Posted on 05/12/2006 12:13:47 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
In his op-ed "Evolution's bottom line," published in The New York Times (May 12, 2006), Holden Thorp emphasizes the practical applications of evolution, writing, "creationism has no commercial application. Evolution does," and citing several specific examples.
In places where evolution education is undermined, he argues, it isn't only students who will be the poorer for it: "Will Mom or Dad Scientist want to live somewhere where their children are less likely to learn evolution?" He concludes, "Where science gets done is where wealth gets created, so places that decide to put stickers on their textbooks or change the definition of science have decided, perhaps unknowingly, not to go to the innovation party of the future. Maybe that's fine for the grownups who'd rather stay home, but it seems like a raw deal for the 14-year-old girl in Topeka who might have gone on to find a cure for resistant infections if only she had been taught evolution in high school."
Thorp is chairman of the chemistry department at the University of North Carolina.
1) Absence, despite centuries of looking for it, of any verifiable instances of spontaneous generation. (The origin of life from non-life as a mundane process of nature.) Biological organisms only come from preexisting biological organisms.
2) Various considerations, e.g. the Second Law of Thermodynamics, indicating that the universe cannot be infinitely old. If the universe had a beginning, and the solar system, and the earth, etc, then so must biological life.
Well, that's only two. But if life does not spontaneously spring into existence, and biological life has not always existed, then it must have started at some point. It either happened by some sort of creation, or by some sort of chemical evolution. In either case it arose from a NON-BIOLOGICAL source, Q.E.D. Unless you want to argue that God is a biological organism!
You act as though one can posit that creatures evolved from a common point of descent, without a creator, but divorce yourself from the problem of nonliving matter organizing itself into the first cell in the first place.
I say, no, evolution HAS to tell a consistent story to be taken seriously. If I tell my five year old that Santa Claus gets on his sleigh, travels all over the world with his reindeer, and comes down the chimney, he will persistently ask, "but Daddy, where does Santa Claus come from?" until there is a satisfactory point of origin.
Evolutionists MUST have a seamless story to tell or their theory has no credence whatsoever. The first cell didn't appear out of thin air, and if one posits that a creator planted it here, his theory might as well be a form of creationism.
In response to my self-persuasive observations, several evolutionists helpfully posted diagrams of different levels of sophistication of vision, etc. But this does not show a credible, physiological pathway from one to another. These are all concurrently existing organisms that happen to be different, and their means of vision often has no rational connectedness to the other.
Simply because I can arrange twenty passengers on a bus in a line from hairiest to smoothest, or shortest to tallest, does not prove an avenue of descent. Do you see my problem with your line of reasoning?
What might be persuasive is if an evolutionist could dig down through verifiably aged strata of earth and find -- somewhere -- a consistently evolving organism from one thing to another in slow gradations. They have never accomplished this, but in their enthusiasm to find SOME example, will often ignore geographic or geological constraints, wildly infer from a single tooth how long the tibia was, or simply redate the strata to accommodate evolutionary theory.
And so what passes for evolutionary "science" today are journal and media articles that state that this or that "might" or "could reasonably" have been the cause of a particular trait. This is only speculation and without scientific value.
Who is this person?
Unless you live in the Dark Ages or any other Theocracy.
Watch the news on Iran; it won't take you long to figure it out...
Your post #236, is a most excellent post...
No matter what idea comes along, there will be good folks and bad folks using that idea....the notion that the validity of an idea, is weighed by what kinds of folks gravitate to that idea is pure nonsense...
If this notion were true, I suspect no ideas would have any validity....evil, bad people can take any idea, no matter what it is, and use if for bad and evil purposes...and the opposite is also true...good, well meaning people can take any idea, and use it for good and well meaning purposes...
I truly dont understand people who use this line of reasoning...its just lazy...
One time there was some article or another on FR, about some violence or some such catastrophe, that occurred in some school..I dont now remember exactly what it was about, but sure enough, some poster or another chimed in with a post, somewhat like this...."Thanks a lot, Darwin"...I mean, how can people rationally think like this...it makes no sense, its just easy, and convenient, and pure laziness, to look at a bad situation, and then blame it all on Darwin...it boggles the mind...
That's Ms. coli on the top, slightly drunk and very ravishing.
That's studs coli on the bottom, oversexed and proud of the hair on his chest, if he has one.
The result....birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it..
my self-persuasive observations
Well said.
Odd that you would complain about this, since you DID receive replies to other portions of that post, which you didn't yourself deem worth responding to (except one making a joke about body hair). Those in glass houses...
5. if humans were created by a perfect God, why did He omit our protective hair? Strength? Precociousness of infants? Basic survival instincts in childbirth, etc.? Makes no sense that a creature inferior in these respects would be created by a perfect God and, before you tout bigger brains, etc., explain why bigger brains, etc. came at the design cost of the loss of hair?
That's evidence for God?
For the archives
As opposed to CS and ID, wherein "might" or "could reasonably" are replaced with "must have," based on no evidence at all.
(Care to comment on the "scientific value" of this?)
An excellent post.
I met Annie Gaylor at a Republican conference in about 1983. She was a staunch Conservative on taxation and separation of church&state values.
Her organization is at www.ffrf.org.
"Odd that you would complain about this, since you DID receive replies to other portions of that post, which you didn't yourself deem worth responding to (except one making a joke about body hair)."
It was only a half joke. Things as simple as sexual preference can have a significant impact genetically over time and can, for example, trend a population towards less body hair.
PLACEMARKER
"Out of curiousity, tell me the three CONCRETE observations that persuade you that all living things evolved from non-life and/or a strand of rna/dna."
Since life has no where else to come from, it must have been created from non-living elements. Even if God created everything including life, life would still have been created out of non-living materials (humans are made of atoms and quarks, non living materials yet still possess life). I tend to believe life was created from the chemicals/materials available on the planet (what else is there?) given the right combination of temperature, pressure, atmosphere and light.
I feel if you repeat these conditions on other planets with similar orbits around similar suns with similar chemical makeups and other conditions I described above you will most likely get primitive forms of life arising "spontaneously".
And with what, for lack of a better term, I'd call "apologetics logic". Sophistical lawyering, equivocation, that sort of thing.
Should I assume from your reply that agree completely with Dimensio's statement:
"Consider the resulting disasterous effect to the Soviet agricultural industry when Stalin outlawed the teaching of Darwinian evolution."
Putting all the failures of Soviet agriculture at the doorstep of Darwinism is quite bold. There is no doubt a list of ten, twenty, maybe thirty characteristics of Stalinism that had a greater affect on the production of agricultural goods than the lack of evolutionary "science".
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