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Why do you debate about evolution?
me ^ | 2-5-2002 | me

Posted on 02/05/2002 8:18:30 AM PST by JediGirl

For those of us who are constantly checking up on the crevo threads, why do you debate the merits (or perceived lack thereof) of evolution?


TOPICS: Miscellaneous; Your Opinion/Questions
KEYWORDS: crevolist
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To: PatrickHenry
I love the Constitution as much as the next guy, but claiming it is "unprecedented" is a bit over the top.

England had a bicameral legislature, an executive branch and a relatively independent judiciary. The key change was an elected executive and upper house.

The origins of modern Western civilization are found in the Reformation and Renaissance, both of which introduced the idea of individual self-determination, one from the divine, the other from the secular perspective.

The Reformed Churches and the Anabaptists in particular believed that churches could govern themselves by electing officers and should not be run by aristocratic bishops or popes. That's why the crowned heads of Europe repressed religious dissent and why so many dissenters came to America.

The royalty recognized what you dismiss: If you don't need a pope or bishop to run a church (and in England the King himself was the head of the Church), similarly you don't need a King or Duke to run a country. If a church can be governed by the elected representatives of the membership, so too a country can be governed by the elected representatives of its citizens.

201 posted on 02/05/2002 3:54:12 PM PST by colorado tanker
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To: Physicist

Thank you for the kind words! I think this is what you mean.

That's it! I may even steal a phrase or two someday...

By debating evolution, we are, in point of fact, contending for the philosophical soul of the conservative movement.

It is my belief that conservatism should be based upon objective moral principles rather than upon any received wisdom, and should not be tied to any particular religious dogma, especially when certain peripheral claims of that dogma conflict with established scientific fact.

That is not to say that conservatives should not be Christians, or even primarily Christians. What it means is that when conservatism comes into open (and so unnecessary!) conflict with science, it discredits itself in the minds of educated people, for reasons having nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of its moral philosophy. Conservatism, in my opinion, needs to break itself of such self-destructive indulgences as creationism, or it will marginalize itself utterly, to our nation's peril.

74 posted on 1/20/02 6:53 PM Pacific by Physicist


202 posted on 02/05/2002 3:57:50 PM PST by jennyp
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To: Physicist
Good explanation! I must say that I too believe in the Big Bang theory -- so perhaps I didn't state my position very clearly. I believe that God the Creator was the Being that caused the Big Bang to occur -- I don't believe that the Big Bang happened as a matter of chance. I believe that God created all the matter that is in our present universe -- it seems that he started with pure energy (see Dr. Schroeder's writings) which later became matter as the temperature of the expanding universe decreased to the point where energy could be condensed into matter. My point was that God created matter -- it did not always exist nor did it appear by pure chance. There was Intelligence behind creation.
203 posted on 02/05/2002 4:00:04 PM PST by Retiredforever
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To: OWK
And likewise, I seek a creationist who can tell me who created the creator.

Nobody created the creator. God is eternal.

1.Everything which has a beginning has a cause.
2.The universe has a beginning.
3.Therefore the universe has a cause

God doesn't have a 'cause' because He has no beginning or end. He is the First Cause.

I know its hard to comprehend something eternal, but think of it this way -- God is the creator of time, so he is not confined to the 'time' that we are a part of. He is outside, or transcendent to time, space and the universe.

204 posted on 02/05/2002 4:02:58 PM PST by incindiary
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To: OWK
"Representational democracy long predates the Presbyterians. Agreed. But if you're inquiring into what the Framers had in their minds, many, including John Adams, were members of reformed churches with elected legislatures and executives.

The concept of "inalienable individual rights" not a belief of Christians or prized by the churches? I disagree. The whole idea behind the Reformation is justification by faith alone - that each individual believer had his own relationship with God without the intercession of priests or bishops. Even more radical was the idea that a believer could read and interpret the Bible for himself. The individualism of modern Western civilization was born in the Reformation (and Renaissance), in which many of the ideas of the Enlightenment are rooted.

The Declaration is quite clear, we are endowed by our Creator "with certain inalienable rights . . . ."

205 posted on 02/05/2002 4:06:16 PM PST by colorado tanker
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To: Physicist
I was responding to someone else's post. We were debating the lack of a fossil record to support the theory of natural selection. The poster claimed the fossil evidence of the unsuccessful mutations posited by Darwin really did exist at one time, but has been destroyed by natural processes. The point of my post was that those natural processes have been awfully selective in what they destroyed.
206 posted on 02/05/2002 4:09:55 PM PST by colorado tanker
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To: colorado tanker
The Declaration is quite clear, we are endowed by our Creator "with certain inalienable rights . . . ."

Ah, but is the Creator a person or a process? The important word isn't "Creator", it's "endowed" and "inalienable".

207 posted on 02/05/2002 4:12:45 PM PST by jennyp
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To: colorado tanker
The Declaration is quite clear, we are endowed by our Creator "with certain inalienable rights . . . ."

The Declaration speaks, in its very first sentence, of Nature and Nature's God, which is a deist, not a theistic formulation. In any event, if it is true, as so many here claim, that the Constitution is biblically based, then surely in the past two centuries some learned churchman has produced an "Annotated Constitution," with scriptural references following each sentence in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, so that we uninformed laymen can grasp the divine source of our governing document. Could you please direct me to such an "Annotated Constitution"? A link will suffice.

