posted on April 15, 2001 06:50:54 PMJulesy, save me some time, and research the law of entropy for yourself, I have neither the time nor patience to try and teach thermodynamics to someone who may or may not have enough scientific background to understand it. No offense of course. :|
posted on April 15, 2001 06:58:19 PM
I remember the ancient astronaut books, Robin. They were fun. Wasn't the first called Chariot of the Gods, or something like that. It seems like there was a movie done also or maybe a tv show.
snowy
[ edited by Antiquary on Apr 15, 2001 06:59 PM ]
posted on April 15, 2001 07:10:27 PM
Trying to 'verify' science is kind of subjective. If you're trying to explain things you can't see, sometimes you have to theorize the possible explanation, which isn't always accurate. I'm not talking about mixing vinegar & baking soda-type science, but the science that brought us into existance.
I think de Chardin's analogy of life is most interesting. If we started looking at the bigger picture, we could see quite clearly we are in the early stages of understanding how everything fits together.
Evolution is something that can't be stopped once life has begun. Who started life is a mystery. If you believe God started life, then the questions end up being basically the same for each side.
Our theories of evolution and creation will change indefinately.
posted on April 15, 2001 07:42:29 PM
When the scientific community has a complete understanding of the genetic coding, will there be a preponderance of indisputable evidence, substantiating the existence of evolution?
posted on April 15, 2001 07:47:44 PM
I wasn't meaning this thread in particular, but AW in general lately.
Seems like the first ones to scream "racism" and "rights violations" and such, are also the same ones who repeatedly bash the Christians here without any second thoughts.
hypocrits suck...
if you are not a hypocrit, then I assume that you will not take offense
You're assuming, jlpiece, that I don't understand entropy (order -> disorder) or thermodynamics.
You're trying to put a square peg into a round hole by suggesting evolution violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Yet, the Laws of Thermodynamics are built into the structure of the universe, from which evolution flows.
Given your supposed "scientific background," it's too bad you've dodged my question twice now and still can't seem to support your original assertion; it might've made for an interesting debate.
That is, if you're interested in what this arguement is really all about. I mean, Creationists pick on it because it sounds so intimidating to someone who doesn't know better. But honestly, it's not stuffy reading.
Creation versus Evolution. As the debate rages, there remain those who contend that they can subscribe to modern evolutionary theory and, at the same time believe in God's Good News as revealed in the Bible. Is this truly possible?
Theistic evolutionists claim that God created man by evolutionary processes; that is, man is said to have evolved from lower forms of life. If this were the case, then all life, including man and his presumed ancestors, would have been subject to death throughout history. This is because evolution depends on death to weed out lesser fit organisms to make room for the development and refinement of surviving species. However, the Bible tells us that death came about as a result of sin. If Adam had not eaten of the forbidden fruit, if he had not fallen into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what need is there for redemption? None! What all of this means is that we cannot give up the Genesis account of creation, but we could the doctrine of Geocentrism and get along.
Genesis 3 unmistakably asserts that death overcame man when he transgressed God's command. Death, according to Scripture, had no hold on man until some later period following his creation. This flies directly in the face of evolutionary theory. Still, theistic evolutionists may try to skirt these passages by regarding the opening portion of Genesis as non-historical. But such recourse can only lead them to even more disastrous avenues. Theistic evolutionists can allegorize Genesis as much as they want, but to do so, they have to contend against Scripture itself. Paul, in such passages as Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, clearly treats the Genesis account in historical terms and he speaks of human death as God's judgment on sin. It was for this very reason -- to answer for God's punishment for our sin -- that Christ died. This is the very heart of the Gospel. Quite frankly, Theistic Evolution, in my opinion, is a contradiction in terms, somewhat like talking about burning snowflakes.
