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StrangeQuark wrote: If you would have said "science and christianity", I would have agreed. Roman Catholicism, though, has rather strict rules on what to believe and what not.

True, when you really take it seriously. That's one of the reasons why I don't call myself religious at all. I was not speaking of myself in my former post anyway, it was just a thought.

cheers Joe

A few of you noticed I wasn't arguing about evolution; I was arguing that I don't believe in evolution. I'm a christian, and I take the bible literally.

As a side note, that's not quite true. I believe in microevolution, or variations within a species. I believe all dogs today are descendents from two creatures- that looked like a dog. Dogs did not come from monkeys, lizards, or birds, and neither did we.

BTW, just because the matter that the earth is made of is older than 6,000 years doesn't mean the earth itself is that old. God could have created the matter but created earth much later.

Of course, that's assuming you believe in God... and BTW, who says evolution is not a religion. It has not been proven, so just like other religions, you either believe in it or you don't.

NotTheCHEAT wrote: A few of you noticed I wasn't arguing about evolution; I was arguing that I don't believe in evolution. I'm a christian, and I take the bible literally.

As a side note, that's not quite true. I believe in microevolution, or variations within a species. I believe all dogs today are descendents from two creatures- that looked like a dog. Dogs did not come from monkeys, lizards, or birds, and neither did we.

That's what creation is about . Well, creationism is. Btw, why do you take the bible literally? The bible ain't that correct, provided taken literally. (7 days? Kain & Abel + parents (Adam & Eva) were the only people on the planet, until Kain married with a princess in Ca?ro/Egypt (can't remember exactly)) And yeah, you said: literally.

I have another question for you; why do look monkeys and humans the same? (Not just the looks, but also its behaving, DNA, etc.)

Did God run out of fantasy?

Of course, that's assuming you believe in God... and BTW, who says evolution is not a religion. It has not been proven, so just like other religions, you either believe in it or you don't.

Except the fact evolution is on a scientific base and other religions don't

And of course, it isn't proven, and it'll take time to find out how there actually came life.

NotTheCHEAT wrote: who says evolution is not a religion. It has not been proven, so just like other religions, you either believe in it or you don't.

"It is crucial for creationists that they convince their audience that evolution is not scientific, because both sides agree that creationism is not."
MILLER


If you can SEE alleles CHANGE over time, what's to prove? In the Middle Ages people had an average height of 1m50, obviously, that's changed -> evolution! Doctors are told to decrease prescriptions of antibiotics because microbes are getting immune to them -> evolution!

Evolution is not about dogs giving birth to kittens. Evolution is about dogs giving birth to dogs with a slighty different DNA-structure.

I'm of to dinner now, but I will add more to this later.

Bye

Evolution. And I'm a very outward athiest.

Now here's a good question:

Athiesm: Is it a religion of no god, or no religion?

DennisCGc wrote: Except the fact evolution is on a scientific base and other religions don't

And of course, it isn't proven, and it'll take time to find out how there actually came life.

Evolution takes as an assumption that the fossil record, DNA clocks, relative ages of creatures discovered via body structure, genetic material, etc. are all valid indicators of 1. Age of that particular distinguishing feature found in body/genetics, and 2. That those creatures sprang from a common ancestor.

Religion takes as an assumption the validity of divine revelations, mystical experiences, etc... as written down in religious texts.

Both, when you get right down to it, are doing the same thing: taking human sensory data as truthful evidence of a thing larger than humankind and any individual human being. For evolution it is a process, and for religion it is usually one or more beings. We in the computer programming field, however, know that the difference between a process and a being is how the thing is coded. A being may be an object (as in C++, Object Pascal and Java classes instantiated), or it may be a function similar to a vertex or pixel shader that slightly modifies its inputs every time it's called to perform a larger work over the long term. Both, however, are still code, and such it is with evolution and religion.

The only difference between the process of evolution and God is that evolution will respond if you experiment on it the right way, whereas God's rules of communication lie along more human sensibilites, and he will only speak to His select prophets.

That being said, I am a Jew who believes that Genesis actually happened. The Torah is a literal truth, it happened, and science is functional truth, derived from "observation" and treatable as truth when God declines to make himself or influence known. Both derive an ideology from sensory information, and therefore neither is more reliable or more true than the other.

I can't believe in something without facts. I was going to post a HUGE essay (over a page long) I just wrote about my takes on religion and how the same thing keeps happening, crusades, assassinations, prophets and miracles. I was going to relate how Galileo, Columbus and Copernicus were opressed for their beliefs the same way that Mohammed and Jesus and Moses were opressed for theirs.

