Genesis Creation vs. Darwin's Macroevolution Myth

FellaGaga-52:

I don't know who told you the Almighty God created the world by the use of magic tricks. Magic refers to tricks of hand and illusions. The Creator used miracles to create humans and other living things. His only-begotten son, Jesus Christ, performed miracles.

Alter2Ego

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"That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth." ~ Psalms 83:18

Macroevolution is the most outlandish conspiracy theory in history. It's funny how non provable geologic and biologic theories can only be proven with the flawed "millions of millions of years" hypothesis that uses dating methods primarily based on presuppostions and not science.

Science is science .
Your phone , internet works great right ?
Medical science too ?
Why the ones you talk about wouldn’t ?

U don’t seem to know how science works to claims what u claim ….

But hey , believing something u can’t even try to process through experimentation like god should have more value and more reliable ?
lol .

Just curious: what presuppositions do you think there are that make dating methods unscientific? The only presupposition actually necessary to make dating methods work is that the basic laws of the universe do not change over time. It would be pretty tough to do any science if we didn’t start with that presupposition. For most of our history that in fact was truly an assumption, but a necessary one - without it pursuing science would make no sense anyway. Since the mid-20th century though this no longer is just an assumption. Emmy Noether proved an important theorem - now known as Noether’s theorem - that proves that any basic symmetry that holds in the universe implies and is implied by a conservation law.

In this case, the symmetry is one very easily understood by any lay person, temporal symmetry. This is exactly as I describe above; the basic laws of the universe are the same at all times. The corresponding conservation law is also a familiar one - the conservation of energy. We have plenty of evidence for this law. We have in fact NEVER seen it violated in any observed interaction. Physicists are so confident in this law that when they observed subatomic particle interactions that appeared to violate energy conservation, they predicted that there must be an unobserved particle involved in the interaction that has the energy needed to preserve energy conservation. You probably would argue that this is a desperate attemp to save a consensus theory and you would be absolutely justified in that opinion, except for one small fact. We actually detected the predicted particle that nobody would ever have thought to look for were it not for energy conservation. It had exactly the properties necessary, including the property of being very difficult to detect. Its existence is now well-established; it is called the neutrino and is important in many interactions.

BGnight:

You are 100% correct. The so-called scientists always come up with "millions of years" for the self-development of various things in the universe, while relying on dating methods that have proven to be flawed. Just about all of the dating method scientists rely on are notoriously flawed. Some examples are Radiocarbon Dating, Potassium-Argon, and Radiometric Dating. Even Thermoluminescence measurements are flawed.

Alter2Ego

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"That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth." ~ Psalms 83:18

Interesting factoid: over 90% of homosapien DNA is the same as other primate DNA, at times approaching 99%. So the question is: If human beings did evolve from other animals, would you expect this to be the case? And the answer of course, is yes.

On the other hand if god created human beings from scratch, this need not be the case at all. It could be the case, but in the creation story "he" has limitless power to create them any old way. Yet he chose this 99% match which jibes perfectly with evolution. God could have done it any way, evolution had to do it this way, the way we see it in the world.

Hmm. Well maybe god created humans in such a way as to make it look like they evolved from earlier primates, so that Charles Darwin would take the bait, devise his theory, and help send many scientific types to hell. Could be. All you have to do is believe it and it becomes reality.

And maybe in a world believed to be teeming with witches, ghosts, demons, Beelzebubs, devils, anti-angels, evil infants, hell hounds, incubi ... maybe in a world believed to be teeming with that cast of characters, an opposing cast was created by primitive man, in various cultures over and over and over, and life was seen superstitiously as a supernatural battle between all these creatures. And none have ever been seen.

ItÂ’s even more than just sharing DNA. One could plausibly argue that humans, chimps and gorillas have systems with similar functionality, so God just was doing modular design and co-opting systems from one species to perform similar function in another. In reality we see something else now that gene sequencing is possible. We see DNA sequences in humans, chimps and gorillas that are very similar to sequences seen in retroviruses. These viruses, like any virus, insert their genetic material into a host cell, and that host cell incorporates it into the cellÂ’s genome.

