Posted on 11/19/2003 10:15:28 AM PST by yonif
Medical student John David Johannessen and the leader of the Christian Medical Students Circle have petitioned the medical faculty at the University of Oslo for lectures "that not only argue the cause for evolution, but also the evidence against", student newspaper Universitas reports.
"The theory of evolution doesn't stand up and does not present enough convincing facts. It is one theory among many, but in education it is discussed as if it is accepted by everyone," Johannessen said.
Johannessen is a believer in creationism, based on the biblical account.
"Of course one has to know the theory of evolution, it is after all part of the curriculum. But certain lecturers demand that one believe it as well. Then it becomes a question of faith and not subject," Johannessen said.
Johannessen told the newspaper that he and his fellows are often compared to American extremists. Besides not being taken seriously or being able to debate the topic relevantly, Johannessen said that 'evolutionists' practically harass those who do not agree with them.
Dean Per Brodal said it was regrettable if any university staff were disparaging to creationists, but that there was no reason to complain about a lack of relevant evidence. Brodal also felt that evolution had a rather minor spot in medical education.
Biology professor Nils Christian Stenseth argued that instead of indulging an 'off-topic' debate the medical faculty should offer a course in fundamental evolutionary biology, saying that nothing in biology could be understood out of an evolutionary context.
The Christian Medical Students Circle want three basic points to be included in the curriculum:
1 According to the theory of evolution a mutation must be immediately beneficial to survive through selection. But many phenomena explained by evolution (for example the eye) involve so many, small immediately detrimental mutations that only give a long-term beneficial effect.
2 There is no fossil evidence to indicate transitional forms between, for example, fish and land animals or apes and humans.
3 Evolution assumes too many extremely improbably events occurring over too short a span of time.
My first thought!
Good for them, and I wish them much success.
They were not violated. That is only your claim, not the claim of the biologist.
" the theory of evolution is a mountain of speculation built on a sand castle to a degree that makes securities trading look like hard science."
Same thing. It's your claim, because you don't know the subject, let alone understand it.
Exactly. Which is why evolution is in no way incompatible with the notion of a Supreme Creator, only with a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible.
spam cans lettuce---CLINTONRENO
Exactly. My God is an awesome God.
Note: Science does NOT determine Truth: you want Truth, seek it in the Philosophy or Theology departments. Science is the process of making MODELS of reality with as close of a match to reality as we can make it, with the end result being a model we can use to predict outcomes and do consistent engineering with. In the case of Evolution, it has been observed, in the micro sense, in the field and in the laboratory. That has been extrapolated, at a lesser degree of accuracy, to macro-level evolution, with support from the fossil record, geochemistry / geophysics, and the observed fact of microevolution.
Now, it could well be that the Lord God did in fact create the world in 6642BC, as Bishop Ussher had calculated, with a set of rules and evidence already in place supporting not just the theory of Evolution, but those of Astrophysics, Cosmology, and of the basic Physics of our Universe as we know it.
Or, he could have set it up from the beginning to happen in such a way that the Universe grew from the Big Bang (gee, that sounds AWFULLY like "let there be light", the formations of galaxies, suns, and planets from chaotic gas clouds, and the appearance and development of life and of man.) to our present situation. Heck, the order even matches that of Genesis. Strange coincidence, don't you think???
It really doesn't matter. But the latter premise makes me FAR more in awe of the power and majesty of God than the "poof, there it is" premise. . . .
The evolutionist asserts that the laws governing matter, energy, thermodynamics, and biology as we know them all today, were at multiple points apparently violated, yet not by a being that had the ability to do so (a Creator.) We are to believe they were simply violated in spite of all known observations to the contrary. That is not science. That is faith.
Somebody doesn't seem to know those laws very well. ALL of them have an element of probability involved: Yes, the Universe tends to go from order to randomness. But only AS A WHOLE, otherwise life is impossible: it would violate thermodynamics. Yes, if spontaneous generation had to occur, it was an exceptionally rare event. However, just as enough chimpanzees on enough typewriters will eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare (and your average Howard Dean speech in a matter of days. . .), the several billion years and planet full of opportunities would raise the chance of an individually rare occurance to happen. . .to near certainty.
Creationist debating tactics go something like this:
1) Put forward about 50 sound bites about why evolution doesn't work (no transitional species, dating techniques don't work etc.)
2) When your opponent is unable to answer all 50 of your points in the short time alloted to him in a debating context because the answers are much more complicated than the sound bites, declare victory.
Artificially Created and Reproducing Virus
You want some salt, pepper, and ketchup to go with that foot ????
If I remember correctly, sickle-cell anemia is a recessive gene. If a person receives one gene, he gets the benefit of increased resistance to malaria. If he is unfortunate enough to get both genes, the effects are not beneficial and lead to a young death.
So, having one SCA gene is beneficial, while having both is not.
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