I won't post it here though. It doesn't really have much to do with the topic of Creation vs. Evolution.

Anyway, I don't think it's possible to have any real proof as to how the Universe was made. For example, you'll always get people who, when confronted with the Big Bang theory will ask how that singularity got there in the first place.

Last week, people knew that we were on the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way. Now there's proof that we're not, and that the Milky Way's a completely different kind of galaxy than we previously believed.

My point: I don't really have one. All I'm saying is that people will believe what they want until you can prove them wrong, and I don't think it's possible with religion OR evolution. And even if you DID have proof, people wouldn't believe it anyway.

Why do monkeys and humans look alike? Same designer. If two buildings look similar, is it because one evolved from the other, or did the same person make them?

BTW, I agree. There is no proof of creation. That doesn't mean it isn't scientific. And there is also no proof of evolution. It's scientific also. But just because something is scientific doesn't mean it's true. There are lot's of things that have been proved wrong, yet were still perfectly scientific before they were proved wrong.

It's important to remember that evolution is only a theory. It hasn't been proven right or wrong. I think people who believe in evolution have a serious problem with the difference between "proof" and "evidence". And admittedly, creationists make many of the same mistakes. Neither theory has been proven, or can be proven. They are theories, and without physically going back and time and checking if lizards are morphing into birds, or if God is creating the earth, you can't prove them. I prefer to believe in creation, and I respect the choice of those who prefer to believe in evolution.

Evolution is no more a fact than creation. BTW, I completely believe in creation, so for me to say that creation is not a fact is going further than most people, who refuse to admit the possibilty that evolution could be just a theory (which is what it is).

Allen, you're exactly right. This is my whole point, from the very first point.

Evolution is science because it's based on a scientific method. This means that people (many different people) gether around a lot of information and try to write down a theory that 1. explains what is already discovered 2. predicts things that are yet to be discovered/obsorved (ie the existence of the planet Neptunus was predicted). Certain changes in properties of many biological processes and systems can be predicted (in the absence of some influences) by the evolution theory. This is proven in the lab daily. Do you, the creationists, believe that god is still creating new species every second?

You say: "But just because something is scientific doesn't mean it's true." and you're right about that. But that's why those theories change over time. We try to get closer and closer to the truth. It's like a murder investigation. The inspectors collect information and try to find out what happened. Than they find new information and have to alter their theories. That process continues until the murderer is found. OK, sometimes the wrong one is arrested, but when someone finds evidence of that man's innosense, he will be released. So can I say that the evolution theory is 100% correct? No, I can't! I don't even believe that. But I do believe that it's very close to what is actually happening.

Religions don't alter that much/fast. How many persons were killed because they simply were asking questions about the catholic believes? How many people are being killed today, because they don't believe in Allah? Creationism is religion. It's based on revelations that cannot be objectively verified. If Jesus/Moses (I'm not really familiar with any religion, in my point of view there is no god, no afterlife, just chemicals, electric pulses, etc) said that animals are constantly evolving instead telling that some god created them, you would think different. I can't understand why people believe dogmas like that. Don't get me wrong. I don't think of you as some kind of idiot. You believe what you were taught, same over here. I just was taught not to believe everything I'm told.

You might have a point if you say that nobody could proof that creationists are wrong. Here's my respons: we once had a visit from a policeman. He asked why we didn't pay taxes for our Mercedes. We told him we didn't had a Mercedes (not lying). He said: prove it. My mom responded: no, you prove that we HAVE it. He couldn't. Problem solved.

Believing in god won't help you finding out why things are as they are.

And even if you DID have proof, people wouldn't believe it anyway.

I agree, and I even think that's a good thing.
1. An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.
2. Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
Will Rogers


Anyway, I'm gonna get some sleep. Good night.

- Jelle

BTW, just because the matter that the earth is made of is older than 6,000 years doesn't mean the earth itself is that old. God could have created the matter but created earth much later.

Yes, God is infamous for His Laziness and Procrastination.

The way I've seen science to be, is that somebody has a hypothese, then starts looking for proof to back it up, or in Popper's case looking for proof that that hypothese's wrong. If they don't look hard enough for proof against it, or if they're eager to accept certain things, something'll be "scientific" Happens all too often, and then magazines'll publish it as truth.

