[Prime Choice]

Biologist and Anglican priest Arthur Peacocke, for instance, argues that evolution is God's way of creating.

That's been my view all along. I've never seen the idea of Divine Creation and evolution as mutually-exclusive (or even competing) ideas. In fact, I find it even more awe-inspiring to consider that God built living things to be so adaptable to non-optimal conditions.

[marktwain]

Invoking God to explain what we can't otherwise account for, he says, is "a kind of idolatry," because true faith should come from within and not because we can't fully explain the natural world.

And this is kind of a mirror image of the argument that I have put forward, that if you are going to use faith to invoke a creator, why bother with trying to "debunk" all the evolutionary evidence? Just accept, by faith, that it was all created when the creator created the universe, complete with fossils, radioactive half lives, and ancient star light.

[PatrickHenry]

PING. [This ping list is for the evolution side of evolution threads, and sometimes for other science topics. FReepmail me to be added or dropped.]

[Lokibob]

Is it a coincidence that the earth is in the precise distance from the sun to spark life? 10% closer (a mere 9 million miles) and water would boil off, 10% further out and water would be perpetually frozen.

God proclaims his glory and demonstrates it every solar eclipse. The moon is set in such a precision orbit, and is exactly the correct size to blot out the sun for only a second or two. If the moon were slightly smaller, or the orbit changed, and eclipse would be far less spectacular. A coincidence?

Water becomes it's densest at a couple of degrees above freezing. This allows ice to float. Without this little feature, oceans would be solid masses of ice, from top to bottom. I can not believe this is coincidence.

To me, the hand of God can been seen in an awful lot of science.

Just one mans opinion.

Bob

[aardvark1]

"Oh Kettle, you're so black!" exclaimed the pot.

[Ophiucus]

This huge error jumped out immediately:

Moreover, the individual parts of complex structures supposedly serve no function. Because evolution selects only the fittest innovations, useless ones vanish. The odds against a bunch of useless parts lying around at the same time and coming together by chance are astronomical, mathematician and evolution-critic William Dembski of Baylor University correctly notes. emphasis added

For a feature to disappear, evolution must select against it. Selective pressure is a 'negative' in essence. If a feature decreases survival, then that feature is removed from the gene pool. If the feature aids or has no effect on survival, it remains.

Vestigial organs like the appendix are the obvious examples.

But that's what makes the anti-evolution arguments amusing at least, the shocking lack or misapplied knowledge.

[AndrewC]

Called the type III secretory system, this microsyringe enables a bacterium to inject a toxin into its victim (this is how bubonic-plague bacteria kill). This component of the flagellum, then, could have been hanging around a very long time, conferring benefits on any organism that had it, ready to combine with other structures (which also perform functions in primitive living things) into a full-blown, functional flagellum.

Nope. Experts on TTSS assert that the chicken came before the egg. The TTSS system is a stripped down version of a flagella rather than the flagella being a new and improved hypodermic.

The TTSS are on "bugs" that live in higher animals and have lost functions rather than gained functions.

[biblewonk]

The "irreducible complexity." concept uses a mouse trap for an illustration. Since removing any one of the seven parts renders the trap useless it is irreductibly complex.

The example given in the article seems to compare two components which each contain thousands of building blocks. We still end up with a compenent that is useless if not complete and whose completeness is overly complex to fall together by any random chance.

[ColdSteelTalon]

"As an icon of antievolution, the flagellum has fallen," says Prof. Miller, a practicing Catholic. "If bits and pieces of a machine are useful for different functions, it means that natural selection could indeed produce elements of a biochemical machine for different purposes."

Note that he uses the word "could"...

Always look for the words "could", "perhaps"... Its a dead giveaway that means NOT PROVEN.

[elephantlips]

There is no evidence in all of history that shows structure and order coming from chaos. The law of sowing and reaping has never been repudiated. "If you sow chaos you reap chaos..." and so on.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

George Coyne -- astronomer, Jesuit and director of the Vatican Observatory --...

Ahhh. The Jesuits.

[PhilipFreneau]

>> Biologist and Anglican priest Arthur Peacocke, for instance, argues that evolution is God's way of creating.

One must believe in intelligent design to believe in prophecy. Peacocke is a phony priest.

[nmh]

Evolution has and always will be fatally flawed. It's premise is ALWAYS that there is NO God and order arbitrarily came out of chaos. A sheer impossibility from the standpoint of anyone with a working brain who choses to use it objectively.

It's actually humorous ... evolution defies the very laws they worship.

[Revolting cat!]

Nobody's gonna make a monkey out of this cat!

[Viking2002]

I can't wait until Jesus finally shows up and hashes out this whole mess........ I don't know about you, but I have a thousand questions for the man. :-)

[Viking2002]

I can't wait until Jesus finally shows up and hashes out this whole mess........ I don't know about you, but I have a thousand questions for The Man. :-)

[kuma]

I don't see how it is considered an attack on free speech to want what has been proven to be blatantly false concepts removed from textbooks.

Examples:

Gills on human fetuses
Geological column
Vestigal organs
leftover legs on whales

There are many more such examples but they are in our textbooks even though they were found to be false long ago. The real issue is the stupidity that passes for an education in schools all across America.

[mrfixit514]

It amazes me that people will accept the garbage that scientist have made up to explain the origins of life but they just can't bring themselves to believe the Bible. Evolution is a fairy tale. It takes just as much faith to believe in evolution as it does to believe that God created the world as described in Genesis.

[PresbyRev]

"Evolution could have co-opted them when it was putting together . . . "

The author reveals in this sentence that he is simply positing the inexplicable and random process of evolution as a de facto designer. Evolution as creative process is itself a form of design if not intelligent design.

[Tinhatter]