Very rarely, but occasionally, retroviruses attack a germ cell - either a speed or an ovum - and therefore the retroviral DNA is inserted into the DNA of the organisms offspring. As mentioned before we see evidence of this in modern organismsÂ’ genomes. There is an interesting pattern to the insertions though. Consider humans, chimps and gorillas. Prior to gene sequencing, the best evidence suggested that there was a common ancestor of all three species. The ancestral line of the gorilla split first leaving a common chimp/human ancestor, which diverged later into the two modern species. Given that, we would expect to see some of these retroviral insertions shared by all three species (when the common ancestor of all were infected). We would also expect to see insertions shared by chimps and humans, and other insertions that are unique to each of the three. What we do not expect to see are insertions found in gorillas and chimps, but not in humans. There is no ancestral species common to those two modern ones that isnÂ’t also common to humans. What is actually observed is precisely this pattern.

Obviously being all-powerful and all, God could certainly have stuck random bits of viral DNA into genomes however he wanted. But that certainly begs the question of why he would insert non-functioning viral DNA into these species in the precise way that supports the lineage of ancestral species that is derived from other independent lines of evidence. Apparently he does want biologists to go to hell after all!

EDIT - for completeness, there also are no insertions shares by humans and gorillas but absent in chimps. This too is obviously expected based on the evolutionary relationships. There are no gorilla/human common ancestors that are not also ancestral to chimps as well.

It's a code. A seemingly minor variation in the encoded information can cause radical change. We are similar to plants also, in our hardware, a hardware that in even its most primitive form is largely untapped. We do not need more advanced hardware to dissociate from animals and plants. It is 'software' that enables the pursuits of man, this is quite obviously unique in comparison to the animal kingdom. You can have the hardware argument if you wish!

If we presupposed that the 2nd law of thermodynamics had validity then we wouldn't exist.

You guys do realize that there's a large population of geologists, biologists, and physicists that are ardent Christians right?

... and Buddhists, and Hindus, and Muslims, and Catholics, and atheists, and Jehovah's Witnesses, and Sikhs, and Jews, and Taoists. You get the picture? So what does that do to the point that many people growing up in Christian cultures are Christians?

Some scientists are Christians. I agree, but so what? Science is not trying to prove or disprove the existence of any God, so belief in any particular God on the part of any scientist is meaningless. Scientists who are Christians still typically support the consensus views on evolution and the Big Bang/inflationary cosmological model. These are NOT contradictory to a belief in Christianity, only to an overly literal interpretation of the Bible.

You do realize that many devout Christians are not anti-science and actually do recognize that evolution has tons of evidence supporting it and is likely the best explanation for diversity of life donÂ’t you? Believing that evolution was the process God used to create species is certainly not contradictory to either the fundamental beliefs of Christianity or to the modern scientific consensus. It is only contradictory to an overly literal reading of Genesis, and even Genesis can be reconciled with evolution if youÂ’re willing to give up the idea that the Bible is intended to be a science text and instead read Genesis as a simplified account of the how our world came to be the way it is,

First of all, why did it take God six days to create everything? Why does Genesis not say “Gid spoke and everything came to be”? The implication is that creation of our world as we see it was a process, not something that happened instantaneously. Modern science agrees; it just says the process took longer. Again we can’t be overly literal here; the main point is that it took time. We can go further - day one - Bible: “Let there be light”; science - “The energy of the inflationary universe was converted into electromagnetic radiation that dominated the universe during the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang” — sounds pretty similar doesn’t it? Even more Bible - “Let the EARTH bring forth the creatures of the land”, the creatures were brought forth by the earth, not spoken into existence by God. Science also says the earth brought forth these creatures via evolution. This also implies abiogenesis; the earth is nonliving but it brought forth the land animals.

The main point is that the so-called conflict between science and religion is a myth. Personally IÂ’m an atheist because I donÂ’t see evidence to convince me otherwise and the scientific explanations all work without a deity. But I canÂ’t argue that science demonstrates that God does not exist. Science cannot do that. Belief in God and non-belief are both compatible with science.