Personally, I'm a little hesitant to accept proven theories, exactly for that matter. Heck, even if they did enough research, it's also proven that somebody'll be able to live 180 years (according to some women's channel on TV), if they eat the right diet. Counterpart of that's that you'll have a gnawing hungerfeeling your entire life. Now imagine having a gnawing hunger for 180 years. That's one hell of a torture. Of course, that's put in tiny letters, or not mentioned at all, so people'll only see that, when you eat like they say you have to eat, you'll become 180 years.

Anyways, I don't immediately accept science as fact, but prefer to stand skeptic towards it, as it suffers from too much of such cases. This doesn't mean I believe in creation. I believe that the evolution theory sounds rational enough, but there's no way to actually proof it really was so, so I prefer to just see it as a possibility rather than truth.

Evolution is constantly evolving. Jelle, you seem to be saying that just because evolution changes and religion doesn't, makes evolution more reliable, scientific, or whatever. If I tell the police I killed someone, then faced with a death penalty, say I didn't, what do you think they will believe? Or, will they believe me at all?


@MagicPoultry: well, from a purely secular point of view, it may sound stupid. From my point of view, it sounds just fine, because the bible says that 1,000 years is like a day to God.
In "The Andromeda Strain" by Michael Crichton, one of the scientists made a point (I'll let you interpret this as you wish), here is a paraphrase, as I do not have the book with me now:

This slab of granite is a living, breathing, talking animal. You may think that is preposterous, but you're wrong. The average lifespan of a piece of rock is a few billion years. We live and die so fast it doesn't even notice us. And it lives so long that we can't see it doing anything.

Yes, I believe that Evolution is scientific. And I believe that creation is no less scientific than that. I also believe that neither has been, or can be proven; and, as Allen said, even with proof, people wouldn't want to believe you. If you had "proof" of evolution, I wouldn't believe it. You may think that would make me look like an idiot, but if I had "proof" of creation, would you believe me?

@Kon-Tiki:
I like your post about living 180 years. Although I would disagree with that, because if you have a nawing hungerfeeling for 180 years, that's not life, that's hell

I believe all religions (and I believe evolution, and atheism, are religions) are unprovable, they are what someone believes, they attempt to explain the "supernatural", or how we came to be, but no matter how you explain it, some people will disagree. However, since you didn't personally see humans evolving from apes, and I didn't personally see God creating humans, neither of us can prove either way. I respect your belief, and I assume you respect mine.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think of you as some kind of idiot. You believe what you were taught, same over here. I just was taught not to believe everything I'm told.

My point exactly, from Post #1. I respect you, and don't think of you as a moron, I only disagree. I don't think I can convince you not to believe in evolution, and I don't want to anyways, I am merely pointing out how stupid it is to argue about all this stuff.

Jelle wrote: Evolution is science because it's based on a scientific method. This means that people (many different people) gether around a lot of information and try to write down a theory that 1. explains what is already discovered 2. predicts things that are yet to be discovered/obsorved (ie the existence of the planet Neptunus was predicted). Certain changes in properties of many biological processes and systems can be predicted (in the absence of some influences) by the evolution theory. This is proven in the lab daily. Do you, the creationists, believe that god is still creating new species every second?

Exactly, the scientific method. Excellent for finding explanations of common things that can easily be reproduced and things that are extremely well documented. It's utterly horrible for explaining things that are NOT well documented in their scientific details (raw sensory data with no inferences), things that are hard to reproduce (Some Buddhist monks can do bizarre, Valentine Michael Smith type things with their bodies, like lower their body temperature/metabolism or whatnot, but most people can't.) or things that nobody has observed.

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, it makes a sound that nobody hears. This does not negate the fact that the tree fell.

Likewise to the peculiar doctrine called "scientism" or "evolutionism" by some, which claims that if something hasn't been scientifically documtented and at least one hypothesis recorded as to its formation, then it obviously can't be true. These people (I find myself lucky to find few to none of them here.) commit the very typical logical error of making a blanket statement of extent beyond their ability to observe or manipulate its truth.

I'm glad to see so many people here take the correct atitude of "live and let live". Now if only the guys in government could do that, there would be no need for an "evolution vs creation" debate.

Now if only the guys in government could do that, there would be no need for an "evolution vs creation" debate.

lol
TOLERANCE is the key word here. But then, it isn't possible for liberals and conservatives to tolerate each other, is it? ::)

Seriously, why can't they?

@NotTheCHEAT: what's your definition of religion and what's your definition of science?