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?
The design is arranged and executed due only, to the laws of physics, which are essentially God's rules for the construction of the entire universe.
It's man that refers to these rules as "physics".
By all means. In honor of my hero, Richard Mitchell, I grant you permission even to plagiarize.
The Dark AgesTM has been a pretty pretty good marketing gimmick, but the modern scientific method was still begun by creationists.
Well, it was begun by people who happened to believe in special creation. This is not evidence that special creation is true.
The people who developed modern astronomy were astrologers. That does not mean astrology is true. The people who developed modern chemistry were alchemists. That doesn't mean alchemy is true. The people who developed modern mathematics were magicians. That doesn't mean magic is true.
Now I suppose the Creationists will attempt to get astronomy, chemistry and mathematics thrown out of the schools because of their non-Biblical, magical and superstitious origins.
I do find your deist view, without a ‘religion’, very interesting.
LOL – it’s true!
But seriously, the heart is where the answer resides.
Chance refers to activities in a three-dimensional universe, that are beyond our realm of our present ability to predict, and chaos refers to activities that are so intricate they are beyond our present abilities to measure as they occur.
God IS capable of setting in motion a series of seemingly "random, chaotic", interlinked events, throughout millions of years, that eventually yield exactly the position where we all are now.
Because man reaches his limits well before his being able to understand or even participate, he regards these activities with contempt and gives them derogatory labels. But these still are God's rules at work, every minute step of the way.
You could say that, even if your parents happened to meet entirely by "chance", your own existence was actually planned in detail from the first moment of time.
Ah; the Underground Grammarian, and author of "Less than Words can Say."
Great minds must think alike.....
;-)
Evolutionary theory does not suggest that one gets energy from nothing. Perhaps you might take a thermodynamics course.
The second law does not address chaos nor order directly. It involves (in one form) heat flow. In no case does evolutionary theory suggest that heat flows from cold to hot (without a correspondlingly larger flow of heat from hot to cold.) Another formulation is that there are pressure-volume-temperature states that are close to each other but cannot be reached by reversible processes. Perhaps you might take a thermodynamics course.
A small and rather insignificant stupid and loud portion of the population is still reeling from the Scopes Monkey Trial.
"The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of Evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence."-Sir Fred Hoyle Nature, Nov 12, 1981, p. 148
"I would rather believe in fairy tales than in such wild speculation. I have said for years that speculations about the origin of life lead to no useful purpose as even the simplest living system is far too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their attempts to explain the unexplainable. God cannot be explained away by such naive thoughts."-Sir Ernst B. Chain, Nobel Laureate (Medicine, 1945), as quoted by Ronald W. Clark, The Life of Ernst Chain (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1985), pp. 147-148.
"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."-Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and Paleontology, Harvard University
"This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists."-G. G. Simpson, Tempo and Mode of Evolution (N.Y.: Columbia Univ.), p. 106.
"One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, was ... it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. ...so for the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, 'I do know one thing -- it ought not to be taught in high school'."-Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist, British Museum of Natural History, London Keynote address at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, 5 November, 1981
"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has."-Malcolm Muggeridge (world famous journalist and philosopher), Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
"I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?"-Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, in letter to Luther Sunderland, April 10, 1979. Cited in: Sunderland, Luther D., Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems (El Cajon, CA: Master Books, 1988), p. 89.
"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless."-Professor Louis Bounoure, past president of the Biological Society of Strassbourg, Director of the Strassbourg Zoological Museum, Director of Research at the French National Center of Scientific Research. (Quoted in The Advocate, March 8, 1984.)
"Scientists of the highest standing would today accept many of [Bishop] Wilberforce's criticisms of Darwin just as they would also accept the criticisms raised by the geologist [and Christian clergyman] Adam Sedgwick, whose review was published in The Spectator in April 1860... Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin. He felt sure that they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so. What we are to make of that fact is still open to debate, but today it is the conventional neo-Darwinians who appear as the conservative bigots and the unorthodox neo-Sedgwickians who rate as enlightened rationalists prepared to contemplate the evidence that is plain for all to see."-Professor Sir Edmund Leach, addressing the 1981 Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."-Professor Whitten (Professor of Genetics), University of Melbourne, Australia, 1980 Assembly Week address.
"Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere."-Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"The Fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"Psalm 14:1
"...as I became exposed to the law and order of the universe, I was literally humbled by its unerring perfection. I became convinced that there must be a divine intent behind it all... My experiences with science led me to God. They challenge science to prove the existence of God. But must we really light a candle to see the sun?"-Dr. Wernher von Braun.
