Posted on 01/30/2005 9:56:02 PM PST by freespirited
What about venus fly traps? What about poison ivy?
They are systems with mechanisms, but we don't think of dead skin cells as the death of a "creature".
Plants are distinct organisms. Skin cells are part of an organism. Big difference.
Our schools have so warped our thinking that this distinction is lost on many.
You seem to be the one who can't make the distinction between organs and organisms.
Next time you go shooting, take aim at a tree. Come back and tell me if you blew it's guts out.
Sorry, you're still losing me as you seem to think that scientific theories are evaluated according to the connotation of the words used to describe the phenomena they explain, rather than how well they explain those phenomena, how well they survive crucial tests, and so on.
I don't dismiss ID "out of hand," btw. I dismiss it because it doesn't seem to do anything useful as a scientific theory, nor does it have any presently visible prospect of doing so.
OTOH I happen, at a philosophical level, to hold to a doctrine of creation in which all things that have being are created, not just those (or those arrangements of things) that "appear" to be "designed". If you look at it as philosophical view ID is even more useless than as a scientific theory, as it is far to small minded and limited.
Then why is Cain described as a hunter, as opposed to Abel who is a farmer? (Or do I have that backward?) Was he just hunting for trophies?! Why all those dinosaurs and other carnivores (supposedly buried by the flood) with big pointy teeth, and in a few cases with the bones of their prey still inside them (and even more commonly in their fossilized dung)?
This notion of yours seems pretty nutty, fully on the plane of the flat earth theory.
It is interesting that you highlight our country, as only our country is in an uproar about this (and the uproar is almost entirely outside science). And your second sentence is disengenuous at best; literal bible believers make up the overwhelming majority of evolution rejectors. AFAICS >99% of opposition to evolution in the developed world comes from fundamentalist christians.
Fossils are a bunch of dead things without dates stamped on them. Most often we find them pooled together, either in coal beds, oil reserves or fossilized bone graveyards.
Fossils are a bunch of dead things that do have dates stamped on them for those who can read the dates (though even before radiometric dating was discovered paleontologists and geologists considered that an old earth and evolution was crushingly supported by the evidence, radiometric dating is just the icing on the cake). The oldest are simpler than the most modern. The same forms are at the same depth and age. We don't find modern forms in deep strata. Biogeographical distribution accords with mainstream plate-tectonics, etc, etc, etc. Flood geology has no explanation for any of this; just lying nonsense designed to appeal to the ignorant, like the idiocies on your profile page.
Anyway, congratulations on analogising the head-in-the-sand position of evolution rejectors so well with your stolen security truck analogy.
I think part of the problem, especially with the young earth/flood geology types, is that they generally don't know much, if anything, about the origin and history of their own views. For instance most would be quite surprised, I think, to learn that all of Darwin's important contemporary opponents (the real "creation scientists") fully accepted an ancient earth, at most attributing only the most superficial sediments (the so-called "diluvium") to a global flood. Although even this was universally abandoned when a creationist and later Darwin detractor, Louis Agassiz, demonstrated that these were actually glacial deposits.
There were a few people around at the time that held views similar to modern flood geologists, but not one of these "Mosaic" or "Scriptural" geologists, as they were called, was a working scientist, even by the loose criteria of the early and mid 19th century. They were dismissed and debunked by the (creationist) scientists of the day who would later disagree with Darwin, the only difference being that Darwin was respected as a genuine and accomplished scientist.
Even the first "fundamentalists" were old-earthers to a man. I have a copy of The Fundamentals on my book shelf. All the essays touching on geology take an old earth view, and most are even neutral or accommodating toward evolution! Not one rejects the theory outright.
The young earth/flood geology view did not become popular again with conservative Christians for fully a hundred years, with the publication in 1960 of Henry Morris and John Whitcomb's book The Genesis Flood.
Something else most young earther's don't know is that Morris was largely cribbing (as he acknowledged in his History of Modern Creationism) from the real inventor of modern flood geology, George McCready Price, and also to some extent Price's associate Harold Coffin. Price developed flood geology in the 20's, but it never caught on.
Now for the real shocker. Price and Coffin did not invent flood geology to accommodate biblical literalism. Aside from the handful of insignificant 19th Century "Mosaic Geologists," this had never been a problem for Christians. Indeed Christian and creationist scientists developed modern geology, and anyway the bible seems to envision a tranquil flood which did little if any geological work (e.g. some of the same geographic names are used before and after the flood).