BTW the 2nd law is perfectly valid, but nobody presupposes this. It has been tested in many different systems. To say we wouldnÂ’t exist if itÂ’s valid is just false and is such a bad argument that many creationist groups (AIG I believe is one) recommend not using this argument. IÂ’m assuming you refer to the argument that evolution violates the 2nd law. This is false and is based on a misunderstanding of both what entropy is and what the law says. The law does not say that entropy of a system cannot decrease. If that were the law, water would not freeze. Converting a liquid to a solid lowers entropy. It says the entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease. A system can decrease in entropy if there is a corresponding entropy increase somewhere else. For water freezing this increase comes because heat is released into the surroundings, increasing the entropy of the environment. For evolution the entropy increase comes from sunlight - releasing enormous amounts of heat into space at a temperature of 2.7K represents an enormous amount of entropy increase, more than enough to drive entropy decreases on earth (and elsewhere in the solar system).

stremba70:

If that's your argument for the reality of evolution THEORY and Big Bang THEORY, try again. A scientific theory is nothing more than educated guesses and is never defined as FACT.

Alter2Ego

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"That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth." ~ Psalms 83:18

That was in response to a poster who stated that many scientists are Christians as if that were significant somehow. I agree; there are scientists who are Christians, but there are also many Christians, including most such scientists, who accept the modern scientific understanding as being the best current explanation of the origin of the universe, the origin of the earth, and the diversity of life.

Obviously whether someone scientists are Christians or not has nothing whatsoever to do with whether our scientific theories are valid or not. I never claimed it did. These theories stand or fall based on evidence, not on anyone’s religious beliefs. Quite honestly nobody working in cosmology, biology, or any other scientific field gives a single crap about ANYBODY’S religious belief.

And BTW, you really need to either educate yourself about what a theory is in science (or if you actually know; stop being dishonest). Theories are the end goal of science. They are the pinnacle of a given field of study. The word theory does not mean “unproven and speculative”. It means “an overarching explanation that accounts for multiple observations, makes predictions about new observations, and is supported by multiple independent lines of evidence”. Both the Big Bang and evolution meet this definition. Does it leak them 100% true? No; science doesn’t do “proof” so nothing is 100% certain. New evidence could be found leading to new explanations and understandings. That doesn’t make them questionable though. The evidence is strong; the only people seriously questioning them are those who think the Bible is supposed to be a science text rather than a moral guide. Christians who do not insist on the literal truth of stories like the Genesis story or the flood story tend to be perfectly comfortable with the idea that the Big Bang was the way God created the universe or that evolution was the process He used to create different species.

FWIW I think alterego must not read much of anything beside the bible and his takes on science are terrible .

But just providing this « inspiration » might be a revelation/revaluation for him:

https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyl....

I’m sure alter ego knows more about the bible and god then the pope .

A scientific theory is a hypothesis/hypotheses proven by experiment. The hypothesis is testable. Period. If a theory is claimed, let first the hypothesis be stated. E.g., "The Universe began with a Big Bang". This is not a hypothesis from the outset because it is not testable. The cosmology guys et al love to go on about science never proving anything, presumably to get around the fact there is no experiment that can prove their "theories". They love to say that mathematical and deductive logical proof doesn't apply to science yada yada, obviously not, who said it did. Big Bang "theory" is ad hoc speculation that can never be tested, worse still when observations fail to conform to the "theory" the idea is simply twisted to make it fit. Yuk. Naturally, theories evolve all the time as new evidence is discovered, but the evidence never contradicts former evidence for the simple reason that a controlled experiment is impossible to debunk unless it was flawed in the first place. E.g., regardless of the progression of electromagnetism following Faraday, who can refute his findings? Yes there are uncertainties, these are accounted for, yes there is a probability associated with a successful conclusion rather than a hard proof. This is how experiment works. It is not a collection of 'multiple lines of evidence' with no indication as to what standard of evidence will or will not be accepted. We are dealing simply with groupthink here, sets of claimed authorities with technical sounding jargon all parroting the same lines from the same books. On a slight tangential note, The Higgs Fake by Unzicker is an hilarious attack on this kind of stuff, the naked emperor etc.

Frequently a theory is confused with a model - models also have predictive power and are useful in this respect, rather than representing some aspect of "Reality" - which here just means observable fact (phenomena). Models are often confused with reality itself. For instance classical models preserve a lot of predictive power yet must be refined or superceded entirely in the face of new evidence. 'big bang model' or 'evolution model' may be considered in this respect, but as historical fact, absolutely not, this is unacceptable.

"The only people seriously questioning them are [bible literalists]" - really? - there is no consensus on these issues. There is a lot of questioning of these shibboleths of "Science" by students of science. The idea that God was behind evolution and the Big Bang is of course silly, I'll get back to that after further consideration.

