Always a treat to read anything by Jack Cashill. Pick a subject, any subject and Cashill will throw together an entertaining and educational piece on it, with receipts, before lunch.
A tremendous article on a fascinating tidbit of American history I was not familiar with, Jack! Once upon a time, the ACLU was a principled organization that actually stood up for the first amendment rights of all Americans even the worst of the worst, like the famous case in Skokie where they took a principled stand in favor of letting a Neo-Nazi group march through a town in Illinois where many Holocaust survivors lived. But in the past thirty years they have changed and basically become a liberal advocacy group. They don’t care about civil liberties anymore. Them opposing the Dover School Board’s decision to teach intelligent design alongside evolution in their public schools proves that wholeheartedly.
I believe in evolution 100% but I’m also a dedicated free speech absolutist who believes that schools should have the right to teach about Intelligent Design and present it as an alternative theory to evolution if their school board so chooses. It’s not up to the state or federal government to tell them what ideas they can and can not question. The U.S. District Court for Middle District of Pennsylvania made the wrong decision in 2005. Judge John Jones showed what a fascist he was that day. Science doesn’t mean believing whatever dogma your told by the authorities, it means actively challenging established knowledge and experimenting with new ideas and theories. Apparently Judge Jones and the state of Pennsylvania forgot that.
As for the board members, they were punished for their transgression by being voted off the school board. That’s right, every single one of them in one of the earliest cases of cancel culture. They challenged established science, so their gone and banished from polite society. I’m sorry, I was under the impression this was a free society where people were free to explore, study and debate different ideas. They allow all sorts of toxic garbage in our public schools these days like Critical Race Theory, ethnic studies and gender ideology none of which is based on actual history or science. But a school district can’t teach intelligent design? Give me a break! Also, it is a compete myth that all Christians are morons who don’t believe in science or that historically Christianity and science haven’t mixed. That’s just absolutely and totally untrue. Yes, I’m aware of what unfortunately happened to Galileo but that’s not the whole story.
I’m so tired of this stereotype of Christians as a bunch of backwards, redneck morons who don’t appreciate science. Take for instance, the so-called “Dark Ages.” They never actually happened, that’s a myth. No respectable historian worth their salt uses that term anymore. The Middle Ages weren’t purely an era of ignorance and decline by any means. Alongside the dark aspects of the Middle Ages like the Black Plague, but there were also beacons of light. There were many, many Christian Scientists, there was steady scientific progress during the Middle Ages and the Church even sponsored scientific research. European scientists in the Middle Ages saw science as a way to understand God’s creation better. Yes, the Christian Church could be hostile to scientific ideas that challenged scripture but they weren’t against science altogether.
Did religious extremists exist in the Middle Ages? Sure, but the average person in the Middle Ages day was not always consumed with intense religious fervor. Also, yes, they did know the Earth was round. This has been common knowledge since the Ancient Greeks. Nor was literacy completely lost it just wasn’t as widespread as it was in the days of the Roman Empire. People didn’t not bathe either, many people in the Middle Ages regularly took baths. Important scientific foundations were laid in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages with Muslim scientists also making important contributions too. Knowledge was preserved and continued to be disseminated in places like monasteries. Nor was Christian Europe at that time some sort of tyrannical patriarchy. Women weren’t solely homemakers during the Middle Ages. They worked in various industries, owned businesses and had rights like owning property and inheriting fortunes.
Don’t believe the stereotypes you’ve heard about Christians or Christian and European history the truth is much more complex then the simple stereotypes you’ve heard. There was good AND bad during those times in Christian Europe. Yes, you had widespread disease, warfare, witch trials and burnings, religious persecution, limited freedoms, and harsh living conditions. But alongside that you also had the development of universities, legal systems and community bonds, the writing of the Magna Carta, flourishing scholarship, and scientific advancement in the areas of mechanical engineering, optics, medicine, and agriculture. Here are some great reads I’d recommend to busts the myths you’ve been taught about Christian Europe’s history which is more complex, more surprising and more inspiring then you’ve been told:
• The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science by Seb Falk
• God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam
• God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Rodney Stark
• The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision by Henry Kamen
• Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History by Rodney Stark
• How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
• Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis by Rabbi David G. Dalin
• Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem: How Religion Drove the Voyages That Led to America by Carol Delaney
• The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History by Robert Tracy McKenzie
• Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World by Jeff Fynn-Paul
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire by H.W. Crocker III
"science doesn't know yet" doesn't mean, "therefore, God had to have done it."
