toldailytopic: Theistic evolution: best arguments for, or against.

[eameece]

You don't find it strange that a culture that old not only retained their cultural identity for centuries, but also regained their homeland? Everything about Israel defies all the odds -- in the Bible and today. Do you ever think about what that might mean? I know I do.

What does your conclusion lead you to? Absurd notions that the Jews and their offspring are the chosen people of God? Refusing to recognize that all people are God's children, all of whom have also done great things through their history? Staying in a worldview that leads to more wars and genocide like the Jews (and other peoples) have also engaged in?

 

[eameece]

That there is a process is one thing how that process began is still in question.

Yes indeed, and I think it is also in question that conventional science can explain all of what's going on in the process. It only explains external aspects of it. That's fine for what it is, but other ways of knowing point to more going on than natural selection. It is not how it "began" once and for all that is really in question, but how things "begin" at every moment. "Creation" is not one moment in the past; it is NOW and throughout all time and in all places.

 

[Sum1sGruj]

Evolution by natural selection does not require any interference by any supernatural event or being.

Theistic evolution is as specious as intelligent design; it includes an admission that evolution as a process does happen, but pretends that it requires a supernatural cause.

Well here's the kicker- prove it.
Because science has not shown how life even forms beyond far-fetched speculation, your entire argument and those like it are obsolete. There is the evolution of the universe, to the stars, to the planets, to the ?, to life.

 

[Alate_One]

Evolution by natural selection does not require any interference by any supernatural event or being.

Theistic evolution is as specious as intelligent design; it includes an admission that evolution as a process does happen, but pretends that it requires a supernatural cause.

Theistic evolution doesn't necessarily posit a requirement for a supernatural cause of natural selection and evolutionary change. Just that there IS an ultimate supernatural cause of the universe.

Of course the problem comes in the definition of supernatural, which pretends that God is not involved in the natural ordinary occurrences, which is not a Biblical position in my opinion.

 

[Stripe]

If the only claim for the Exodus is the account in the book of Exodus, that is not evidence that the claim is true. You are only saying you accept the claim on faith. That's your choice, but you can't claim there is any evidence to back up the claim. genuine original supplied a source for evidence; I probably will look at it.

:AMR:

Boy are you stupid. I thout I'd seen dense before, but you take the cake! :dunce:

 

[eameece]

:AMR:

Boy are you stupid. I thout I'd seen dense before, but you take the cake! :dunce:

I do, and a delicious cake it is. :banana:

The truth is always delicious; yummy yummy yummy.
You ought to try it Stripe. It might make you put your defensive baton down, and take a look on the side of the angels.

 

[eameece]

Right at the start. :thumb:

Genesis 1
3*Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4*And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. 5*God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day.​

Nowhere does this definition say that a day is 24 hours long, or that it depends on a rotating earth. Nowhere among the 6 "days" does Genesis define a "day" as 24 hours of Earth rotating.

You believe what you believe because some authority told you to believe it. You and your folk simply take things on faith, whether it is creationism and other religious-right prejudices (homosexuality is a sin, for example), or whether it is trickle-down economics and the theory that government takes your money to give to folks who didn't earn it. You get these things from authority, and you simply can't be bothered with truth or facts. Obedience is all that counts to you. You cannot trust yourself to investigate anything for yourself. It is you guys who are unAmerican. You don't believe in freedom except as a slogan to prop up the wealthy with trickle-down economics.

Put down your baton and open up, Stripe. Take down your wall against reality.

 

[genuineoriginal]

Evolution requires no religious belief, any more than chemistry or plumbing requires religious belief. Like chemistry and plumbing, it is consistent with religious belief.

Evolution, like chemistry or plumbing, is an invention by man.

 

[eameece]

The connection between right-wing faith and right-wing economics

The connection between right-wing faith and right-wing economics

Former Reagan official Bruce Bartlett puts it this way:

Well, it's very much like religion. And I think that it's not a surprise that so many very, you know, devout Christians are a part of the Republican Party and accept a lot of this. Because the nature of deep religious belief is faith, which means you accept things for which there is no proof.

And so, I think it's not that hard to shift that faith over to believe a lot other things that you've been told are true so many times that you just accept that on faith as well. That if you cut taxes, revenues will go up, you know, and things of this sort. That all tax cuts are good and all spending cuts are good, and all government is bad....

It's the lack of willingness to discuss issues in a reality-based way. We just seem to live in a zone in which people no longer really seem to care about facts or analysis. And we talk in sound bites.

And the media of course contribute to this. The decline of the major media. People don't want to read magazines. They don't even want to read a newspaper article if it's more than a couple of inches. And if it doesn't mention Lindsay Lohan, they move on.

Clearly people don't seem to know as much. And they don't seem to care that they don't know as much about public policy or just the basic facts of, you know, how much does the government tax, how much does the government spend? What does the government spend money on? I've seen more than one poll that shows people believe that 20 percent of government spending goes to foreign aid.