But if human death were not God's judgment on sin, as theistic evolutionists would have to maintain, what then did Christ die for? Those clinging to evolutionary dogma would have to admit that Jesus lied when He claimed to die for our sins. Consequently, the atonement is robbed of all meaning, while the Gospel is hollowed to an empty shell. In their attempt to fuse evolutionary theory with Scripture, theistic evolutionists only wind up perverting God's Good News into no news, as we remain dead in our sins
Rick
http://www.equip.org/free/CP0108.htm
In the begining, God created the heavens and the earth.
[ edited by ddicffe on Apr 15, 2001 11:32 PM ]
posted on April 16, 2001 01:06:58 AM
Such carefully woven support for the nonsense that is religion and belief in all assortments of diety. Around the world through time designing men wishing to further their aims create plot within plot in the furtile attempt to keep masses of people following their sway. Taking piecemeal whatever they wish from the accumulating body of scientific knowledge to discount it as best they can. Enlisting converts each day even converts, actually most particularly converts, from amongst the members of societies who are most dangerous to their cause and elevating those person's human thought to a level which could be called a new gospel in a modern age. Adapting the phony story so that their institution, which is their vocation, which gives them their sustenance and a hope of riches on this earth will endure. Most even appear to realize that in truth all attainments possible to them are right here, right now.
Well, ddcilffe, tell them they need a rewrite. I don't see reference anywhere in your support to the well documented happenstance of genetic mutation--an everyday occurance, not once a day but millions upon uncountable millions of times a day. it's something poor Darwin, upon who's denigration you so heavily rely, had not heard of, and it's a process that can and probably will explain away all of your archaic mumbo-jumbo. As knowledge has evolved past Darwin through discovery, so it will continue past all of us who are here now.
There is new empirical insight to the gradual development of the eye, for example, and it's pretty well known that genius as that of Leonardo, whom you cite, is a gift of chance, the chance combination of new with existing genetic coding in an individual.
You might better make your case by the demonstration of a God given ability to predict the outcome of chance. At least if you could do that your (and by 'your' I mean all practioners of the furtherance of belief in Godmagic) table will remain filled and your coffers replent (replete) from your winnings at the gambling tables.
posted on April 16, 2001 09:06:34 AM
I dislike "Proud to be ignorant" attitudes, and consider creationism to be one. That people hold such beliefs isn't necessarily any of my business. However, when they attempt to have school science classes acknowledge their religious nonsense I am outraged. Most irritatingly, creationists attempt to do so with pretences of a "creation science" which carefully omit mentions of their religious basis and then protest their oponents calling it religion. It's still religion, not science.
posted on April 16, 2001 09:21:43 AM
Well stated krs.
This is what bothers me about religion in general. People preach that the bible is the word from God, to believe whats in the bible, you believe in him (generally). When the theory of evolution came out there was a huge outcry amoungst the religious communities, I'm sure "blasphemy" was said a couple of hundred times. Over the years there have been new discoveries to help support the theory and with that religious figures are changing their tune, well maybe that was Gods way to create us.
Yes science can be disproven, but so can religion to some degree.
Death is the cause of man's sins? Then what happened with the dinosaurs, they were before man? God loves ALL living things.
posted on April 16, 2001 09:42:52 AM
Speaking of dinosaurs, is there any reference to them in the Bible? To any religious scholars reading here, I am curious to know if there is any reference to prehistoric "life" in the Bible and what importance those who support Creationist theory ascribe to this form of life. Where does it fit in? I really am curious about this. Thanks.
posted on April 16, 2001 10:52:55 AMjulesy you asked for it.
Anyone with short attention spans, little scientific background or preconceived notions you wish to hold on to, please ignore this.
Life of any kind is only possible in a physical universe which has physical constants such as ours. If any of physical constants like the speed of light, the mass of an electron, the gravitational and nuclear force constants were even slightly tampered with, we could not have molecules which form the basis of physical life. If the earth was a little closer to the Sun, or a little further away, life could not exist here.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that a closed physical system tends towards increasing disorder. If there is nothing outside the Universe to provide a source of energy to it, (such as a Creator), and if the Universe is infinitely old, then one would expect the entropy of the Universe to be infinite. But this is clearly not so. Information theory tells us that random noise won't give us any more useful information. Could the genetic code have come into existence through random activity then, without any guidance from a Creator?
none has come up with models to show how the irreducibly complex systems in biology could have been constructed one step at a time by means of random genetic mutations. Its like a mousetrap. If you remove just one component of the mousetrap, it can't catch mice, and has no functional or survival value. So if a mousetrap "evolved", how did it get to the step just before having a useful function?