It is certainly not silly to believe that God created the Universe nor is it silly to believe that God controlled evolution but it's absolutely preposterous and harmful to believe that a compiled text that has undergone numerous revisions is somehow divine and blesses the reader with knowledge beyond that which science can determine about the natural world.

Also referring to God as Jehovah is nonsense, Jehovah is a piss poor translation of Yahweh which is also a name that should not be applied to God as Yahweh was originally the Jewish "king of gods" (similar to Zeus) prior to the sublation of Judaism into a true monotheistic religion which rejected the existence of any god but God.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The Big Bang theory makes quite a few predictions. It predicts that objects in the universe should appear to be receding from us. Even further it predicts that the apparent speed with which they recede should depend on how far the object is from us. More distant objects should recede more rapidly than closer ones. A non-Big Bang model makes no specific prediction as to whether objects should be receding or moving toward us. It should be fairly randomly distributed as to travel direction. Furthermore the magnitude of the speeds of other objects should follow no simple rule - these should be relatively random as well. What do we observe? We observe for nearly all objects, and universally for those outside our galaxy, that they all are receding and that there is a simple linear relationship between the speed and distance - Big Bang 1, non-Big Bang 0

The Big Bang also predicts that the universe initially was dominated by light, non visible light, but still light. It predicts that at a particular time the universe would have cooled enough to form neutral atoms. At that point this light would have gone from a state where it was constantly being absorbed and scattered by charged particles to one where it was free to permeate the universe - that is the universe became transparent to light as it is today (large scale, of course; obviously there are non-transparent objects in the universe). Given that development, we can predict that this light would still be there; it hasnÂ’t gone anywhere. We should see a very nearly uniform radiation no matter what direction we look coming from the apparently empty sky, associated with no detectable astronomical object. Non BB models predict no such uniform, universal source of light. What do we actually observe? A cosmic microwave background (with exactly the wavelength predicted by the BB theory BTW) with all the properties described. BB 2, non BB 0.

Once we discovered this radiation, the BB theory was used to predict properties of it. One such is the power spectrum. The radiatiion is predicted to be ALMOST uniform, but with some very small irregularities in its temperature (or eqivalently energy). They are predicted to be on the order of 1/10000 of the temperature of the CMB. Further the spatial distribution of these irregularities and the polarization of the light comprising it also are predicted by the BB and the observations match prediction. Since non BB models donÂ’t even predict a CMB, this has to be a win for BB - BB 3, non BB 0 (or if you count predictions of polarization, magnitude and distribution of the irregularities separately itÂ’s BB 5, non BB 0)

There is yet more - the BB theory accounts for the time and manner at which free quarks no longer were stable and combined to form protons and neutrons. It further accounts for the mechanism by which these particles were later, after sufficient cooling, were able to form stable atomic nuclei. Based on these accounts it predicts a very specific elemental composition of these primordial nuclei, a certain percentage of hydrogen, helium and a much smaller amount of lithium and beryllium. Non BB models make no such predictions. Observations of the oldest stars allow observation of elemental compositions from shortly after the time that nuclei formed and again observation and prediction are in agreement - BB 4 (or 6), non BB 0.

I hope the point is clear. You are just wrong about lack of predictions. BB does make predictions and all have been found correct. Obviously there are still uncertainties - what dark matter is and how it interacts, the nature of dark energy and others. Further research might change or cause the BB theory to be abandoned for something else entirely. But thatÂ’s true of ALL scientific theories and is no reason to discount BB any more than any others.

I could do a similar analysis for evolution but IÂ’ve gone on long enough. The point is that the available scientific evidence is strongly in favor of both evolution and BB. Neither of these is on “shaky ground”, at least not any more so than any other scientific theory. I donÂ’t expect you, or even particularly want you, to change your religious beliefs. Just recognize that the scientific evidence is what it is and it favors these theories. If you want to reject them and believe what you do despite the evidence, that’s your business; just be honest about it and say that.

These theories also are not an “atheist conspiracy to prove God does not exist”. It is true that some people look at the evidence for these theories and the evidence that God exists and conclude that no God exists. Some people look at the evidence for these theories, accept that they are the best explanations we have, and incorporate them into their religious belief and still maintain that belief - I.e. God used the BB to create the universe and evolution to create all the different species of life, including humans. People like you who assert that these people are silly for believing this are doing much more to promote atheism than anything science is doing. Science truly does not care about the supernatural, and most people recognize that science works and are hesitant to believe something that requires them to reject it.

