Take one water bottle.
Add a vitamin pill.
Heat for a billion years...
Then poof! You have life?
Posted on 06/11/2007 2:09:09 PM PDT by Alter Kaker
Sounds like good science to me.
You see, good science isn't dogma. When one theory is shown to be inadequate, it is replaced by another one. For example, people used to believe in abiogenesis, or spontaneous generation. They had experiments to prove their claim (see: Spallanzani)1. It took the genius of Louis Pasteur to devise an experiment to disprove spontaneous generation that was acceptable to the religious dogma as well as conforming to the scientific method, by no means an easy task.
What about for evolution? Before Darwin, there was Lamarck. He suggested that traits developed in one lifetime are passed on to future generations. The data, however, didn’t really support his theory all that much. So, it was dumped in favor of Darwin’s theory. Good science.
Talk.origins is a dishonest site.
No evidence is presented there; only opinion, and propaganda. It’s a waste of time and bandwidth to click any evolutionist’s links here.
It's not clear to me. Would you mind clarifying it for me?
Spontaneous generation just was re-dubbed chemical generation.
Macroevolution is every bit as dogmatic and religious as Creationism.
I’m not a Bible literalist (I think the six days of the creation could refer to periods of time rather than literal days, for example, since you can’t very well have a day or a week before the sun and moon are created).
And I believe (because I see with my own eyes) that you can have partial evolution, where birds grow longer beaks or dogs are bred for particular functions, for example).
But I think the theory of General Evolution is statistically highly improbable, if not impossible, without some sort of help beyond blind material chance. Saving the theory by positing an infinite number of universes, so that at least one of them can get it right, improves the statistics, but it also seems extremely improbable. Why on earth should we believe that? What is the evidence? What would Occam think of such a theory?
Sheesh. Even the strictest "creation science" types accept speciation. It's effectively essential to do so if you accept a literalist version of the "Noah's Ark" story, as there would be too many animals for the ark to carry otherwise.
Indeed such Biblical literalists implicitly invoke rates of speciation (differentiation of "created kinds" often into dozens and dozens of species, often with varying chromosome numbers and conventionally classified into multiple genera and/or sub-families, e.g. the "horse kind" including horses, zebras, asses, etc) that are vastly more rapid than any evolutionists would consider remotely plausible.
Less strict creationists also accept that speciation occurs (or did occur). In fact I've followed the antievolution movement for many years and I'm not aware of a single "professional" creationist or antievolution scientist type who believes in fixed species. You have to go back at least to the 19th Century for that.
And the silly and also dishonest Answers in Genesis is just as much of a waste of time and bandwith, as you consider Talk.orgins to be...
So two websites, completely in disagreement with each other...people will read one or the other or both, and then make up their minds...
We each have our own opinoins about these websites...other Freepers, hopefully will go and check both of them out and make up their own minds..
Great answer, although I'm sure most Catholics would argue that Christ did not have to die at the last supper in order for the Transmutation to have taken place, after all he turned water into wine which was a clearly observable fact from all witnesses to the event, why could he have not actually Transmutated the Sacrament, the answer of course is that nothing prevented him from doing so (although I'd have to say it would be icky).
b) God stated that God created the universe in a particular order, at a particular date, that is at odds with the Macroevolutionary model--that, along with Macroevolution being very far from a watertight hypothesis, is why so many Christians are Creationists.
Another great answer, but again my argument remains the same, why out of all the books of the Bible do we have to take Genesis as literal fact when we know so many passages were merely mans interpretation of what God had reveled to him?
Could not an observer of today been better able to acnowledge both the greatness of the act of Creation and been better able to interpret/describe what he was he was seeing to us today?
Why is it so hard to fathom that the observer of Gods Revelation to him of Creation was only describing it in a way he could understand?
From your earlier post, what are some species that have actually been observed turning into other species (breeds of dogs are not separate species, even if they might be labeled subspecies)? This is an actual question, and ‘mainstream’ Creationist models have it more at a genus level, rather than species (so dogs are descended from wolves or a wolfish species; horses, donkeys, zebras are related; elephants and mammoths, too, but a lizard and a protozoa aren’t).
Take one water bottle.
Add a vitamin pill.
Heat for a billion years...
Then poof! You have life?
So guess that for comment 150, it is what are some lifeforms which are supposed to have crossed genera which have been observed rather than what are some species.
Look up the definition of "spontaneous". In any case the term "spontaneous generation" is used in science to refer to an historical view that living things come into existence from non-living material as a normal and recurring process in nature. I.e. something envisioned to happen all the time, not just at one time long ago.
In fact spontaneous generation originally arose as a scientific view in a CREATIONIST context, many, many years before Darwin came along. Although some pre-Darwinian evolutionists (e.g. Lamarck) accepted spontaneous generation, Darwin himself rejected the notion.
Bear in mind that one of the distinctive features of Darwin's theory was that it included the idea -- which previous evolutionary schemes did not -- of universal common descent (i.e. that all living things are ultimately related by ordinary biological reproduction). Spontaneous generation is INCONSISTENT with common descent. If living things are continually or even intermittently coming into existence by means other than biological reproduction then all living things are NOT related.
look around you next time you go “fossil hunting”: the “layers of sediment” all over the world show evidence of a world-wide flood!
Why would there be fossils on even some of the highest peaks (that are confirmed not to have been recent volcanoes) in the world? Why has there been miles of supposedly (dated by evolutionists) ‘old rock’ on top of ‘younger rock’. See second post for more evidence!
who’s to say that all that water was as salty as it is now, or that there wasn’t rain enough to fill fresh water run-off lakes? I am not a scientist, so I will say I don’t know, but although your question is thought provoking: it doesn’t disparage the theory of creation.
I do appreciate that you are thinking though, and this discussion is helpful, I hope!
I believe in adaptation. I don’t believe that a monkey becomes a human.
Horses don’t become alligators. That’s all I’m saying.
And I would go along with an anti-dogmatism statement or policy of this type so long as it is applied to scientific theories in general, instead of singling out for special qualification only those scientific theories that biblical literalists happen to object to.
Interestingly antievolutionists have often proposed statements or policies such as you describe, but they ALWAYS refuse to generalize them to all scientific theories. I've yet to find a antievolution activist who has shown the slightest concern with scientific dogmatism (supposed or actual) as a general principle. It's always invoked as a ploy in service of special pleading.
In fact it's pretty clear to me that antievolutionists generally prefer that scientific theories other than evolution are taught dogmatically, as this will make evolution seem less valid by contrast.
Does this mysterious "real" science you write of include the supernatural in its explanations and findings?
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