Too many things in the Universe are "just right" for the existence of life. Has Someone tampered with the physical constants of the Universe, as Paul Davies suggests in one of his books, or is it just an accident that had to happen? The theory of evolution, is in fact, a philosophy, an a priori commitment to naturalist philosophy.For proponents of evolution, the fact that all its most critical mechanisms are still unknown is not a problem. They simply must exist, because the only alternative would be believe in some sort of Creator which even Science itself must then depend on for its existence. To speak against evolution is tantamount to blasphemy in today's temples of naturalistic philosophy.
The first such scientific breakthrough arose from Einstein's theory of general relativity. Subtracting one set of his famous field equations from the other yielded the surprising result that everything in the universe is simultaneously expanding and decelerating. The only physical phenomenon satisfying simultaneous expansion and deceleration is an explosion. But, if the universe is the aftermath of an explosion, then sometime in the past it must have had a beginning. If it had a beginning, then there must be a Beginner.
Einstein's own world view initially kept him from adopting such a conclusion. Rather he proposed a new force of physics that would perfectly cancel out the deceleration and expansion induced by gravity. However, Edwin Hubble soon proved that the galaxies indeed were expanding away from one another in the manner predicted by Einstein's original formulation of general relativity. Confronted with this, Einstein gave grudging acceptance to "the necessity for a beginning, and to "the presence of a superior reasoning power.
Others were not so ready to concede a theistic world view. Sir Arthur Eddington proposed that the universe part way through its general expansion undergoes a quasi-static pause of infinite duration so as to "allow evolution an infinite time to get started. Herman Bondi, Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle attempted to circumvent the beginning by proposing continual creation. Accordingly, the universe, though expanding indefinitely, takes on an unchanging and eternal quality since the voids that result from expansion are filled by the continual creation of new matter. Willem de Sitter, Richard Tolman, and Robert Dicke revived the ancient Hindu belief in an oscillating universe. The universe was presumed to explode, implode, and bounce back into a new cycle of explosion and implosion ad infinitum and thus "relieve us of the necessity of understanding the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.
These and a few other theories were considered viable loopholes until the limits and parameters of the universe were measured. We now know that the universe is too large to allow for any kind of pause in the general expansion. It is too small to permit continual creation. It radiates much too perfectly for the universe ever to bounce.
Moreover, as astronomers look back in time with their telescopes, they see that the universe has changed precisely as predicted by a general relativistic explosion.
All this evidence has become somewhat academic. In 1968 and 1970 three British astrophysicists, Stephen Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose, extended the solution of the equations of general relativity to include space and time. Their papers showed that if these equations are valid for the universe, then, under reasonably general conditions, space and time also must have an origin, an origin coincident with that for matter and energy. In other words, time must have a beginning. In 1970 general relativity still had not been overwhelmingly established by observations. But by 1980 observations removed any doubts.
Three independent lines of research (color-luminosity fitting of globular cluster stars, nucleochronology of supernovae nuclides, and the Hubble time for the expansion of the universe) yield a definite and consistent age for the universe of 16 +/- 3 billion years. With the knowledge that time has a beginning, and a relatively recent beginning at that, all age-lengthening attempts to save agnostic science should cease. Moreover, the common origin of matter, energy, space, and time proves that the act(s) of creation must transcend the dimensions and substance of the universe—a powerful argument for the biblical doctrine of God.