208 posted on 02/05/2002 4:15:35 PM PST by PatrickHenry
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To: jennyp
From what I've read, the Framers did not have the same difficulty as we moderns in identifying our Creator. On that, the various Christian demoninations, the Deists and the Jews could all agree.
209 posted on 02/05/2002 4:18:59 PM PST by colorado tanker
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To: rwt60
Maybe its just the way God wanted it to be.

I believe that if there was evolution, it was designed by God.

I don't know why people have to argue about something like this. We probably won't know the answer to this until we meet our maker.

210 posted on 02/05/2002 4:28:38 PM PST by luckystarmom
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To: PatrickHenry
The Constitution is not based on the Bible. I don't know where you got that.

You might want to pick up From Dawn to Decadence, which is Barzun's recently published masterpiece, an overview of our Western civilization. He explains how the dominant themes of the last five centuries are rooted in the Reformation and Renaissance, which gave birth to the Enlightenment and the ideas now embedded in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Although secularism is a theme in the West, the emphasis on individualism and individual rights was advanced by the Reformation, without which it is highly unlikely the ideas of Locke or Montesquieu ever would have been written.

It's also a particularly good read today, because of the contrast between the Christian West and the Muslim world, which did not experience this development and began to go into decline around the same time the modern West was born. The Muslim world never had a Reformation and remains mired in authoritarianism and a benighted form of religious fundamentalism not seen in the West in centuries.

211 posted on 02/05/2002 4:30:19 PM PST by colorado tanker
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To: spoiler2
I agree.
212 posted on 02/05/2002 4:35:48 PM PST by luckystarmom
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To: colorado tanker
I guess we're not in disagreement after all.
213 posted on 02/05/2002 4:36:12 PM PST by PatrickHenry
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To: incindiary
Nobody created the creator. God is eternal.
1.Everything which has a beginning has a cause.
2.The universe has a beginning.
3.Therefore the universe has a cause
God doesn't have a 'cause' because He has no beginning or end. He is the First Cause.

Do you want to be taken seriously? Please tell me that you are aware of the egregious errors in your above reasoning; people WILL notice when you violate basic rules of logic. Using grossly flawed arguments neither furthers your position nor does much for your credibility. (Variations of this "proof" have already been thoroughly dissected and analyses of such can be found in numerous places.)

214 posted on 02/05/2002 4:39:11 PM PST by tortoise
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To: PatrickHenry
As Cary Grant said, "I understand we understand each other."

And now I can run off to dinner!

Freegards.

215 posted on 02/05/2002 4:41:14 PM PST by colorado tanker
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To: Dales
Dales said - "Even if men do not understand fully the way things are, things are a particular way. The speed of light in a vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 m/s. Out of all the possibilities one could imagine, it is that. What are the odds of that? There are infinite possibilities as to what it could have been, but it is that. What are the odds then? One way, out of infinite possibilities. One over infinity. To me, that means that the odds that existance could have just happened are zero." My reply - "Hmmm, of course there can be an infinite number of that one possibility contained in an infinite set of differing possibilities. So your sum becomes Infinity divided by Infinity, which I guess by your logic would have to be 1. 1 over infinity isn't definitely zero anyway, so your logic is possibly flawed in other ways. Of course, I don't imagine that makes much difference to you, but perhaps I am wrong. I don't see why creationists feel the need to disprove evolution to justify their beliefs."
216 posted on 02/05/2002 4:43:15 PM PST by smallfatcat
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To: JediGirl
Don't you love it when you post a thread and it goes over 200 replies on the same day?

My original motivation in getting involved in the crevo threads was a feeling of dismay. I knew that creationists were out there, but it was a shock to find that sensible conservatism had such a large anti-science wing. It has to be countered if we're ever going to get anywhere, so I started diving in on any thread where nobody else was doing the heavy lifting for the E side. But that's not why I keep coming back.

These debates have been a whole second education. It's fun. It isn't a life, but it's a hobby.

I'm almost disappointed now when the other side doesn't show up.

217 posted on 02/05/2002 5:01:04 PM PST by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro
I'm almost disappointed now when the other side doesn't show up.

You needn't worry, evolution boy. I'm always close at hand.

218 posted on 02/05/2002 5:04:21 PM PST by No-Kin-To-Monkeys
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To: VadeRetro
These debates have been a whole second education. It's fun. It isn't a life, but it's a hobby.

Pretty serious hobby... what are you getting out of it?

219 posted on 02/05/2002 5:09:15 PM PST by Heartlander
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To: OWK
Where precisely does the Bible specify the concept of rights?

I don't have to quote scripture for you to understand my point. You can see the difference in countries based upon Judeo-Christianity and those that aren't. I am not claiming these societies aren't faliabile, as we are all human. Indeed, many who "claim" to be Catholics/christians, in reality are liberals who support abortion, etc. There has also been a lot of conflict and violence in all of humanity--Still, truth exists. Whether or not the majority live up to the exercise is not my concern for this argument, only that the truth can be ascertained and therefore practiced on an individual basis, thereby achieving differing levels of spiritual perfection.

The truth is that the founders believed in a specific doctrine--that God is a well-spring of unfathomable love, mercy, and forgiveness--not war, hatred and oppression like we see throughout the Moslem world. The founders beliefs are reflected in how they constructed our political bodies.

220 posted on 02/05/2002 5:17:54 PM PST by JMJ333
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