Creationists...What will it take?

Just to be argumentive, quoting your link there:

The NAS defines a fact as "an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as 'true,'"

Well, guess what, over the course of humanity, I think more people have confirmed creationism and accepted it as true. Does that make them more right than evolutionists?

And then in topic seven there, how can one explain where these first nucleic acids or amino acids came from? This is the most intriguing question in my mind? Something started something somewhere. How can everything just be? This is what keeps my mind open and willing to listen to any explanation and never deem any one thing as the absolute truth. The start of our universe cannot be explained by science or religion.

[edit on 27-1-2005 by steggyD]

Originally posted by steggyD

Well, guess what, over the course of humanity, I think more people have confirmed creationism and accepted it as true. Does that make them more right than evolutionists?

How have more people confirmed creationism???....I can understand more people accepting it as truth, but confirmed???? How does one go about confirming creation??

Originally posted by LuDaCrIs
This question goes out to all creationists.

What is it going to take for you to beleive evolution?

An act of God, I guess.

Dang it, Steggy, I was about to quote that sentance!
So instead, I'll quote something else:

When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution’s truth beyond reasonable doubt.

In response to this:

This is a debate tactic known as ‘elephant hurling’. This is where the critic throws summary arguments about complex issues to give the impression of weighty evidence, but with an unstated presumption that a large complex of underlying ideas is true, and failing to consider opposing data, usually because they have uncritically accepted the arguments from their own side. But we should challenge elephant-hurlers to offer specifics and challenge the underlying assumptions.

It's also interesting to note that Scientific America refuses to publish any retort to these points or anything dealing with a creationist model. The response is simple, "no, you're wrong and I don't want to see your evidence." That's why I found this comment extremely ironic:

Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects their evidence.

Well, Mr. Rennie, I wonder where people could have gotten that impression.

As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.

Easily said, but he didn't want to back that statement up with any examples. That whole article is a bunch of double speak and assertions given with very little evidence. The finches used as examples are examples of microevolution. None of those finches became a rat, or a snake, or some unknown animal. They just adapted their beaks to their environment and food source, like the peppermoth. I can go speak factually, sound very confident in what I'm saying, use a bunch of big words and use blanket arguements without any examples to prove to you the sky is a new color, actually, herpel. It seems evolutionists are very willing to slam creationists as ignorant and uninformed, but they don't seem to want to take on a creationist scientist in a scientific debate. Why is that?

Originally posted by junglejake
Easily said, but he didn't want to back that statement up with any examples. That whole article is a bunch of double speak and assertions given with very little evidence. The finches used as examples are examples of microevolution. None of those finches became a rat, or a snake, or some unknown animal. They just adapted their beaks to their environment and food source, like the peppermoth. I can go speak factually, sound very confident in what I'm saying, use a bunch of big words and use blanket arguements without any examples to prove to you the sky is a new color, actually, herpel. It seems evolutionists are very willing to slam creationists as ignorant and uninformed, but they don't seem to want to take on a creationist scientist in a scientific debate. Why is that?

Once again your ignorance is shining through. Evolution would never claim that a finch would turn into a rat or a snake. The point is that the isolation, which these finches, experienced from the rest of the population will lead to a new species. The beaks changing into a more adaptive characteristic is just a step towards a new species. This is why microevolution can be observed in a lab. Macroevolution takes 1000's if not 100,000's of years, which is why we can observe it in a lab. Technically every species on the planet is a transitonary species.

Lud, you need to look past the specifics. I'm making a point using examples we have here today. I am not saying a finch will become a rat, I'm saying a finch should become another animal completely that we have never seen before. What's this animal's name? Who knows, it doesn't exist yet, and we have no idea what it will look like or anything. If macroevolution stands as true, this will happen, though. Try to get away from nitpicking little details in examples and try to address the larger issue at hand. One form of animal mutating into a completely different animal has never been observed, and the fossil record does not back this up.

Originally posted by LuDaCrIs

Originally posted by steggyD

Well, guess what, over the course of humanity, I think more people have confirmed creationism and accepted it as true. Does that make them more right than evolutionists?

How have more people confirmed creationism???....I can understand more people accepting it as truth, but confirmed???? How does one go about confirming creation??

