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To: Right Wing Professor
CreationSafaris: How did the spider find these hygroscopic compounds and incorporate them into the production line? It evolved.

RWProfessor: The spider found nothing. The spiders that expressed a gene that made their webs attract water survived better. One wonders why anyone has difficulty with the idea.

And this was observed by scientists? Or was it imagined? People have difficulty with "it evolved" because it goes against Scriptural teachings and any "proof" is in the imaginations of it's believers. For anything to "evolve", it must have a design/purpose/instruction.
677 posted on 05/26/2005 2:45:20 AM PDT by backslacker
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To: backslacker; Right Wing Professor
And this was observed by scientists?

The overhwelming evidence for it has been observed, yes, and has passed all verification tests and falsification tests.

Or was it imagined?

No, that's how the creationists arrive at their conclusions (for dozens of examples, just read this thread), not evolutionary biologists. That is, when the creationists aren't simply lying.

People have difficulty with "it evolved" because it goes against Scriptural teachings

People had difficulty with "the Earth moves around the Sun" because it went against Scriptural teachings as well.

One would think that "people" would have learned not to make this kind of error.

As the famous explorer Ferdinand Magellan said, in reference to a clash between the trustworthiness of direct evidence over dogma:

"The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." (Ferdinand Magellan, from George Seldes, The Great Quotations, Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1983, p. 461.)
And:
"To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover."
-Galileo

"By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox."
-Galileo

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-Galileo

"It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment."
-Galileo

"Nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages."
-Galileo

Hint: Galileo was right -- because he followed the evidence where it lead. The Church, the Cardinals, and the Pope himself were wrong -- because they clung to their arrogant notions that they were unable to misunderstand Scripture.

Learn from their mistake.

and any "proof" is in the imaginations of it's believers.

I see -- so vast amounts of evidence supporting evolution, including just the tiny taste of it presented in post #661, is all just "imagination"? It's just made up? Someone fantasized all of it? Is that really the paranoid, slanderous, pig-ignorant position you want to put your name on?

I regret to inform you that your creationist sources have lied to you, and lied badly. And you have made the mistake of swallowing their lies whole.

For anything to "evolve", it must have a design/purpose/instruction.

It has to have a survival advantage. A "use" if you will. That is hardly synonymous with "design/purpose/instruction", although I know how much trouble creationists have gasping such simple distinctions.

917 posted on 05/26/2005 2:15:54 PM PDT by Ichneumon
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