"A little science estranges a man from God; a lot of science brings him back."-Sir Francis Bacon
"I must confess to a feeling of profound humility in the presence of a universe which transcends us at almost every point. I feel like a child who while playing by the seashore has found a few bright colored shells and a few pebbles while the whole vast ocean of truth stretches out almost untouched and unruffled before my eager fingers."-Sir Isaac Newton, greatest scientist in history.
"The gaps are gone, but the links remain -- missing."-Douglas Dewar.
"It's such a deeply ingrained faith, such a strong dogma on which we are all raised from an early age. Interestingly, I've read a number of biographies of scientists who are leaders in both creationist and evolutionary thought. The overwhelming trend is that the leaders of evolutionary thought all make their living purely from evolutionary theory. They are 'specialists in evolution' and there is no way that you could see how someone whose entire life and reputation and livelihood were bound up with the theory could turn against it. On the other hand, the leaders of the creationist movement usually have made a name for themselves in some area of fundamental and applied science -- real science -- before moving into creation science."-Kouznetsov, in Dr. Carl Wieland, "Interview with Dr. Dmitri Kouznetsov," Creation Ex Nihilo, Vol. 14, No. 1, p. 36.
"Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts. This museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of their views. In all this great museum, there is not a particle of evidence of the transmutation of species."-Dr. Etheridge, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, cited in Dr. Scott Huse, The Collapse of Evolution.
"If pressed about man's ancestry, I would have to unequivocally say that all we have is a huge question mark. To date, there has been nothing found to truthfully purport as a transitional specie to man, including Lucy, since 1470 was as old and probably older. If further pressed, I would have to state that there is more evidence to suggest an abrupt arrival of man rather than a gradual process of evolving".Richard Leakey, world's foremost paleoanthropologist, in a PBS documentary, 1990.
"At this point the war centering around Darwinism and its control over the scientific discussion of origins is going well for the creationists, and evolution is being defeated in many battles."-Dr. Paul D. Ackerman, It's a Young World After All (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1986), p. 12.
"I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science."-Dr. Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 422. (Note: Lovtrup is an evolutionist, albeit not an "orthodox" one.)
"The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the issue within academic and professional ranks, and that a growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the evolutionist camp. It is interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some instances regretfully, as one could say."-Wolfgang Smith, Mathematician and Physicist Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University Former math instructor at MIT
"...contrary to what is widely assumed by evolutionary biologists today, it has always been the anti-evolutionists, not the evolutionists, in the scientific community who have stuck rigidly to the facts and adhered to a more strictly empirical approach."-Dr. Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (London: Burnett Books, 1985), p. 353, 354. (Note: Dr. Denton is neither a creationist nor a Christian.)
"One is forced to conclude that many scientists and technologists pay lip-service to Darwinian theory only because it supposedly excludes a Creator..."-Dr. Michael Walker Senior Lecturer, Anthropology, Sydney University Quadrant, Oct 1982, p. 44
"It is a religion of science that Darwinism held, and holds men's minds... The modified, but still characteristically Darwinian theory has itself become an orthodoxy, preached by its adherents with religious fervor, and doubted, they feel, only by a few muddlers imperfect in scientific faith."-Marjorie Grene, Encounter, November 1959, p. 48.
"If the word 'God' were written upon every blowing leaf, embossed on every passing cloud, engraved on every granite rock, the inductive evidence of God in the world would be no stronger than it is."-Dr. E.A. Maness.
"So many essential conditions are necessary for life to exist on our earth that it is mathematically impossible that all of them could exist in proper relationship by chance on any one earth at one time."-Dr. A. Cressy Morrison, past president of the New York Academy of Sciences.
"It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for it is incontrovertible that where there is a plan there is intelligence - an orderly, unfolding universe testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever uttered - 'In the beginning, God.'"-Dr. Arthur H. Compton, Nobel Laureate (Physics).
Oh, they could well have assumed it was some type of supernatural person, even the traditional Christian God. I'm saying the derivation of our individual rights works just as well if "our Creator" was a purely natural process. The essential part is the fact that we are endowed with individual rights, that are inalienable because they are directly implied from our intrinsic nature as human beings. How, precisely, we came to be human beings (with minds capable of complex abstract thought) instead of just large monkeys (for whom any abstract concept such as "rights" is far beyond their mental reach) is irrelevant to that issue.
Such naïve use of quotes, innocently borrowed no doubt from a godly source you trust, and believing you have something with which to smite the godless mainstream theory of biology. Dig deeper, incindiary. CLICK HERE & don't stop until you've found the real stories behind each of those quotes that sounded so convincing. When you discover that they're utterly cynical Clintonian truth-twisting games being played on you, hopefully you'll feel like I did when I discovered that all ten of the Hollywood Ten really were Communist cadre.
BTW, this one is my favorite...
"The Fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no God.'"
Psalm 14:1
;-)
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