Vatican comes out in support of Darwin?

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

You got evolution in my creation!
You got creation in my evolution!

[Archon]

You're not the real Gemm!

[Entsuropi]

Jeffe: It's on.

[The Jade Knight]

I'm confused.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Various forms of dating proves both the age of the earth at 4.5 billion years old [etc]

If God says something different from what science says, I believe God. Generalizing what I said, I think scientists generally do a good job finding explanations to things to the limits of human reasoning and understanding.

Also, adam and eve do not fit with the world as we know it; the Flying Noodle Monster first created a mountain, a tree, and a dwarf.

The Flying Noodle Monster is a somewhat amusing straw man. I wonder if anyone actually believes in him, or just profess belief. Poor guy (deity?).

[scAri]

God does NOT say anything that science doesn't say. There is a significant difference between Science and what "scientists" say.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Sorry, I was using it to mean "the scientific community," but I should have been more specific.

[The Jade Knight]

I think most of us understand that, but it is a misleading term.

[Faster Master St. Pastor]

I can foresee a certain Dr. Kent Hovind very angry about this. Tehee!  

After all, He himself said that any God that relied on evolution to create Earth was a retarded God. Tehee!  

[Peter Ahlstrom]

I was just thinking about this issue last night when it struck me to wonder whether the ID people aren't going about it from entirely the wrong angle. In examining the wonders of creation, is it the intelligence of the creator which is most remarkable, or is it the creativity of the creator which is most evident?

[Skar]

I'm sure you know this but I'm going to say it anyway, for completeness.

The word "Intelligent" in Intelligent Design simply denotes that life had to be designed on purpose rather than happen randomly.

To put my two cents in... I think the irreducible complexity problem with the theory of  evolution "from nothing to us" has gone completely unanswered.

I've looked.  There is not even a hypothetical situation that has ever been proposed (at any meaningful level of detail) for even the simplest evolutionary process.

You get scientists blithely saying that, over time, bacteria developed cilia so they could move around better to find food, and eyespots so they could find it more easily.

What I have been totally unable to find, anywhere, is a proposed mechanism for this happening on a chemical/cellular level.  Not only has the process not been observed, nobody has ever been able to come up with a viable hypothetical process.

Now, before you say it, I'm not talking about fruitflies expressing different genes in response to changing environment.  Those genes after all already existed in the fruitfly, the expression happening is similar to an on off switch.  I'm talking about things like developing a working cilia that actually provided an evolutionary advantage to the organism involved.

The problem has been reduced to a good example:

Disassemble a hundred radios into their respective parts.  Put those parts into a cement mixer.  How long until a complete working radio is assembled?  Entropy (the physics phenomenon not the individual who posts here under that handle) directly opposes evolutionary theory.

A single cell bacteria, with or without flagella, with or without an eyespot is a million more times more complicated than any radio and the cement mixer only contained relevant parts, unlike the primordial soup that supposedly spawned our beginnings.

I think the Intelligent Design folks are being falsely polarized by the media's search for sensationalism. ID does not imply or presuppose God.  It just points out that evolution doesn't fly.  Therefore life was probably designed.  The who/what that did the designing is an entirely different issue.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

Now that's theres what I been talkin' bout.

But seriously, yes. The cillia is the best example I've heard for the perception I have.

The problem is compounded by evolutionists who take evolution as a given. They give statements like "it's evident all around us," or "it doesn't need to be proven" when trying to win converters. Well, how is that argument any different from any religious expression they're so vehemently against.

There are gaps in the fossil record. This neither proves nor disproves anything. BUt the record we do have is so incomplete as to leave out confidence in trusting that as a major evidence. And it is THE major evidence. Evolution is one possible explanation for some of the phenomena we see about us. Maybe it's right, maybe it isn't, but it's hardly a given and there are problems with it that are very unconvincing.

And there is no way to demonstrate it, conveniently. You need, at best, an experiment thousands of years long to demonstrate it. Then you get to repeat the experiment with various controls? This isn't likely. Theories that are much more demonstrable (such as Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics) are bearing out as only special cases, or even possibly inaccurate due to quantum studies. Yet they are both repeatable and very precise. So I should roll over and believe a theory that has many, many, many gaps, can't be demonstrated, and is not experimented? That sounds quite unscientific to me.

Interestingly, the whole approach presents an interesting case for Kuhnian history of science theory. Basically, he says you don't win converts in scientific debate. You only can win new members from the younger generation, then you have to wait for the old school to die off. However, it doesn't seem to be given that evolution will win this round. The counter-position still has a lot of influence, particularly over the youth. I think it will continue to be a partisan issue for a long time. Frankly, I have no problem with it being left to whatever you believe, I just have problems with people telling me that not accepting evolution is unscientific. Whichever side you fall on, you've made a pre-rational decision on which authorities to believe and you have to accept major gaps in your explanation, gaps that could destroy your explanation when filled.

[The Jade Knight]

I think the reason Evolution is so universally accepted and embraced at science is simple:

For Atheists and Agnostics, there is no other acceptable alternative.  None at all.  They have to believe in Evolution (a priori), because the alternative requires taking a pro-diety assumption.  They can't accept that.

Personally, I think the theory is unsound science, on a great many levels.


EDIT:  What a post to gain this title on!

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Skar, don't they claim random mutation via things like cosmic rays causes things like cilia and stuff to happen?

I'm not convinced that the entropy argument has much weight, because the Earth is not a closed system--the Sun is constantly bombarding the Earth with energy, which can cause the net organization of the Earth to go up rather than down, so I've heard.

[The Jade Knight]

This addresses the argument of entropy in more detail:

http://trueorigins.org/steiger.asp

The short of it:  Yes, evolution still violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

"...there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics.  Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated [closed] systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems ... there is somehow associated with the field of far-from equilibrium phenomena the notion that the second law of thermodynamics fails for such systems.  It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself."
[Dr. John Ross, Harvard scientist (evolutionist), Chemical and Engineering News, vol. 58, July 7, 1980, p. 40]