"Darwinism" is not on the ropes. Prior to Darwin, almost everyone believed God created each species Himself. The ID people keep retreating to new positions as more knowledge gets produced: "well, OK, natural selection did produce THAT, but how about THIS?"
For a while they said, "Well, how about eyes? There's no way those could have evolved."
Except now we know that light-sensitive cells did evolve first, before there was actual vision.
The thing that ID people refuse to grasp is, we're not talking about the scale of a human life, e.g. 70 years. We're talking about a reproduction cycle of a year or two, over hundreds of millions of years.
Having said all that: I have zero regard for the smug wokesters who make fun of you and want to shut you up. They're wrong about almost everything. But they happen to be right about this.
We know no such thing. The current narrative is that light sensitive cells preceded… but that is a long way from vision. Look, the universe, much less the earth itself is not old enough by best estimates for random natural selection to have resulted in the complexity of human beings, especially what we now know about the diversity of the enteric biome in each of us, much less the complexity entailed of each and every other species on Earth and their interactions. When Francis Collin’s led the human genome project, he thought the riddles of human disease would be solved in a few decades, and that was a few decades ago and we are no where near that utopia.
I'll ignore the last paragraph. All scientists need to be as humble as the data calls for, but no humbler.
Francis Collins disgraced himself during the pandemic, so I'm not inclined to listen to anything else he ever said.
As for probability and the age of the universe: I'll repeat that ID believers just keep retreating to new lines of defense as their old ones get overwhelmed. As soon as someone refutes your argument about "the diversity of the enteric biome" you'll come up with something else.
It's not required that every single step of speciation be found in the fossil record; that's demanding the impossible. Every species' DNA demonstrates where we came from.
Someone on these stacks summarized a conversation he had with an avowed atheist like yourself: It takes a lot more faith to be an atheist than to be a believer. Not recapitulating that discussion but to go to your own example of the fossil record:
Forget the fossil record. You cannot even get to the fossil record without violating the second law of thermodynamics.
The second law of thermodynamics basically can be understood as refuting the idea of undirected spontaneous evolution: higher levels of complexity do not develop spontaneously without not only external input of energy, but intelligent application of that energy to order that application.
If you can refute that (& you can’t), then I will entertain re-engaging with you. Have a pleasant evening.
Can't I? The 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to CLOSED systems. Earth is not one. It receives energy from the sun.
Secondly, antibiotic resistance in bacteria evolves almost every day (unfortunately). There is no intelligence required.
Decreases in entropy, or increases in order, happen all the time, e.g. crystals, snowflakes, protein folding.
Lastly, one can easily agree completely with all that and still believe in God. The physical constants are suspiciously well suited to our universe existing and giving rise to life. The Catholic church itself has said that evolution does not violate the faith.
Well, Albert, you are a sophist. You are misusing the terms, bacteria adapt to exposure to antibiotics by selection of those that are least impacted by the antibiotic. In no way would that type of process ever result in development of an eye.
Yes earth receives energy from the sun but it is quite undifferentiated, right? Not like a welder’s torch or a spark from a spark plug. Organized energy input requires intelligence.
Your examples are of the natural result of energy flowing from warmer to colder or evaporative cooling. Protein folding occurs because of the electromagnetic fields engendered by the particular properties of the various amino acids strung together in a very specific sequence. It is not random in any way, but is predetermined by the sequences of amino acids in the protein and physiochemical environment or micro environment.
The question remains why do the proteins fold just so that you and I can argue using instruments designed at great cost depending on other instruments and systems created again at great cost over time and distance. Only fools would say that it is random at any level. Too complex for human understanding, but random, not.
Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door 508 years ago. I an a Calvinist Reformed Presbyterian, your Pope means nothing to me.
Book by Vern Poythress: Redeeming Science and the Bible means more to me.
Earlier you said, "The second law of thermodynamics ... higher levels of complexity do not develop spontaneously without not only external input of energy, but intelligent application of that energy to order that application."
that seems pretty clearly to rule out crystals and snowflakes: they ARE a higher level of complexity, and no intelligence. Would you like to explain that? The second law of thermodynamics is pretty much a canard unless the whole system is closed.