20 percent. It's actually one percent. But of course if you believe a huge percentage of government spending is going to just giveaways to foreigners then why not cut taxes and slash spending? It's not coming out of anything that matters to you. People have to be given the factual information they need to make decisions. And they're not getting it. And they may not even want it. -- instead of talking to economists like me, we need to be talking to psychologists and sociologists to try to get at the root of this problem.

 

[eameece]

Evolution, like chemistry or plumbing, is an invention by man.

And so is the Bible. And the idea that it is some kind of literal truth to be taken on faith, rather than a basis for discourse-- as the people who wrote it think.

 

[Stripe]

Nowhere does this definition say that a day is 24 hours long, or that it depends on a rotating earth. Nowhere among the 6 "days" does Genesis define a "day" as 24 hours of Earth rotating.You believe what you believe because some authority told you to believe it. You and your folk simply take things on faith, whether it is creationism and other religious-right prejudices (homosexuality is a sin, for example), or whether it is trickle-down economics and the theory that government takes your money to give to folks who didn't earn it. You get these things from authority, and you simply can't be bothered with truth or facts. Obedience is all that counts to you. You cannot trust yourself to investigate anything for yourself. It is you guys who are unAmerican. You don't believe in freedom except as a slogan to prop up the wealthy with trickle-down economics.Put down your baton and open up, Stripe. Take down your wall against reality.

:chuckle:

That's right. I'm asking for you to believe, without evidence, that the Earth has always been rotating pretty much as it is today.

 

[kalliste]

Natural selection does not explain anything but external influences that affect the survival of species. It does not explain the driving force of life. That does not have to be posited as an external cause. Life is causing itself; life is sacred, it is God acting through evolution, and through us humans as its current leading edge. This divine energy is not supernatural, in the sense of being beyond nature. It IS supernatural in the sense that it can't be explained by old-fashioned mechanical laws from the old materialist physics.

This new age approach cuts through the dichotomy between the spiritual and the secular; a wonderful attitude for those who are open to see it. It is truth and divine, and the true essence of scripture too, and what Jesus taught. But you need the ears to hear it.

Sorry, eameece, I don't agree.

What evolution does explain is how species evolve into other other species. Living things are all related by dna, and the dna contains the clues that tell us how different species are related.

Life is not "sacred" any more than "death" is sacred - it is a process, and you are just putting the superstition back into a process that is wonderful enough without all this "new age" mumbo jumbo.

Stop pretending that "old-fashioned mechanism" is all that scientific theories are about nowadays, the basic laws don't change, but as we refine them, our understanding of them and how they act does.

Most modern sciences weren't even imagined in your mechanistic, materialist artificial demarcation and inserting scripture isn't going to help your "understanding" even if it does make you feel "all warm inside"!

 

[Stripe]

Take my word for it? That I don't have faith - I am afraid so.If Charles Darwin, Stephen J Gould and David Attenborough have not persuaded you of all the evidence there is for evolution by natural selection, what hope have I got with the limitations of a chat forum? Get real - just because you choose to ignore it, that doesn't mean you are right.

So you're just going to insist that you're right for the rest of your stay here?

That's going to get pretty boring pretty quick. :chuckle:

 

[kalliste]

:chuckle:

That's right. I'm asking for you to believe, without evidence, that the Earth has always been rotating pretty much as it is today.

Of course you have to ask people to "believe without evidence" - because the evidence shows that it hasn't.

 

[One Eyed Jack]

Of course you have to ask people to "believe without evidence" - because the evidence shows that it hasn't.

What about conservation of angular momentum?

 

[Stripe]

Of course you have to ask people to "believe without evidence" - because the evidence shows that it hasn't.

What evidence? And what has not done what?

 

[Stripe]

What about conservation of angular momentum?

Oh! Is he another "the Earth has not always been rotating" theorists?!? And here I was thinking emeece was a lone nutter. :chuckle:

 

[noguru]

Evolution, like chemistry or plumbing, is an invention by man.

Well all three are actually discoveries of principles we can observe in the natural world. Of course the technology we have developed to utilize those principles are inventions.

 

[genuineoriginal]

Well all three are actually discoveries of principles we can observe in the natural world. Of course the technology we have developed to utilize those principles are inventions.

At least there is a practical use for chemistry and plumbing.

 

[eameece]

:chuckle:

That's right. I'm asking for you to believe, without evidence, that the Earth has always been rotating pretty much as it is today.

But according to you, some thousands of years ago it did not exist. And science says the same thing (except they say it was over 4 billions years ago).

According to you, a believer in Genesis, the Earth was created on the first day, and there was morning and evening with no Sun, but just a Light (in some part of the "heaven" but not others) that later went away. But since Genesis is not a scientific treatise, it does not explain how any of this happened. So you have to fill in the details if you are curious about how it all happened. So you study science, which tells you among other things that the Earth rotates, and why, and that means studying the processes of how things happen; and for life, that includes evolution.