Now that the limits and parameters of the universe have come within the measuring capacity of astronomers and physicists, the design characteristics of the universe are being examined and acknowledged. Anything but the slightest disturbance in the values for the four constants of physics and for more than a dozen parameters of the universe would yield a universe unsuitable to support life. One astrophysicist likened the "coincidental" nature of these constants and parameters to the chance of balancing thousands of pencils upright on their points. Design characteristics also are becoming apparent for our planet earth. At least nineteen such life-sensitive parameters have been investigated.Considering that the universe contains only about a trillion galaxies, each averaging a hundred billion stars, we can safely conclude that not even one planet would be expected, by natural processes alone, to possess the necessary conditions to sustain life. These lists, each of which grows longer each year, would seem to provide another body of convincing evidence for the hand of the Creator-God of the Bible in the formation of the universe and of the earth.
Now that the limits of the universe have been established, it is possible to calculate whether it is large enough and old enough to produce life by natural processes. The universe contains no more than 1080 nucleons (basically protons and neutrons) and has been in existence for no more than 1018 seconds.
Compared to the inorganic systems comprising the universe, biological systems are enormously complex. The genome for the DNA of an E Coli bacterium has the equivalent of about two million amino acid residues. A single human cell contains the equivalent of about six billion amino acid residues. Moreover,unlike inorganic systems,the sequence in which the individual components (amino acids) are assembled is critical for the survival of biological systems. Also, only amino acids with left-handed configurationscan be used in protein synthesis; the amino acids can be joined only by peptide bonds; each amino acid first must be activated by a specific enzyme; and multiple special enzymes are required to bind messenger RNA to ribosomes before protein synthesis can begin or end. The bottom line is that the universe is at least ten billion orders of magnitude (a factor of 1010,000,000,000 times) too small or too young to permit life to be assembled by natural processes. Researchers, who are both non-theists and theists and who are in a variety of disciplines, have arrived at this calculation. Invoking other universes cannot solve the problem. All such models require that the additional universes remain totally out of contact with one another; that is, their space-time manifolds cannot overlap.
Thus the only explanation for how living organisms received their highly complex and ordered configurations is that an intelligent, transcendent Creator personally infused this information.
Evolution implies that everything is building itself up out of nothing into increasingly complex forms. Ruthlessness, cruelty, vicious competition - all these things are unavoidable and part of the necessary struggle towards a higher, more advanced state.Darwin justified and promoted racism in his book "The Origin of Species". He believed that white people were more evolved than those with colored skin, is that not correct? I hardly think you evolutionists like to acknowledge your poster boy was a racial supremacist.
It is no accident that both Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx made much of evolution in their social theories. For Hitler, it was the reason that Jews had to be exterminated - so the human race could continue its upward evolutionary path without being contaminated by so-called "unclean elements". For Marx, it was part of the justification for an economic and political system which made all men into slaves of the state, for their own good. So much so that Marx dedicated his work "Das Kapital" to Charles Darwin, to whom he felt he owed an enormous debt.When man believes he is an animal, he starts to behave worse than an animal.(You can look at any prison system for evidence of this.)
Any kind of cruelty and oppressive political system can be justified by an appeal to the 'survival of the fittest'.
The present slaughter of unborn babies through abortion can only be justified by appealing to the idea that "we" have the right to decide who or what lives and who or what dies. This can only be true if there is no God who demands that we respect human life. The unborn baby is not a part of its mother. It has a different genetic code and different identity. The end can never justify the means in a world which belongs to a holy, righteous God.Many atheists ignore evidence that doesn't fit into their world view, as we have certainly witnessed here on this board.Science only deals in physical reality describable by mathematical laws and statistics. If then a secular humanist assumes that science can give all the answers, he is also assuming that God and spiritual things do not exist. It is only an assumption though. No proof has been offered. Contradictory evidence is then dismissed because he thinks he already knows the answer. Its called a closed mind.
The lack of evidence or even plausible models for biological evolutionary theory is no problem also, because the assumptions imply that real evidence for the viewpoint has to be discovered sooner or later. We are still waiting to see that hard evidence.