Also, "Yes earth receives energy from the sun but it is quite undifferentiated" that seems irrelevant. There's more than enough solar energy to effect life processes at the molecular level. You don't need welding torch-level energy.
Right. No matter how much you explain, they just keep on. A quote something like "you can't reason someone out of a position they weren't reasoned into."
Would you like to see a 10-step version of the evolution of the eye? because this claim has elicited lots of scientific analysis. Even your claim about Darwin is bogus because after he said that, he explained how it could have happened step-by-step.
The eye is not "irreducible complexity." Even a 1% survival advantage from better light sensitivity will lead to a species being dominant. There are plenty of examples of that.
Pick a different example if you want to have some legs, like:
Why are the physical constants in our universe so precisely balanced that they formed a universe instead of staying a primordial soup?
What caused the Big Bang?
How do we reconcile quantum theory and relativity?
What Darwin observed in the micro environments was extrapolated to the macro….no doubt accelerated by the Marxists supporting the eventual goals of the cabal’s agenda…
Darwinism and finches beak adaptations is a pitiful weak explanation for the complexity of a single cell. Especially when you realize that most mutations have a negative effect on the host. Darwinism is as based on believing as much as religion. Who are you going to believe? A man as flawed as yourself or God ? “ Live not by Lies”
The theory of evolution is no different than the gender assigned at birth theory.
Go on any medical online site and you’ll see that they no longer refer to us as either male or female, they refer to us as “Gender assigned at birth) as in assigned female or male at birth.
They did the same with evolution. I can’t read any publication without evolution being weaves in at some point.
"Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court case in 2005. This ruling found that ID is a form of religious creationism, not a scientific theory, and therefore its teaching in public school science classes is unconstitutional.” This is such bullshit, on SO many levels!!
It takes a near-religious faith to believe in magic space dust too. Dust that can self-create anything given x-billion years. Like Felix the Cat’s magic bag of tricks, dust becomes a planet, suns, stars, water, trees, elephants and humans, all because… because “it” wanted to. That is the epitome of weak but forced thinking.
First item being the 17% that believe humans” have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” It’s so ridiculous in that Humans, and all other life probably would have had to survive the physical changes the earth went through . Starting as a barren rock spinning through space or a molten ball of magma, it would be impossible to arrive in Darwin’s day as they supposedly did. I can accept a slowly advancing stream of advancing life forms, but what of that first bit of humanity? When did it start jiggling and moving under its own power?
That’s where the concept of a greater power begins. An electrical spark by chemicals swirling in the soup may have started it. Possibly, something or someone may have been the creator of what blossomed into what we’ve become. I prefer to favor that last option. If I’m wrong, I won’t know and it won’t matter anymore. At least not to me.
If there were no God, Man would have to invent one, making it possible to develop a code to prevent the destruction of each other and by now, this conversation would be moot.
It’s a dumb legal decision, but Darwin is still on pretty solid ground. There are many things in biology that evolution can explain, but which make no sense from a creationist point of view. (Unless you think God put lots of little oddities in DNA and the fossil record as practical jokes.)
It’s true that the origin of life is still a mystery, but the outlines of how it could happen are somewhat known. I recommend Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance by Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler for insight into how complexity can grow naturally from the interplay of natural physical laws and random chance.
The main problem I have with Creationism is that it just pushes the problem back one step and feels self-contradictory. Life and the universe are so complex that only God could have done it, and yet nobody created God…?
It seems apparent to me that something created us. Maybe aliens. Maybe God.
I’ll continue to pray and walk with Jesus because that’s what works for me. Love your neighbors as you love yourself is no easy task. I work on it everyday.
Wow, what timing! I just received a mailer from the aclu imploring me to vote to retain the justices of the Pennsylvania supreme court. Their reasoning was that the justices ruled against lawsuits to restrict mail in ballots and protect abortion. I realize that this is the pa supremes not fed judges.
Always a treat to read anything by Jack Cashill. Pick a subject, any subject and Cashill will throw together an entertaining and educational piece on it, with receipts, before lunch.
A tremendous article on a fascinating tidbit of American history I was not familiar with, Jack! Once upon a time, the ACLU was a principled organization that actually stood up for the first amendment rights of all Americans even the worst of the worst, like the famous case in Skokie where they took a principled stand in favor of letting a Neo-Nazi group march through a town in Illinois where many Holocaust survivors lived. But in the past thirty years they have changed and basically become a liberal advocacy group. They don’t care about civil liberties anymore. Them opposing the Dover School Board’s decision to teach intelligent design alongside evolution in their public schools proves that wholeheartedly.