Mistaken on the first point, and this illustrates the problem nicely: a typical "hypothesis" from cosmology - that red shift indicates a Doppler effect and recession. This is not tested but assumed to the case without the necessary "multiple lines of evidence" or whatever standard of proof is allowed that day. Next entire theses built on such wrong assumptions. The observation is red shift, not the recession of a galaxy. Now let us take a typical example from physics: say Faraday's laws of electromotive force. This is really chalk and cheese as to what constitutes science and what does not. These are different disciplines, not without merit in either case I might add.

Science is of course fallible and is not subject to abstract proofs and hard deductive logic. Case in point - the "discovery" human beings have 24 pairs of chromosomes. Repeated for decades by "scientists", even "proven" in "experiments" supposedly demonstrating these 24 pairs, journals parroting the same wrong science over and over. And this ishard science. We see the problem magnified many times over for the observational/historical sciences. Yet, for physics and natural science the correctly carried out scientific method yields sound proofs. Any prediction is of course not proven until it is proven, reproducibility offers satisfactory proof. The wire always moves etc. There is no such reproducibility in cosmology, yes red shift is always observed by any observer, yet recession is not observed once. Reproducibility loses all meaning in this context.

The BB model predicted a CMB nowhere near 2.7 K (see Gamow), non-BB models achieved much better prediction - this is discussed in "the electric universe" by W Thornhill et al. Primordial nucleosynthesis is simply speculation nothing more. Ok so BB will inevitably be rejected, agreed on that. I ask again, will Faraday's laws ever be disproven? This is not from a religious persuasion, this is from a student of physics.

The reason I say it is silly to say that God is behind these theories is because it is incompatible with the scriptures that such beliefs rest on. E.g., the chronology of Genesis and the creations of Heavenly and Earthly man. The idea God chooses to use the processes of BB and evolution, while as you admit such theories are bound to change - incompatible with the immutability of God ofc - processes that are easily understood by human beings and only just developed in our history is kind of ridiculous and arrogant. Such understanding of the nature of deity requires contemplation way beyond what any of us are capable of, the scriptures - of all religions - make this clear by their almost total impenetrability.

well yes a reading of the bible certainly does not imply that these are monotheistic religions. Even the most dogmatic Christianity accepts higher intelligences than man beneath God. Agreed on that at least.
Science is by definition concerned with the phenomenal, religion with beyond the phenomenal, so of course the promise is to bestow knowledge beyond science.

Really ?
Aren’t those believe the earth is only 6000 years old or something like that ?
How can they possibly think that about aliens ?
Why would god create more « advance » life form and yet we, the lesser ones be in his image ?

stremba70:

I have news for you. Just because people claim they are Christian it doesn't mean they really are. Adolf Hitler claimed he was a Catholic and ordered the deaths of millions of innocent civilians.

No true Christian would accept scientific theory that is found nowhere in Jehovah's inspired word, the Judeo-Christian Bible.

Alter2Ego

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"That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth." ~ Psalms 83:18

stremba70:

I'm not interested in your Atheist Religion beliefs including the definitions that you seem to be making up as you go. To quote you:

1. "Theories are the end goal of science."

2. "It means 'an overarching explanation that accounts for multiple observations, makes predictions about new observations, and is supported by multiple independent lines of evidence.'"

If you didn't make those up, then wherever you got those definitions from, that source is misleading you. Below is the definition of Scientific Theory from a credible source.

Definition of Scientific Theory:
"A scientific theory summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing. A theory is valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it. Therefore, theories can be disproven. Basically, if evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, then the hypothesis can become accepted as a good explanation of a phenomenon. One definition of a theory is to say it's an accepted hypothesis."

http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistry101/a/lawtheory.htm

ThoughtCo

Difference Between a Scientific Hypothesis, Theory, and Law

11t:

As soon as you can quote one single verse of scripture from Jehovah's inspired word, the Judeo-Christian Bible, that says ANYTHING about evolution, you will have made a point.

Alter2Ego

________________
"That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth." ~ Psalms 83:18

There are angels in the bible are there not?