I guess the same way. How is everything here? Either they were created that way or they were created to evolve that way. Either way they were created, which I can't see how anybody can argue creationism. Who or what created them? I don't know.

Another thing to think of is that these supposed animals that might have been in the evolutionary phase, maybe they were just another species that is extinct that may have had characteristics somewhere in the middle of the two species in question. The point is, until we build a time machine and go back to these phases, I don't think the argument can be won in either direction.

Edited to add this. I suppose that is your answer right there in my last sentence in paragraph above. Time travel.

[edit on 27-1-2005 by steggyD]

Once again your ignorance is shining through. Evolution would never claim that a finch would turn into a rat or a snake. The point is that the isolation, which these finches, experienced from the rest of the population will lead to a new species. The beaks changing into a more adaptive characteristic is just a step towards a new species. This is why microevolution can be observed in a lab. Macroevolution takes 1000's if not 100,000's of years, which is why we can observe it in a lab. Technically every species on the planet is a transitonary species.

There goes the crack smoking again. You keep confusing evolving with adaptation. According to what you think,,,, humans will someday not be human anymore, we'll be something bigger and better. I don't think so.

Originally posted by deesw
There goes the crack smoking again. You keep confusing evolving with adaptation. According to what you think,,,, humans will someday not be human anymore, we'll be something bigger and better. I don't think so.

Ummm adaptation is the trigger for evolution.
And yes if we don't kill ourselves first we will become something different.
We don't notice it in our life time because it takes hundreds of thousands of years.
Humans have been studying animals for a very short period of time(2000-3000 years) and we have noticed microevoution take place, most notably within our domesticated animals.

"There is no difference between micro- and macroevolution except that genes between species usually diverge, while genes within species usually combine. The same processes that cause within-species evolution are responsible for above-species evolution, except that the processes that cause speciation include things that cannot happen to lesser groups, such as the evolution of different sexual apparatus (because, by definition, once organisms cannot interbreed, they are different species).

The idea that the origin of higher taxa, such as genera (canines versus felines, for example), requires something special is based on the misunderstanding of the way in which new phyla (lineages) arise. The two species that are the origin of canines and felines probably differed very little from their common ancestral species and each other. But once they were reproductively isolated from each other, they evolved more and more differences that they shared but the other lineages didn't. This is true of all lineages back to the first eukaryotic (nuclear) cell. Even the changes in the Cambrian explosion are of this kind, although some (eg, Gould 1989) think that the genomes (gene structures) of these early animals were not as tightly regulated as modern animals, and therefore had more freedom to change. "

www.talkorigins.org...

A real creationist will never accept the truth of evolution, and indeed countless other aspects of science and common sense that disprove the existence of a superior being, until their "God" tells them it is true. This will never happen, and for that reason trying to answer the question posed in the topic of this thread is about as productive as banging your head against a brick wall.

and indeed countless other aspects of science and common sense that disprove the existence of a superior being,

You show me proof that God doesn't exist!

i believe that god guides evolution. Its obvious that species change over time but i believe god makes how they evolve.

Originally posted by deeswYou show me proof that God doesn't exist!

That's the genius of religion. You Can't prove a negative.

That's the genius of religion. You Can't prove a negative.

No proof huh?

Originally posted by tomcat ha
i believe that god guides evolution. Its obvious that species change over time but i believe god makes how they evolve.

That's just it.
The question should not be Creation vs. Evolution, but Religion Vs Spirtuality

I belive that Everything that exists, matter and energy, EVERYTHING is made up of the same basic material. (see string theory, superstringtheory.com...) And that is what "God" is. The eternal sorce opf light within us all. The earth is a school, a learning place that we teach ourselves subjectivly about ourselves.

There is no death! No heaven, no hell. Only the eternal. There is no "I" after "death". just WE.

Originally posted by deesw
No proof huh?

Well then try and prove that evolution DOESN'T exist you can't.

Ah...the old 'Creationism vs.Evolution (read: Religion vs.Science) debate...always great for building points but ever without an answer.
It's like asking for proof of God, or the opposite. You're bound to get lots of posts, argument, slandering, postulating and reminders that other threads already covered this somewhere along the line.
But, anyhow...here's my take...for what it's worth;

Creationists like to have an important guy living in nothing, who gets really bored there and decides to 'create the universe'. The hard part to understand is that with that scenario, this important guy with the beard had to be mulling over his sorry situation 'somewhere'. The problem is that if there was a 'somewhere' this important guy was in, who made that place? In fact, who made the important guy to begin with?