I believe in evolution 100% but I’m also a dedicated free speech absolutist who believes that schools should have the right to teach about Intelligent Design and present it as an alternative theory to evolution if their school board so chooses. It’s not up to the state or federal government to tell them what ideas they can and can not question. The U.S. District Court for Middle District of Pennsylvania made the wrong decision in 2005. Judge John Jones showed what a fascist he was that day. Science doesn’t mean believing whatever dogma your told by the authorities, it means actively challenging established knowledge and experimenting with new ideas and theories. Apparently Judge Jones and the state of Pennsylvania forgot that.
As for the board members, they were punished for their transgression by being voted off the school board. That’s right, every single one of them in one of the earliest cases of cancel culture. They challenged established science, so their gone and banished from polite society. I’m sorry, I was under the impression this was a free society where people were free to explore, study and debate different ideas. They allow all sorts of toxic garbage in our public schools these days like Critical Race Theory, ethnic studies and gender ideology none of which is based on actual history or science. But a school district can’t teach intelligent design? Give me a break! Also, it is a compete myth that all Christians are morons who don’t believe in science or that historically Christianity and science haven’t mixed. That’s just absolutely and totally untrue. Yes, I’m aware of what unfortunately happened to Galileo but that’s not the whole story.
I’m so tired of this stereotype of Christians as a bunch of backwards, redneck morons who don’t appreciate science. Take for instance, the so-called “Dark Ages.” They never actually happened, that’s a myth. No respectable historian worth their salt uses that term anymore. The Middle Ages weren’t purely an era of ignorance and decline by any means. Alongside the dark aspects of the Middle Ages like the Black Plague, but there were also beacons of light. There were many, many Christian Scientists, there was steady scientific progress during the Middle Ages and the Church even sponsored scientific research. European scientists in the Middle Ages saw science as a way to understand God’s creation better. Yes, the Christian Church could be hostile to scientific ideas that challenged scripture but they weren’t against science altogether.
Did religious extremists exist in the Middle Ages? Sure, but the average person in the Middle Ages day was not always consumed with intense religious fervor. Also, yes, they did know the Earth was round. This has been common knowledge since the Ancient Greeks. Nor was literacy completely lost it just wasn’t as widespread as it was in the days of the Roman Empire. People didn’t not bathe either, many people in the Middle Ages regularly took baths. Important scientific foundations were laid in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages with Muslim scientists also making important contributions too. Knowledge was preserved and continued to be disseminated in places like monasteries. Nor was Christian Europe at that time some sort of tyrannical patriarchy. Women weren’t solely homemakers during the Middle Ages. They worked in various industries, owned businesses and had rights like owning property and inheriting fortunes.
Don’t believe the stereotypes you’ve heard about Christians or Christian and European history the truth is much more complex then the simple stereotypes you’ve heard. There was good AND bad during those times in Christian Europe. Yes, you had widespread disease, warfare, witch trials and burnings, religious persecution, limited freedoms, and harsh living conditions. But alongside that you also had the development of universities, legal systems and community bonds, the writing of the Magna Carta, flourishing scholarship, and scientific advancement in the areas of mechanical engineering, optics, medicine, and agriculture. Here are some great reads I’d recommend to busts the myths you’ve been taught about Christian Europe’s history which is more complex, more surprising and more inspiring then you’ve been told:
• The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science by Seb Falk
• God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam
• God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Rodney Stark
• The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision by Henry Kamen
• Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History by Rodney Stark
• How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
• Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis by Rabbi David G. Dalin
• Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem: How Religion Drove the Voyages That Led to America by Carol Delaney
• The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History by Robert Tracy McKenzie
• Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World by Jeff Fynn-Paul
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire by H.W. Crocker III
I am not sure the ACLU was ever on the square, but they used to be much better ar faking it,
"science doesn't know yet" doesn't mean, "therefore, God had to have done it."
"Darwinism" is not on the ropes. Prior to Darwin, almost everyone believed God created each species Himself. The ID people keep retreating to new positions as more knowledge gets produced: "well, OK, natural selection did produce THAT, but how about THIS?"
For a while they said, "Well, how about eyes? There's no way those could have evolved."
