support.[This message has been edited by Voice, 04-24-2004]

The environment. Selection. The laws of physics.When you flip a coin, what decides whether or not it comes up heads?

It's like this. Pretend you're running a race with a gun at the finish line. When you beat the other guy you grab the gun and shoot him. That way everybody knows who won.Who decided who won? Nobody. It wasn't a "decision" process. You were faster, so now he's dead.If oxygen is a better metabolic agent than other chemicals, it's because the laws of physics are the way that they are. As well as everywhere. The reason is because creation is unsupportable. It's contradicted by evidence.

That's a better question than you think it is, Voice. For the first 1500 million years of life on Earth, air like ours today would have been pretty much deadly poison. What critters there were back then were apparently all one-celled and made their living by doing chemical reactions on hydrogen sulfide, nitrate ions, dissolved iron, and whatnot. But about 2200 million years ago, the ones that used sunlight to split water and make oxygen got the upper hand, and free oxygen started showing up in the atmosphere. A lot of bacteria died out - the oxygen killed them.But some that had mutated proteins to let them use oxygen found a gold mine - you can get a great deal of energy by reacting things like sugars with oxygen. The early organisms that did this didn't need gills, as they were tiny and single-celled. They just absorbed oxygen and released carbon dioxide through their cell membranes. Maybe 1600 million years later were the first bunches of cells living as a unit, where there was an advantage to having one part of their bodies used for oxygen/CO2, while another part did something else. In other words, gills didn't come about all at once.

Or? Why or? Obviously there are times when evolution happens more rapidly than others. Punctuated Evolution is still proposed as being very gradual just too quick for much evidence to fossilize. It is a matter of perspective, 1,000 generations is gradual but can happen in hours, months, years or 1,000's of years. All of those times would be considered extreamly rapid.As for support: there are web sites all over the place. The funny thing is when really interesting questions are asked they don't seem to have the answers. Some of what is in those creationist sites also turns out to be false.I guess that does make it hard to support literalist creationism. However, there are lots of people who believe in creation by God without any conflict with science. Most people don't call that creationism.

both can be going on at the same time.remember, evolution is a change in an individual that gives it some advantage over all the other similar critters. It is not some lockstep parade where all of the creatures change together or even at the same time. It can also be local in nature, effecting populations only in a small issolated community, or it could be some major catastrophic event that affected many species on a world wide basis.Two other points areNo one decides. It is not a thing where creatures get together and say, "You know, if we had lungs we couold go up on land". Instead, those creatures that mutated so that they had lungs and gills found they could sneak up out of the water and find stuff to eat that the others couldn't get to. They had a broader food supply, both what is above the water and what is below, and so an advantage over the others.But you also need to understand that many here that support evolution are, believe it or not, very devout Christians. Some of us actually recieved our training in Christian Church Schools.[This message has been edited by jar, 04-24-2004]

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion