Charles Darwin film 'too controversial for religious America'

reply to post by John Matrix

By way of example of the probabilistically impossible odds of abiogenesis, consider the
May 31, 2007 paper published by Eugene V. Koonin of the National Center for
Biotechnology Information. Peer reviewed and published in Biology Today [2], Koonin
calculated the probability of the most simple life form arising by natural processes, with
the following conclusion:
...
the chance of life occurring by natural processes is 1 in 10 followed by 1018 zeros.
Koonin's intent was to show that short of postulating a multiverse of an infinite number of
universes, the chance of life occuring on earth is vanishingly small

From the 1st link from your 2nd: Origin of Life as Evidence of Intelligent Design
I say that attempting to determine statistical probabilities when we do not know the starting condition of the system under analysis is flawed science. However, taking Koonin @face value, or any of the other figures quoted by the article, the unlikelyhood of abiogenesis is evidence of nothing more than itself. It doesn't mean it didn't happen; it could mean we just dont know how it could yet; it could mean the earth was quite different then, or subject to external influences we have no way of determining; it could mean it didn't happen.
However, to jump to the conclusion it must mean there was a creator is unscientific, because there is no evidence of such, just speculation which cannot be tested by experiment or discovered by evidence. This is why religion should stay out of science: they are 2 completely different disciplines with no common methodology & precious little common language even.

Originally posted by Jim Scott
If you examine the proponents of evolution on ATS you will find that many are "free thinkers" who are Wiccans, homosexuals, etc.

How pathetic and insulting typical hate from a fundamentalists.

Judging by your posts and audacious attitude to spamming ATS with biblical quotes, I'd say your mental health is dangerously fragile and a threat to society. Religious believers are the worst kinda of immoral people, do you know the highest divorce rate and teenager pregnacies in the United States is within the Bible belt

Can you hear the tears of baby Jesus? Oh wait, no, he doesn't exist.

And you are right, the world is dying. However, we cannot fix it because religious believers suggest all medical advances are against the Bible

As for intelligent design, it is more plausible to suggest humanity was genetically engineered by another intelligent civilisation. After all, the Bible is a product of Summerian, Egyptian and Pagan tales mutated into one entity. Bet your wasn't taught that at Sunday school!

Religious America should read their own Constituation, especially the section on the Separation of Church and State.

Wow I could kill this whole thing instantly...
Darwin never thought up evolution it was 'natural selection' that he posited... and I am quite sure if anyone else went to Galapagos where only place is that some animals exist, that thinking 'isolation facilitate new species' is pretty much the ONLY answer.

Originally posted by John Matrix
Why do people always bring up the crusades from several hundred years ago and blame it on Christians?

Why do people always try to blame Nazism and Stalinism on atheism?
Hitler was possibly the biggest believer of his time, he thought it was his righteous DUTY to rid the world of satanic 'races' and that his 'Aryan race' was the chosen one of God, and he frequently mentions God in his writings and speeches. It was his "righteous duty" and he used Christianity as a basis for a lot of his politics.

Stalin may have been a fascist but he wasnt quite atheist. The way I like to put it is that he was a theist, just he thought that HE was god. That is why sometimes it is called the 'cult of Stalin', people actually WORSHIPPED him.

reply to post by John Matrix Well, I read most of it but with the mass of assumptions, misrepresentations, misunderstandings, just bad science & semantics, I got bored & skimmed towards the end. Those links provide no evidence for intelligent design, rather they raise questions about evolution theory. Some are out of date, some based on discredited ideas &/or oversimplified metaphors, & a lot of speculation unsupported by empirical data. Even where the referenced ideas bear scrutiny, that they provide evidence of ID would only be true if it were the case that an object which appears not to be an apple must be an orange.
That people believe this bunk tells me that what I hear about the quality of scientific education available to most in the USA probably is as bad as is often reported.

Originally posted by John Matrix

Originally posted by merka

Originally posted by John Matrix
Evolution is an atheistic religion that denies God the glory for His creation. You are an evolutionist, therefore you mock God by denying Him his Glory.

That is YOUR belief, not necessarily the belief of evolutionists.

You cannot straddle both sides of the fence my friend. You are either on the one side of the issue or the other. There is no in between, no merging of the two beliefs. They are in opposition to each other.

No John ... you are wrong ... The fence only exists if you want it to ... some have no need for a fence ... for them the way is clear

Christianity and Evolution does co-exist in a belief system for very many people ... and for them, it's a beautiful thing ...

Originally posted by Jim Scott
Apparently science has recently found we are most likely at the center of the universe. Sorry.. might want to catch up here:

What are you talking about??

We're not even in the centre of our own Galaxy, let alone the Universe.
How can we say we're in the centre of the Universe when we don't know just how big the Universe is?


Perhaps you should read something more modern.


Wow.... Science has just recently discovered that the Earth is flat.... Amazing

reply to post by blupblup

blupblup I'm not trying to disagree with you here, but Jim Scott DID post a reference source, so perhaps if you want to be critical of the assertion he made you could review his reference, which is an article written by:

Robert A. Sungenis, Ph.D.

December 10, 2008

which says:

In a paper written by three astrophysicists from Oxford in 2008 evidence for the centrality of the Earth was the simplest explanation for the practical and mathematical understanding of the universe, far superior to the forced invention of “Dark Energy” to support the Copernican model. ScienceDaily put it in simple terms for the layman:

So actually 2008 seems to be like a fairly recent paper.

The fact is cosmologists have made observations they can't explain by any known theory so they invented the name "Dark Energy" as a code for "We don't know what the heck is going on with this data" which opens the door for people to write papers trying to explain the data.

Apparently the idea that we are at the center of the universe (The milky way galaxy is at the center is apparently what they really postulate) may be the topic of one such paper. It's fine if you want to dispute someone's ideas, but you may want to check out their source when you do that.

To the best of my knowledge, this resolution to the dark energy problem hasn't gained widespread acceptance through the scientific community yet, but it's an interesting hypothesis which they claim explains our strange observations about the increasing rate of expansion in the universe. I'll have to find that 2008 Oxford university paper and read it.

[edit on 14-9-2009 by Arbitrageur]

Originally posted by Bunken Drum
Ok I've had enough: creationism is not science.

By your definition one could say Evolutionism is not science either.

LOOK, there are scientists that believe in evolution and there are scientists that believe in creation. So we have scientific creationists and we have scientific evolutionists. Both have hypothesis, both study the evidence, both note phenomena, both make predictions based on the evidence. Both have peer reviews.

I agree neither side can prove their theory. All either side can do is explain how the evidence supports their hypothesis. Then the rest of us look at both explanations(for the same evidences) and decide which model, theory, hypothesis is more reasonable.

Creationism is a new thing.

There were scientists before evolutionary science. There were scientists that believed in creation, therefore creationism is not a new thing. What developed as a result of evolutionism was a greater need to demonstrate that intelligent design is the more reasonable explanation for all that exists.
Intelligent design is predicted by the evidence, supports the hypothesis and theory of creationist scientists, and is accepted in peer reviews, therefore it is a legitimate theory and based on scientific observations of existing evidence.

In fact the only prediction that creationism does make is that creationists will not accept evolution, regardless of evidence, because faith requires none, nor can it be disproven. Thats not science either.

In my paragraph above I mentioned that creationism predicts intelligent design in all of the evidence. Therefore, your statement is incorrect.

Evolutionism requires faith in natural processes working over hundreds of millions of years to generate mutations that result in higher orders of life and increasing complexity of life forms. This is not observable, nor has it ever been observed.

So, evolutionism is a faith based system...and therefore a religion, not a science.


[edit on 14/9/09 by John Matrix]

reply to post by Bunken Drum


I'm going to use some of your own words and reasoning to demonstrate how it can apply to your religion too:

To jump to the conclusion the evidence proves evolution is unscientific, because there is no evidence of such, just speculation, which cannot be tested by experiment or discovered by evidence. This is why the evolutionist religion should stay out of science: they are 2 completely different disciplines with no common methodology & precious little common language even.

Originally posted by debunky

Originally posted by John Matrix

Originally posted by debunky
Snowflake.

Next please.

Review context.
A snowflake is not an example of life from non life. A snowflake is the result of intelligent design and the fractal nature of water molecules.
Next please...right back at ya.

[edit on 13/9/09 by John Matrix]

Exactly: A snowflake/drop of water isn't even alive, yet if you extract energy from the drop of water, its apparent structure and order increases!

But it does not become life....we are talking about life from non life particles....that's the context for higher order and complexity through so called mutations that benefit a species....that's the context. A snowflake has nothing to do with life from non life particles, regardless of the view that a snow flake appears to be more complex than a water molecule, when in fact it's not, it's fractal in structure, as is the molecule, the pattern formed, though complex is not a predictor of more complex life forms as a result of spontaneous random mutations occurring over hundreds of millions of years.

reply to post by John Matrix

Intelligent design … is accepted in peer reviews

Can you provide an example of a modern paper that supports the notion of intelligent design that has been submitted to and accepted by a peer reviewed scientific journal that is both reputable and not centred around proving Christian or any other religious belief?


And by the way, if you believe creationism to be up there with evolution as a scientific hypothesis (not even theory) why were you so absent from the thread I posted a couple of weeks ago asking for someone to provide such a hypothesis? I’d love to hear the scientific case for creationism.

Originally posted by John Matrix
By your definition one could say Evolutionism is not science either.

Correct, the study of evolution is not science, it's a scientific theory (an accepted fact) which is part of the science of biology.

LOOK, there are scientists that believe in evolution and there are scientists that believe in creation.

Indeed. And those scientists who have a belief in God universally accept the proven process of evolution as one of God's creations -- a tool, just like erosion, to ensure that what was created continues to adapt as the environment changes.


Logical, thinking persons of faith accept evolution as a tool of their creator.

we are talking about life from non life particles

Evolution never addresses the origins of life. Your implication is a typical disingenuous lie made popular by the Creationists who rely on misrepresenting facts and outright fabricated lies to keep those unfamiliar with science in the dark.

reply to post by Mike_A


If you, or anyone, really wanted to know about scientists who hold to the creationist model you would have done the search. But here, let me help you with a few links(there is much more available on the Internet).
Scientists for Creation:
www.christiananswers.net...
www.evolutionfairytale.com...
www.answersingenesis.org...
www.icr.org...
www.icr.org...

Remember, evolutionst scientists get grants and funding from the gov. If the gov. only proivided creation scientists with funding you would find far more creation scientists than evolution scientists. Follow the money......that's why there are more evolutionist scientists and science programs.......they are all hitching a ride on the money train.

Originally posted by Mike_A
And by the way, if you believe creationism to be up there with evolution as a scientific hypothesis (not even theory) why were you so absent from the thread I posted a couple of weeks ago asking for someone to provide such a hypothesis? I’d love to hear the scientific case for creationism.

I read his links that disprove evolution. And guess who the star witness is to disprove evolution? Charles Darwin, aka "the father of evolution"!

www.intelligent-design-evidence.com...

The fact is that the fossil evidence does not support Darwinian gradualism. It never has
and likely never will. Evolutionists such as Stephen Jay Gould were forced to propose
theories such as "punctuated equilibrium" to "save the phenomena," i.e., explain the
evidence in a coherent fashion." Stephen J. Gould refers to the rarity of transitional fossils
as the "'trade secret' of paleontologists". Gould states:

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade
secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data
only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however
reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism
that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record: ". . . He who
rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my
whole theory." [7]

I think I have to agree Darwin didn't claim he had all the answers and he was brave enough to admit it.