Except now we know that light-sensitive cells did evolve first, before there was actual vision.
The thing that ID people refuse to grasp is, we're not talking about the scale of a human life, e.g. 70 years. We're talking about a reproduction cycle of a year or two, over hundreds of millions of years.
Having said all that: I have zero regard for the smug wokesters who make fun of you and want to shut you up. They're wrong about almost everything. But they happen to be right about this.
We know no such thing. The current narrative is that light sensitive cells preceded… but that is a long way from vision. Look, the universe, much less the earth itself is not old enough by best estimates for random natural selection to have resulted in the complexity of human beings, especially what we now know about the diversity of the enteric biome in each of us, much less the complexity entailed of each and every other species on Earth and their interactions. When Francis Collin’s led the human genome project, he thought the riddles of human disease would be solved in a few decades, and that was a few decades ago and we are no where near that utopia.
Read Job & humble yourself.
I'll ignore the last paragraph. All scientists need to be as humble as the data calls for, but no humbler.
Francis Collins disgraced himself during the pandemic, so I'm not inclined to listen to anything else he ever said.
As for probability and the age of the universe: I'll repeat that ID believers just keep retreating to new lines of defense as their old ones get overwhelmed. As soon as someone refutes your argument about "the diversity of the enteric biome" you'll come up with something else.
It's not required that every single step of speciation be found in the fossil record; that's demanding the impossible. Every species' DNA demonstrates where we came from.
Someone on these stacks summarized a conversation he had with an avowed atheist like yourself: It takes a lot more faith to be an atheist than to be a believer. Not recapitulating that discussion but to go to your own example of the fossil record:
Forget the fossil record. You cannot even get to the fossil record without violating the second law of thermodynamics.
The second law of thermodynamics basically can be understood as refuting the idea of undirected spontaneous evolution: higher levels of complexity do not develop spontaneously without not only external input of energy, but intelligent application of that energy to order that application.
If you can refute that (& you can’t), then I will entertain re-engaging with you. Have a pleasant evening.
Ultimately, you ignore my last sentence in the previous post at your ultimate peril.
Can't I? The 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to CLOSED systems. Earth is not one. It receives energy from the sun.
Secondly, antibiotic resistance in bacteria evolves almost every day (unfortunately). There is no intelligence required.
Decreases in entropy, or increases in order, happen all the time, e.g. crystals, snowflakes, protein folding.
Lastly, one can easily agree completely with all that and still believe in God. The physical constants are suspiciously well suited to our universe existing and giving rise to life. The Catholic church itself has said that evolution does not violate the faith.
Well, Albert, you are a sophist. You are misusing the terms, bacteria adapt to exposure to antibiotics by selection of those that are least impacted by the antibiotic. In no way would that type of process ever result in development of an eye.
Yes earth receives energy from the sun but it is quite undifferentiated, right? Not like a welder’s torch or a spark from a spark plug. Organized energy input requires intelligence.
Your examples are of the natural result of energy flowing from warmer to colder or evaporative cooling. Protein folding occurs because of the electromagnetic fields engendered by the particular properties of the various amino acids strung together in a very specific sequence. It is not random in any way, but is predetermined by the sequences of amino acids in the protein and physiochemical environment or micro environment.
The question remains why do the proteins fold just so that you and I can argue using instruments designed at great cost depending on other instruments and systems created again at great cost over time and distance. Only fools would say that it is random at any level. Too complex for human understanding, but random, not.
Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door 508 years ago. I an a Calvinist Reformed Presbyterian, your Pope means nothing to me.
Book by Vern Poythress: Redeeming Science and the Bible means more to me.
Earlier you said, "The second law of thermodynamics ... higher levels of complexity do not develop spontaneously without not only external input of energy, but intelligent application of that energy to order that application."
that seems pretty clearly to rule out crystals and snowflakes: they ARE a higher level of complexity, and no intelligence. Would you like to explain that? The second law of thermodynamics is pretty much a canard unless the whole system is closed.
Also, "Yes earth receives energy from the sun but it is quite undifferentiated" that seems irrelevant. There's more than enough solar energy to effect life processes at the molecular level. You don't need welding torch-level energy.
100%. ID is a “God of the Gaps” argument. Just like explaining a rainbow.
Right. No matter how much you explain, they just keep on. A quote something like "you can't reason someone out of a position they weren't reasoned into."
