I think you misrepesenting things slightly.

Certainly the bible literalists can find no way to reconcile evolution to the bible and so want it effectively removed from being taught as is conflicts with their beliefs. They can't defeat the principles scientifically (science is trying to do that itself all the time anyway), so they try and ridicule it as "only a theory" in the hope that if people think evolution may be wrong then they'll jump to the only other option that has been put forward "god dunnit".

However, many other Christian groups see the bible as allegory. For them the idea that a god set things in motion and then chose and enlightend man at a later date through visions and such is not such a hard concept to reconcile.

The other point to make is we keep referring to Christianity here while ID tries to avoid naming the god that dunnit, pretty well all the supporters of it are followers of the Christian god. Some other relgions have less of a problem with evolution.

 

Evolution is not evolution if someone alters it. It still does not answer the question of why a God would wait 3.5 billion years before altering it. If you allow the possiblity that evolution was going along unhindered, and then God popped along and made it go in the right direction, it does not then stand up that he would have given man visions that told of everything being created at the same time.

Either he mislead man, or they mis interpreted what he said, and if that happened, is it not possible that the whole shebang is rubbish, and that God is just another alien who helped some promising looking apes in the right direction? All very tenuous I agree, but then again, so is religion.

Evolution is about chance mutations that enable a species to adapt and thrive, it goes against everything the in the bible, liberal or not.

All IMHO at least

Geezer

 

Odly enough, quite a few Islamic people are supporting the ID theory these days. Not so much in their "home countries" (Darwin just got translated into Arabic in Egypt this year), but mainly amongst immigrants.

 

You're shoe horning. I never suggested that god did interfere. Man evolved from whatever and once that had happened and god saw there was intelligence he made himself known to a select few who passed on the word. They interpreted it as best they could in the form of stories and the bible was produced.

OK I'm over simplifying it and I don't buy it, but plenty of Christians have no real issue with evolution. I'm just trying to give an insight to how I have seen them try to reconcile it.

I don't buy in to the religion thing at all, you have to jump through way too many hoops to get it to even remotely hang together. I was just trying to explain some of the hoops the christians will jump through to try and cope with both.

 

Indeed and IIRC the Dali Lama has given it some support. However, the main following is very much with the YEC crew.

 

Sure, agreed.

Oh, and just for the heck of it: I still looking for the books Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

 

Evolution is a completely discredited theory amongst the vast majority of scientists/genticists......there have many many works done to totally discredit the theory. However the materialists have clung on to it and taught it as fact,....if you read many of the leading scientific journals they acknowledge that random evolution simply cannot account for the sheer complexity of living creatures....

 

If I ask you to back this up, are you going to come up with the Harun link?

Of course it isn't "discredited". And I also don't really see the link with materialism, unless you refer to neo-darwinism, which was again a very American thingy.

 

The Big Bang seems a tad unlikely too. Yet it was named as such by a Catholic priest.

 

One for the road:


"The Babel fish," said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

"`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

"`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

"`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing."

 

Are you quoting the unsubstantiated assertions the YEC's / IDers make - or do you actually believe that? If the latter, please provide say 10 links to well established scientifc journals (Scientifc Americans, New Scientist etc etc) that renounce evolution. Cheers!

 

Also do a google on "Scientists called steve" or have a look at the article about it by the Telegraph

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../18/waa318.xml

 

OllyK

from your link...
This is confusing 'natural selection' with 'molecules-to-man evolution'. YEC have no problem with natural selection as a normal operational science proceedure.

