Creationism vs. Evolution

But that's the premise. If you don't have a premise, you're missing the foundation of the theory.
The point of cosmology is seeking answers. I have no problem admitting that all the information isn't in yet, that more study and thought is required. However, you can't admit that and claim that the facts are all in. Very fundamental questions can't be answered by these theories. That's why they are theories and not facts.

 

Well, here's about as good an explanation of scientific theory as you'll get:

"In scientific usage, a theory does not mean an unsubstantiated guess or hunch, as it can in everyday speech. A theory is a logically self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of a related set of natural or social phenomena. It originates from or is supported by experimental evidence (see scientific method). In this sense, a theory is a systematic and formalized expression of all previous observations which is predictive, logical and testable. In principle, scientific theories are always tentative, and subject to corrections or inclusion in a yet wider theory. Commonly, a large number of more specific hypotheses may be logically bound together by just one or two theories. As a general rule for use of the term, theories tend to deal with much broader sets of universals than do hypotheses, which ordinarily deal with much more specific sets of phenomena or specific applications of a theory."


Science and faith are not mutually exclusive but the latter cannot explain the former.

 

But evolutionary theory still doesn't include a complete explanation for how none living matter became living matter.
That's a fairly large gap.

 

I don't think it ever intended to, but your point is taken.

For most normal folks, that's where philosophy and/or religion come in.

 

The best way to look at it is like this...

A child falls asleep at the aunt's house. Mom and Dad say it is time to go so they carry the sleeping child in the car. They drive home and when they arrive back at the house the kid is awake. The child, having woken up a little earlier, knows s/he is in the car. The kid knows that the parents are driving. The kid knows that the parents took the Parkway. What the kid doesn't know is how s/he got in the car.

Sure, it might be safe to presume that the parents carried the kid to the car. But there is a chance that the aunt could have carried the kid to the car. Or maybe a neighbor had shown up while the child slept and carried the kid to the car.

The kid knows that s/he was in the car and the the journey took him home. Before then, well, that is somewhat of a mystery.

Not know how the child arrived in the car doesn't mean that the car didn't ride on the Parkway. The child is still home and had to arrive there somehow.

 

I don't find it an issue worth debating. In the least. We're here. We're not there.

Just another way to build fences between people.

 

A page back someone asked about who's speaking ... his name is Chris Miller and he's a geologist (and former evolutionist) turned creationist. He tries to sort out through his knowledge and beliefs the argument for both sides, even though he believes in creationism.

I spoke with a philosophy prof today who put it quite nicely. He has no problem teaching about creation ... so long as it's in a theology class where you also get to learn about other religions and what they believe. He said that he's a strong supporter for the scientific method and thinking scientifically with reason.

I'm really glad this has spurred such reaction. It's been hard to get people around the newsroom to respond to this.

 

And to go back to Pierce's article:

Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It's not the place where people believe in silly things. It is not the place where people go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly things. Idiot America is not even those people who believe that Adam named the dinosaurs. Those people pay attention. They take notes. They take the time and the considerable mental effort to construct a worldview that is round and complete.

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents--for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power--the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they're talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

 

I've been torn on this for many, many years.

On the one hand, I don't believe in a literal translation of seven 24-hour periods (the Biblical creation). I believe some sort of evolution took place. Every religion has a creation theory -- the Judeo-Christian version is no more or less plausible.

However, when you keep going back, at some point, something had to create the first piece of matter. Even if you're a Big Bang Theorist, something had to create those two pieces of matter that collided and led to everything else. So I also believe in a creator deity.

So, can I vote for both?

 

I always say that I have no business telling God how He can do things -- that He can't use evolution to create anything. He could have, if He so chose, evolved everything from a single-celled organism (which sounds a lot like 'dust' from the Genesis story).
The best scientific evidence we have at this point is that that is how it happened.
Does that mean that God doesn't exist or the Bible is all a lie? I think not.
Maybe he simply explained it in a way that people back then could understand, because obviously the concept of microscopic organisms would be something they might have trouble with.

 

The uniform: http://www.bustedtees.com/shirt/vivalaevolucion/male

 

PART MAN, PART MONKEY
by Bruce Springsteen

NO MISSING LINK
by Dan Bern

APEMAN
by the Kinks

MISSING LINK
By the Waco Brothers

It's on their great Freedom & Weep album, but I can't find the lyrics online.