About every seven years every cell in our body is replaced. None of the material that composed our physical body 7 years ago is in the same form today, and we are constantly changing. Is our identity based only on physical matter, or is there something more?
A big question is this:what is behind the existence of our personalities, and our consciousness? If the answer is: 'Nothing but time, chance, matter and energy' then our personalities, our feelings, our thoughts and desires have no real ultimate value. They are nothing more than an accident. If someone hurts you, and you are a materialist, you should just accept that this was just an outcome of the laws of physics, and could not have happened any other way. Justice, ethics, love and meaning are all arbitrary concepts - rooted only in superstitious religious ideas or interesting patterns in the neural networks which form our brains. Everything is just a meaningless collection of molecules bumping around. We make what we want out of it (except that concepts like 'we' and 'want' are very hard to define in materialist, physicalist terms).
Most people believe that there is such a thing as "right" and "wrong". For example,
some people believe it is morally wrong to impose your point of view on someone else. Most people believe it is wrong to kill people because you don't like the color of their skin.Is this sense of "right and wrong" that people have a product of education, or a mechanism of survival, or does there really exist "right" and "wrong"?
Is there anything wrong with rape, murder, child abuse? If so, why? Where do these objective moral laws come from, if not from God? How can there be a moral law without a moral lawgiver? If men are the lawgivers, then which men are the ones to decide what is right? On what basis can the rightness or wrongness of an action be determined?
Materialists would like to believe that the whole activity of the Universe can be described by certain mechanistic laws. If these laws really do describe and predict everything that happens and will happen - then obviously freedom of choice is an illusion - because everything happening in our brain is simply the result of mechanistic cause and effect processes. If this is true then nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Those things are just arbitrary categories.
Even our talking about such things is just an outcome of the laws of physics.
posted on April 16, 2001 11:30:20 AM
jlpiece: THANK YOU!!!! I could never have stated your points as articulately as you have just done. I doff my hat to you...
Rick
In the begining, God created the heavens and the earth.
posted on April 16, 2001 11:57:07 AM
None of that matters a lick.
Biblical knowledge of the universe is limited but man's is not and all arguments that conditions as so far discovered are all knowledge to be found forever are very limited in vision or scope.
Like children reciting their verse so creationists spew new dogma designed only in defense of a static knowledge which has no developing possibilities. Denying the wonder which is the ability of the human mind to analyze it's surroundings continually in pursuit of greater knowledge, religious zealots believe that there is no knowledge but that which has been meted out upon a biblical plate.
Would the God who is the object of so much admiration for his wisdom and all seeing foresight really have created a species of doting ignoramuses only to satisfy some perverse narcissism? Who could think that?
Then if the God, so adored, equipped man to seek answers to the mechanics and physics of the universe, aren't those who would deny that derived knowledge blasphemers by their own definition in also denying their God?
posted on April 16, 2001 12:25:12 PM
I believe arguing creationist, creation sceince, or evolution is missing the point of the Bible.
Of course man (Christian or non) should continue discovering.
The Bible is a book to learn too, but faith in God and Christ is the whole point of the Bible, for those that choose to.
As God, I believe, gave Man a choice and free will
posted on April 16, 2001 12:40:43 PM
You have to understand that these are just theories. Because we understand so little, (but feel we know so much) logic dictates the direction to move in, in each theory.
How do we know that ALL of the Bible hasn't been found? What if a whole new set of text were discovered? It could end up that the whole Bible would have to be re-written AND re-translated. It would/could change everything.
The same goes with science. It's recently been discovered that the universe is NOT slowing down as previously thought. Will this POV change again? Also, as far as life being rare, scientists believe that life is an unstoppable energy. That life probably exists everywhere in some form. That there are multiple universes that are as "alive" as we are......and so on....
There are laws of physics that are true and hold constant...for now. But who knows what discovery could be made tomorrow that could change one of these laws?
posted on April 16, 2001 01:33:04 PM
There is conclusive evidence to the existence of evolution! Reading these boards lends one's thoughts to the concept, apparently some are higher up the scale of evolution than others.