Darwin was asked to explain the evolution of the eye. Darwin shrugged and said he could not. Not then not ever.
Would you like to see a 10-step version of the evolution of the eye? because this claim has elicited lots of scientific analysis. Even your claim about Darwin is bogus because after he said that, he explained how it could have happened step-by-step.
The eye is not "irreducible complexity." Even a 1% survival advantage from better light sensitivity will lead to a species being dominant. There are plenty of examples of that.
Pick a different example if you want to have some legs, like:
Why are the physical constants in our universe so precisely balanced that they formed a universe instead of staying a primordial soup?
What caused the Big Bang?
How do we reconcile quantum theory and relativity?
Thanks Jack and thanks to the incredibly interesting conversation/comments as well!
What Darwin observed in the micro environments was extrapolated to the macro….no doubt accelerated by the Marxists supporting the eventual goals of the cabal’s agenda…
No actual evidence required.
Job & 1/2 Jack. Beautiful left Hook & a very good right cross. God Bless.
Darwinism and finches beak adaptations is a pitiful weak explanation for the complexity of a single cell. Especially when you realize that most mutations have a negative effect on the host. Darwinism is as based on believing as much as religion. Who are you going to believe? A man as flawed as yourself or God ? “ Live not by Lies”
The theory of evolution is no different than the gender assigned at birth theory.
Go on any medical online site and you’ll see that they no longer refer to us as either male or female, they refer to us as “Gender assigned at birth) as in assigned female or male at birth.
They did the same with evolution. I can’t read any publication without evolution being weaves in at some point.
It’s all about taking God out of the equation.
How many of y’all still believe in dinosaurs? 🦕
To me, the question of how life began on earth has never been answered sufficiently. Perhaps it never will.
"Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court case in 2005. This ruling found that ID is a form of religious creationism, not a scientific theory, and therefore its teaching in public school science classes is unconstitutional.” This is such bullshit, on SO many levels!!
Yes.
It takes a near-religious faith to believe in magic space dust too. Dust that can self-create anything given x-billion years. Like Felix the Cat’s magic bag of tricks, dust becomes a planet, suns, stars, water, trees, elephants and humans, all because… because “it” wanted to. That is the epitome of weak but forced thinking.
First item being the 17% that believe humans” have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” It’s so ridiculous in that Humans, and all other life probably would have had to survive the physical changes the earth went through . Starting as a barren rock spinning through space or a molten ball of magma, it would be impossible to arrive in Darwin’s day as they supposedly did. I can accept a slowly advancing stream of advancing life forms, but what of that first bit of humanity? When did it start jiggling and moving under its own power?
That’s where the concept of a greater power begins. An electrical spark by chemicals swirling in the soup may have started it. Possibly, something or someone may have been the creator of what blossomed into what we’ve become. I prefer to favor that last option. If I’m wrong, I won’t know and it won’t matter anymore. At least not to me.
If there were no God, Man would have to invent one, making it possible to develop a code to prevent the destruction of each other and by now, this conversation would be moot.
It’s a dumb legal decision, but Darwin is still on pretty solid ground. There are many things in biology that evolution can explain, but which make no sense from a creationist point of view. (Unless you think God put lots of little oddities in DNA and the fossil record as practical jokes.)
It’s true that the origin of life is still a mystery, but the outlines of how it could happen are somewhat known. I recommend Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance by Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler for insight into how complexity can grow naturally from the interplay of natural physical laws and random chance.
The main problem I have with Creationism is that it just pushes the problem back one step and feels self-contradictory. Life and the universe are so complex that only God could have done it, and yet nobody created God…?
It seems apparent to me that something created us. Maybe aliens. Maybe God.
I’ll continue to pray and walk with Jesus because that’s what works for me. Love your neighbors as you love yourself is no easy task. I work on it everyday.
And wasn't the famous grey moth on the tree bark seen in almost every textbook staged?
Wow, what timing! I just received a mailer from the aclu imploring me to vote to retain the justices of the Pennsylvania supreme court. Their reasoning was that the justices ruled against lawsuits to restrict mail in ballots and protect abortion. I realize that this is the pa supremes not fed judges.
They are afraid to speak out.
No, the only plausible explanation is we were created by the Raven.
What, you only believe the Judeo-Christian origin myth? Not the Navajo? Why so sure your religion got it right?
Or, it might be that evolution is correct, since nothing in biology makes much sense without it.