Price and Coffin were instead driven by extra-biblical literalism. They were both Seventh Day Adventists, and as conservative members of that sect they believed that the writings of founder and prophetess Ellen G. White were infallible and literally true. Whereas the Bible can be interpreted and accommodated in various ways, White could not. She wrote clearly and unequivocally that fossils were deposited by Noah's flood.
Now, Henry Morris was a fundamentalist and antievolutionist before he read (and later met) Price. His first book, That You Might Believe accommodated an old earth view. But for Price's belief that Ellen G. White was an infallible "prophet," a view that most fundamentalists would consider goofy if not heretical, it's possible Morris might never have become a convinced young-earther, might never have swayed so many other fundamentalists, and old-earth creationism might be the standard form of anti-evolutionism today, as it was for most of the last couple hundred years.
I agree that ID is not within the grasp of current science, especially where any attribution of personhood is concerned.
>Nowhere does the Bible say there was no animal death before
>Cain's murder. Romans 5 speaks only of HUMAN death. Accepting
>evolution only requires accepting pre-human ANIMAL death.
So it's your contention then that through millions of years of death and evolutionary change in primates that the first human arose possessing eternal life only to forefeit said eternal life after the events in the Garden of Eden?
That's more absurd than a literal seven day creation story. That's quite a bit more absurd than classical evolutionary theory as well. As I said, attempts at merging the two viewpoints result in the weakest of all philosophical and theological viewpoints.
If the Garden of Eden story is an allegory, what is man's need for salvation?
If the Garden of Eden story is an allegory, at what point do you start accepting the book as real history? After Cain killed Abel? After the Flood of Noah? After Abraham? After Moses? Only the New Testament? Only the four Gospels? Only those parts of the four Gospels which you agree with (like the Jesus seminar?)? Only "Thou shalt not judge" (like many liberals and atheists??
Perhaps that illustrates the problem for you.
Oddly enough, this really only seems to be a widespread problem among Christians. You don't see many Hindus running around discounting the Vedas or Muslims running around editing the Qu'ran. One wonders why.
Would you care to elaborate on this, please? Please explain how the fossil record fails to support the numerous predictions of common descent with modification, perhaps you will win a Nobel Prize.
Furthermore, 99% of the support for evolution comes from atheists and agonistics. Your point?
My point is that I am afraid you have been told lies by someone. Here is a (by no means exhaustive) list of judeo-christian religious organisations that support evolution. Christians who reject evolution are very much in a minority amongst Christians worldwide, before we even start looking at other faiths and agnostics and atheists. Even in this country (the only developed country in the world with a significant anti-evolution movement) Christians who accept ToE outnumber atheists.
I am arguing that the Bible very clearly describes a creation without death before sin. And that plants do not die in the Biblical sense, they wither, being that they are without blood. Plants were originally created to be food for all animals and man.
Stultis - Thanks for the history. It helps explain. I still wonder about the passion that the subject engenders. Perhaps some of the creationists can help explain.
You could be a little friendlier. You are correct in your position aren't you?
Don't know what to tell you. It's a whole host of issues, a bit different from one individual to another I think.
Part of it may be the "special status" of human beings. Darwin was deeply disappointed, for instance, that his good friend and (geological) mentor, Charles Lyell, never really quite accept human evolution. That seems to have been due to religious sentiment (possibly a fear that making man fully a part of nature called into question the afterlife and reunification with loved ones) even though Lyell was not particularly orthodox.
Even the co-discoverer of evolution by means of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, did not accept the natural evolution of the human mind, taking on that subject a mystical bent. He was a believer in Spiritualism.
William Jennings Bryant, a leading antievolutionist of the 20's, and an instigator of the Scopes law, famously admitted that he didn't really much care if animals and plant evolved, so long as humans were excepted.
Few today take this position of only excepting humans, except for maybe some of the "New-Age" antievolutionists. Today usually either it's biblical inerrancy/literalism or more general fear that evolution is somehow "atheistic". However, as my earlier message hinted at, I think the inerrancy/literalism objection is, to a certain degree, something that fundamentalists have "talked themselves into."
Sorry for the rambling reflections, without coming to much of a conclusion.
I apologize that my posts are sometimes unfriendly. I try to get some humor in there too but it doesn't always work. I know that.
Go with the humor/sarcasm, ribbing can be fun. We are not enemies.
Thanks for responding, I will watch myself as well.
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