For the record, this post is being posted in News/Activism by the express permission of Jim Robinson, founder and owner of Free Republic:
“Debate on church doctrine and or threads on specific religious matters may be best posted in the religion forum, but the defense of religious freedom, especially against those who wish to deprive us of same belongs front and center on FR.
They banned God and prayer and creationism from public schools and public places, but I’ll be damned if they’re gonna ban Him or it from FR!”
—Jim Robinson
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2203455/posts?page=78#78
I stopped right there. "Celebrate"?? I celebrate Christmas, Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day and other major holidays. I have never "celebrated" Darwin in any way, shape or form.
Lemmie flip this a bit. Can you imagine a CNN reporter saying:
"While we officially celebrate the over 2000th birthday of Jesus Christ..."
Yeah. I thought so, too.
Perhaps someone can answer me these two questions. I am not trying to be sarcastic, but have never had these questions adequately answered and would like to know what a atheist evolutionist would think.
First, how could life begin from nothing? Please, I understand that some believe in a “primordial soup”...but that is misleading because initially there was no soup. Soup is organic, there would have only been inorganic materials from which to build life...how could that have possibly happened?
Second, if life were created from nothing...then why is not new life being created all the time now that there really is a very rich soup of life from which to draw on?
God cannot be denied by true scientists, and that’s why many are agnostics. But faith cannot be argued scientifically either.
Why would a scientific theory or any kind rule out or even address a theology in the first place?
Darwin is not just an important 19th century scientific thinker. Increasingly,
Uh oh...I think Stephen here is saying Darwin thinks scientifically. What say YOU?
Polls on "how many of the People believe X" are hilariously irrelevant to ANY truth. People will believe some crazy stuff.
Those who are not scientists may wonder if they have a right to entertain skepticism about Darwinian theory.
Great set up for pointing at the "rights-stealing atheist boogeyman" Go ahead...show me someone the is not a scientist that is afeared that they have no right to be a skeptic of ANYTHING and I'll show you someone that is too scared to speak their mind and is likely uneducated in EITHER evolution or ID and will sound like a doofus if they DO speak their mind.
We are told that a consensus of scientists supporting the theory means that Darwinian evolution is no longer subject to debate
....and I will tell you that if you want to "debate" a scientific theory, you do it with science. You wanna disprove evolution, disprove it with actual science, not "it's complicated and tiny, so THERE....God did it."
You wanna "debate" it in your living room....have at it.
But does it ever happen that a seemingly broad consensus of scientific expertise turns out to be wrong,
Sure....when politics is involved.
GREAT....attach evolution to geocentrism and eugenics. Why not just get it over with and bring up the Holocaust, Mao, Marx.....?
Sorry, Stephen, the Cambrian explosion does not refute the ToE....but it's good to see that you toss around figures like 520 million years.
Fossil finds repeatedly have confirmed a pattern of explosive appearance and prolonged stability in living forms, not the gradual "branching-tree" pattern implied by Darwin's common ancestry thesis.
This does not refute the Teory of Evolution.....it shows that there were environmental circumstances for MILLIONS OF YEARS that favored a great diversification of life over MILLIONS OF YEARS. Wow....
Yeah yeah....you've used the key phrase "micro-evolution" and compared it with "macro-evolution"....next up...."irreducible complexity"....
I see Stephen is trying to build a concensus of his own....science is not a "concensus" to be won in an ad numeram.
Increasingly, there are reasons to doubt the Darwinian idea that living things merely "appear" to be designed. Instead, living systems display telltale signs of actual or "intelligent" design such as the presence of complex circuits, miniature motors and digital information in living cells.
There's the irreducibly complex nonsense. Earth to Stephen, those little flagellar motors are comprised of some parts that also have another function...one of protein secretion...as in ...complex AND reducible. Just because something is tiny and complex doesn't mean it id designed. It means it is tiny and complex. Of course, to sway the uneducated masses, one must use common words like circuits, motors, and digital...things Man has made.
The structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code, similar to a computer code.
Actually, it's a chemical code that Man made digital....but good job bringing computers into the mix...probably get you another few followers.
This discovery highlights a scientific mystery that Darwin never addressed: how did the first life on earth arise?
D'UH....that's because the Theory of Evolution HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ORIGIN OF LIFE.
To date no theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the information needed to build the first living cell
.....and if you're a real scientist, Stephen, you'd know that failure to come up with something...yet...means exactly....NOTHING in the science world. Failure to discover or explain something in the science world does not mean it does not exist in the science world.
Instead, the digital code and information processing systems that run the show in living cells point decisively toward prior intelligent design.
ONLY if you want it to and ONLY in the non-science world where one can believe whatever they want so long as they don't wanna bring it INTO the science world as "science" or a "refutation of science."
Indeed, we know from our repeated experience -- the basis of all scientific reasoning -- that systems possessing these features always arise from an intelligent source -- from minds, not material processes.
False claim, Stephen.
DNA functions like a software program.
No, it does not, but you need it to sound like a Man made machine to suit your purposes. I didn't know that computer software was all about random changes in the programming code, but lemme take a computer program and randomly alter the code and see what happens.
We know that software comes from programmers.
Yes, we do...continue with the false analogy.
Information -- whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal -- always arises from a designing intelligence.
hieroglyphics, books, and radio signals are not biochemicals......
The question of biological origins has long raised profound philosophical questions.
Yes, philosophical and theological questions indeed.
It's not surprising that such a worldview-shaping issue would illicit strong passions and disagreements.
Yes, in a world dominated by religions, things that are naturalistic don't gibe well.
All the more reason to let the evidence, rather than a supposed consensus, determine the outcome of what is, in fact, a very legitimate and important debate about the Darwinian legacy.
All the more reason to let science deal with science and theology deal with theology.