Evolutionists are scientists (for the most part), who know that plants and animals adapt, including us. We change according to conditions. If there was a fruit we all liked that hung 12 feet off the ground, and we had never invented ladders, we would have really long necks or legs, like the giraffe. The problem then gets weird when we look down the trunk of the tree of life to see where all the different species evolved from. Somewhere down that trunk and into the roots, they start to talk about interplanetary seeding or a lightning bolt in the primordial muck and the next thing you know, they're starting to talk like creationists.

It's a never ending cycle, like the worm Ouroborus eating it's tail, we always get back to the same thing...what the heck started this all off?

Personally, IMO...it doesn't matter if you're a Creationist or an Evolutionist...at the very beginning it seems there was something that happened that, while mysterious and unimaginably profound, we will never totally understand until we can reproduce the event in a laboratory. Which, of course, we can't.

For all you Creationists out there, what existed in the emptiness before creation?
For all you evolutionists, where did all the 'stuff of the universe' come from that seems to continually evolve?

How big is the universe? How long is forever? What is left after all the stuff in the universe gets sucked into a black hole? Why am I worried about it?

Actually, I would say maybe the real conflict here is not Religion vs Science, but Dogma vs. Adaptation, with respects to one's belief system. Any real scientist cannot rule out the possiblity that God or something so similar as to not matter does exist, but to a scientist, that is just another theory in a long line of them to be proven or disproven as circumstances allow (if they ever do). The creationist believes they already "know" that God exists. Thus they don't need to seek answers, since they already have them. There was a period in history where the Church (gatekeepers of the dogma) pretty much controlled science. It was called the Dark Ages for a reason. Like I said before, this isn't an attitude we want to encourage in our children.

It is the Dogma of "We know the truth because it's written in our book" opposed by the Adaptation of "We don't know enough to know the truth."

Any belief system that contidicts provable, repeatable, observable facts just because those facts and the solid theories constructed with them don't jive with the age-old dogma is not really rational. A belief system that approaches any accuracy at all should be able to take any scientific discovery in stride and incorperate it into it's view of the universe.

Creationism should be mentioned in schools in the context of:

"Many people believe that a Diety or Higher Power is responsible for the creation of the Universe. We cannot prove or disprove that using the scientific method. We will discuss what we can prove or theroize based on what we can prove. If you want more information on other versions of Creation, you are encouraged to seek out those groups and institutions that have that information."

That's all you should say about it in Science class, now if it's a Religion class, feel free to throw around all the Dogma you want.

There is no death! No heaven, no hell. Only the eternal. There is no "I" after "death". just WE.

For your sake I hope you are right.

Originally posted by masqua

Personally, IMO...it doesn't matter if you're a Creationist or an Evolutionist...at the very beginning it seems there was something that happened that, while mysterious and unimaginably profound, we will never totally understand until we can reproduce the event in a laboratory. Which, of course, we can't.

For all you Creationists out there, what existed in the emptiness before creation?
For all you evolutionists, where did all the 'stuff of the universe' come from that seems to continually evolve?

How big is the universe? How long is forever? What is left after all the stuff in the universe gets sucked into a black hole? Why am I worried about it?

Masqua...you bring up some very interesting points which i have been thinking about myself.

As far as what happened before the big bang or before creation, I just cant answer that question. The point is that I dont know, but i am not willing to accept the idea of GOd as the creator just becasue its a convienient explanation. With the explanation that god just created the earth and everything doesnt let you question any further. Thats the problem with this whole creation thing I have. At least with the theory of evolution you can put it up to tests and eventually disprove it. With creation you jsut have to accept it and beleive with the help of "faith" (watever that is) that it happened.

I cant say i am 100 percent convinced evolution happened, but right now, I beleive it makes more sense than creation. Eventually this could change, maybe a new theory will come up to explain our existence that rivals both religion and evolution. All i know is that i am willing to critically examine both, and it seems evolution is a better theory not only becasue it has more supporting evidence, but the fact that its falsifiable. Creationist theory can never be tested or examined and for that i cant accept it as true.

[edit on 30-1-2005 by LuDaCrIs]