I’d like to ask some questions if you’re willing.
It’s generally not worth your time. :sigh:
LOL, I’m a mild one, I suppose, but probably not the best example of one you would be looking for.
This applies to me as well.
GBFans really isn’t likely the best place to do this.
I believe in science and religion, but unlike with science, I kind of pick and choose the religious practices I want to be a part of.
Question one:
Do you accept the hypothesis of descent with modification by means of natural selection (organisms better adapted for certain environmental conditions tend to survive long enough to reproduce)?
Do you have an emotional response to this question? What is it?
Do you accept evolution?
Is there an emotional response to this question?
Yes I believe in evolution. No that doesn’t evoke an emotional response. I see science and religion as two different things, like apples and oranges, and the religious aspects were written thousands of years ago for people who can’t even grasp that the earth goes around the sun.
I think it’s pretty valid - but I have strong Deist beliefs. Simply because a higher power created everything does not mean he created them perfectly nor in their final form. I find the hypothesis of natural selection to be entirely valid and not inconsistent with my beliefs.
Any response would be an emotional response - if I had to categorize my response it would be in apathy. After awhile you start to feel like a broken record with these sorts of things. Logically, there is no denying that a higher power could have created everything and then set in motion everything else. Science can’t negate it, but conversely no one can prove it to be absolute.
After years of saying this over and over it begins to just be an institutionalized response, so I’d call it apathetic if anything.
By accept I assume you mean accept it as valid - which I certainly can to some degree. I am unconvinced of many things - but I believe that to almost be the nature of science. Things are often found through the process of negation. I find it hard to believe that turkeys are descended from velico-raptors that had certain telepathic abilities; but that is what the Discovery channel purported. Don’t take that as me knocking the entire concept of evolution, but merely that it is not an absolute in every situation.
One of those areas in which I remain unconvinced is that of the evolution of man. I’m really not sure what happened there. I am certain adaptation has taken place, but to what degree I can not specify.
No emotional response worth notation.
I think we are created by a higher power/God, but I believe that they/he/she/it set everything into motion, and the universe is just running according to the rules set up by that/those being/beings. I also believe in evolution. I used to be unsure, but then took a science class in college, and I guess you could say my beliefs evolved.
I love these topics, but it’s only a matter of time until someone blows an O ring and it gets locked, if history is a guide.
hats off to you for posing the question.
I’m with Ron on this one. I do Believe in a higher power/God and I believe he created everything we see, including science. perhaps the big bang really happend but it was started w/ God. the book of Genisis does not say how long the first days and nights were while God was creating, maybe it took millions of years in man’s time but only a few seconds in God’s time. I think that God intinded to let his creatures evolve thats all part of “free will”.
Great topic
CRAZY!
To make this clear. Creationists tend to believe that the Earth is only 6000 years old? And believe in Intelligent Design?
I believe strongly in Evolution. But there are still things that haven’t been explained.. for example how cells initially developed from elements. There have been expirements for figuring out how things came to be, which cannot be explained yet. However, I think that the key factor in the development of Earth Life is greatly due to time. One cannot begin to fathom the 4-5 billion years that the earth has been around, and the amount of time it took for life to develop to where we are today.
Life first showed up 3.5 billion years ago (a billion years after the earth formed). Since then it has been all evolution. We all evolved from one single creature. Which is why similar traits are seen throughout the species. But.. I would not throw out the idea that life on Earth was seeded by someone (not something, IE not a omnicient “God”.. more like “Aliens”, as there have to be more creatures in the Universe.). Afterall the Earth was bombarded by rocks from all over the Galaxy, and any of those could have had Life on them that was pre-developed. In the very least they could have already had a pre-developed message or code for life that is fused in the DNA.
But I think we were given a ideal location for life to develop. Perfect location from the Sun, perfect planet size which gave us a good gravity that held the right gases to the Earth. There is an unmeasureable number of Suns in the Universe. If each one has a planet, or several planets… the probably for life other than us is extremely likely.
Good Job understanding the point of the thread, AJ.
I agree Ron.
AJ’s name should be the first credited source in every book in the subject 
Tend to, but not all do. They’re usually lumped into groups such as Young-Earth creationists (people that believe the Earth is 6000> years old) and some other subgroups that are all under the Old-Earth creationist umbrella (God created the world in 7 “days,” but those “days” could be thousands or millions of years, thus the age of the earth is far greater than 6000 years).
Intelligent design also has similar splits in interpretation, but I digress. The question is, Leegon, are you looking for young-Earth, ■■■■■■■■-intelligent design believers or people who ride the fence?
Personally I believe in evolution, simply because it just makes more sense to me. Even if we were created by a higher-power I don’t believe, as Ron said, humans were created in a perfect, final form.
Also, AJ, How to Bake an Apple Pie from Scratch (with Pictures) - wikiHow.
I guess I would have to throw my lot in with the ID people.
I believe in evolution as the process of life, not as the answer. I believe evolution is the way we got to where we are but that is not why we are.
There are too many holes and gaps in evolution for me to fully get behind it. Not the least of which is that it can’t offer an explanation of how life began. It always starts out at single-cell organisms and works its way up to man but it can’t explain how we go from No-life to Life.
Ben Stein did much better at explaining this than I am doing. If you are interested in this I suggest you check out his movie Exspelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Good watch.
Never did see Expelled, but every time I hear about it I think of Roger Ebert ripping Ben Stein several new orifices in his review of the movie.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.html
I’ve seen it, but it doesn’t really have a big impact on me. I think the actual point of that movie is that people are not allowing creationism to be studied. Not that Ben Stein believes in Creationism (which I think was spelt out clearly that he didn’t in the movie)?
Which gaps? I can understand… like the fact that they haven’t found the “missing link” fossils of the bridging from “man” to animal. I don’t understand why someone couldn’t get fully behind evolution. It is afterall just an explaination of how we got from one point to now.. not how it was created. You believe fully in gravity don’t you? Yet we don’t even have a full scientific explaination on how that works or what it is.. I guess it could be God just trying to stop us from reaching Heaven before he will allow us?
How did life begin? Did god just create man, and then remove a rib from him to create a woman? Or is it more plausible that we evolved from creatures / animals that share much of the same genetic make up as us?
This is what I think of when people say Creationism:
I think the story of creation (both man and the Earth) as told in the Bible was quite simply man trying to explain what he could not understand. We know it takes eons for the disks of dust, debris and ice that orbit around young stars to coalesce into planets and moons. It just could not have happened in 7 days. I think you can disprove plenty of the stories in there. I think God and science can coexist, if people can be open minded.
As far as the missing link, I thought I read somewhere that they found a hominid (maybe wrong term)much older than Lucy, and it is supposedly the missing link..what’s the name of it? it starts with “A” I thought. and no it’s not AJ. lol
Another reason I don’t like to prescribe to one religion is that for my religion to be right, everyone else’s has to be wrong.
I guess my god can beat up your god LOL
The concept of a “missing link” is an outmoded scientific misnomer. There never was any single animal that was half human, evolution doesn’t work that way. As far as bridging fossils goes there is a fairly complete progression of hominids that have been identified that lead from modern humans back to proto-anthropoids.