An interesting article below - responding to a letter with a difference of opinion - due to a lack of understanding of what Creation Science actually means - maybe this will help answer some peoples questions...
Actually, Darwin didn’t need a core argument for natural selection, which was already developed and established by a creationist named Ed Blyth about 25 years before that. Blyth published several papers on the subject and this was good, observable science.
If Darwin’s only real contribution was to say that natural selection was true, no one would have ever taken notice of him and he would have gone down in history without much fame.
Biblical creationists have no problem with natural selection, which has been in effect since the Fall of man, although it really became a driving force for rapid speciation after the Flood. This concept explains the variation within the creation kind or “baramin.” The relatively new study of baraminology is the study of the original created kinds.Natural selection doesn’t imply this because it merely explains variation within the created kinds, but Darwin indeed did mention a singularity of life, i.e., that all life ultimately came from a single source organism. In chapter 15 of Origin of Species, Darwin comments: Darwin indeed believed that all life came from a single organism. I also suggest reading The Descent of Man written by Darwin several years later, where he makes his position very clear.A common misunderstanding about evolution and natural selection is that they are the same process; this is misleading at best. Many evolutionists confuse the issue by using these two words interchangeably. They are not the same; rather, these processes operate in opposite ways. Natural selection acts on genetic information that is already present within a population, and the information is either static or lost. And usually what evolutionists mean by evolution is “molecules-to-man” evolution. This is not the same as natural selection, as particles-to-people evolution requires a gain of new genetic information that was not previously there. Please see Muddy Waters.This is possible; however, a symbiotic relationship cannot be explained adequately by “molecules-to-man” evolution. How would the genetic information for such a relationship have risen in the first place? It is more logical to believe that such relationships formed due to the creative acts of the Creator, the ultimate source for information.Again, it was actually Ed Blyth, a creationist, who first described natural selection. Darwin used natural selection to describe how new species came about from what he observed (remember there is a loss or rearrangement of genetic information in speciation not a net gain of new information). But this does not explain how you can turn a single-celled organism like an ameba into a human.



This is why most evolutionists have abandoned traditional Darwinist teachings—that it was natural selection alone that accounted for molecules-to-man evolution—and now adhere to a neo-Darwinist belief. To Darwin’s credit though, he didn’t tell everyone to believe that it was natural selection alone. In fact, he left open other possible mechanisms: How have we encouraged anti-science? It seems you have been caught up in believing evolution is science, when it is indeed a religion—an anti-Christian religion. And since “molecules-to-man” evolution is origins science, it is not observable, testable or repeatable unlike operational science, which is how we get space shuttles, computers, antibiotics and mapped genomes! Even popular evolutionist Ernst Mayr is aware of this fact: In other words, if anything is anti-science, it is the belief in undocumented, unrepeatable, unobservable molecules-to-man evolution. It was actually Newton’s assumption of the universe being created that enabled him to discover the motion of the planets. Besides, what Newton discovered has to do with operational science and is observable; molecules-to-man evolution is not. We agree with you in one sense, Darwinism is not a theory; at best it’s a hypothesis (and we also suggest other creationists not use this argument: see Arguments we think creationists should NOT use). Sorry, but we’re not going to give you the answer you want to hear. If it is a fact, then repeat it. So why is it that evolutionists are unwilling to allow for competing models, i.e., creation or even intelligent design? The hypothesis of evolution changes every year; if one theory is said to be fact, but then a year later is shown to be wrong, then how can it be fact in the first place? It is illogical to think that something is a fact and then not a fact. The reason the Bible never changes is because it is God’s Word and is absolute truth. A true fact is something that never changes.
Ben, the underlying issue is whether you want to believe imperfect man’s ideas about the past or believe a perfect God’s Word. Why would you want to believe men, who were not there in the past to witness what happened, over God who was there to witness His own creation? That’s illogical. You have a lot more faith in men than we do. We would rather put our faith in a perfect God and His Word rather than imperfect man’s ideas.
Matthew D’Orazio and Bodie Hodge, AiG–USA
References

1. Charles Darwin, Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection for the Preservation of Favored Races, Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard (Editor in Chief), page 241, 1952. Return to text.
2. Ibid., page 239. Return to text.
3. Mayr, Ernst, What Evolution Is, Basic Books, New York, NY, page 13, 2001. Return to text.
4. Principia, Book III; in: Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from his writings, H.S. Thayer (Ed.), Hafner Library of Classics, NY, page 42, 1953. Return to text.

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Cheers

Mick