But I think what we now have a better understanding of than in Darwin's day, is all the natural disasters the Earth is subjected to, from supervolcanoes like the one at Yellowstone, to Mt Everest sized asteroid impacts that wiped out a lot of life on the planet. Therefore we now have at least a mechanism whereby some periods of equilibrium can be interrupted, and opening the door for the type of adaptation Darwin proposed.

reply to post by John Matrix


No, no John, you said that creationists had their papers peer reviewed. Unless you are talking about publications that are openly biased towards creationism then that is not true is it.

You said;

Intelligent design is predicted by the evidence, supports the hypothesis and theory of creationist scientists, and is accepted in peer reviews, therefore it is a legitimate theory and based on scientific observations of existing evidence.

Can you provide an example of this or not?

You guys do realize that science and religion aren't mutually exclusive and you can believe in one without denying the other?

They both require a good amount of faith and they both explain different things. Religion will never tell us how a virus works but science can't tell us where all of the universe came from and why it all works so well.

You reach a point, in science, where you can't explain anymore, where you realize everything is so amazing, that perhaps an equally amazing explanation is the right one.

You can't tell me it doesn't take a lot of faith to buy into membrane or string theory.

Since Creationists cannot actually prove there is a God, it is logically unprovable that said god then created anything at all.

I find their constant claims of Creationism to be a science at best absurd, and at worst a complete debasement of the scientific principle.

reply to post by Shadowflux

They both require a good amount of faith

No they don’t, the whole point of science is to remove the need for anything to be taken on faith. Anything that is held as true by science is supported by evidence; faith is belief without evidence.

And no, it doesn’t take any faith to buy into M-theory or string theory; both are built around mathematical models that make predictions that are either consistent with observation or not. Whether or not these theories are considered correct or not depends on this consistency, i.e. the evidence.

Do not confuse yet to be tested or confirmed predictions with items taken on faith. If a theory says that some new type of matter needs to exist, its existence is not a matter of faith. It’s existence is predicted and will be determined based on whether the observable evidence points towards this conclusion.

There is no need, or room for faith in science.

reply to post by Sargon of Akkad


I guess it depends on what your concept of "God" is, you don't always have to follow established systems.

Originally posted by Shadowflux
You guys do realize that science and religion aren't mutually exclusive and you can believe in one without denying the other?

That's a good viewpoint that some eminent scientists share. They see evolution as a tool God uses to perpetuate His creation, as others have posted in this thread.

They both require a good amount of faith and they both explain different things. Religion will never tell us how a virus works but science can't tell us where all of the universe came from and why it all works so well.

Religion certainly involves faith. I'm not sure that true science does. People have used the abiogenesis argument to show that science involves faith since science can't prove abiogenesis, but I see the scientific view as somewhat agnostic in this regard. No scientist has ever proven how life began so I think the claims that science has faith that abiogenesis is the mechanism for the creation of life is a bit of a stretch.

You can't tell me it doesn't take a lot of faith to buy into membrane or string theory.

I know of scientists who say they won't accept those theories until they make some useful predictions. As far as I know there's not any proof to support them. Therefore your insinuation that string theory could be viewed as a sort of "faith-based" religion is not inappropriate even though this theory is deeply embedded in academia:

www.slate.com...

The leading universities are dominated by hooded monks who speak in impenetrable mumbo-jumbo; insist on the existence of fantastic mystical forces, yet can produce no evidence of these forces; and enforce a rigid guild structure of beliefs in order to maintain their positions and status. The Middle Ages? No, the current situation in university physics departments. I just invented the part about the hoods.

The upper rungs of the particle-physics faculties at Princeton, Stanford, and elsewhere in the academy are today heavy with advocates of "string theory," a proposed explanation for the existence of the universe.

In contrast to string theory, which has no evidence to support it, evolution is a much better supported theory with evidence to support it. But as you so eloquently said, belief in evolution does not deny the existence of a creator as some people seem to be trying to imply. I wish more people could come to the insightful understanding that you have.