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Real_Solitude -> RE: unbelievers? (9/22/2008 5:28:06 AM)
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ORIGINAL: FurGodWurLivin
Which is not the theosophical case of Trinitarian Christianity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three persons who have a singular identity. They are not "lesser Gods" comprising parts of a higher "Supreme Being" such as Shiva is to Brahman. Rather, they ARE the Supreme Being. The Trinitarian position is that there are "Three in One while still being Three". The Hiduist position is that there are "many who are part of the One over all." This is what I meant when I spoke of the Trinity being a grand mystery because there is nothing equivalent to it in all Philosophy or other religions.
While this doesn't apply to all of Hinduism, there is a faction of Hinduism called Trimurti.
"Trimurti, meaning "having three forms", is the term applied to the three main Hindu gods: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. This Trimurti or triad represents all aspects of the Supreme Being. The Trimurti is depicted as a single-bodied, three-headed man. This symbolizes the fact that the three forms are aspects of one Supreme Being. Nothing in the universe is created, preserved, or destroyed without the mutual agreement and approval of the three aspects of the Supreme Being, for they are unitedly essential for the production and reproduction of all forms of life "
The three aspects are not viewed as "lesser" or subservient, but as aspects of Brahman.
Because you are trusting the opinion of those who don't believe the doctrine and have no real reason to do an indepth theosophical study of it, I'm not surprised you think so. There are many men who agree with the Trinitarian foundation that have done studies on the topic and written entire books on it. Grudem, Wright, Tennent, Augustine... just to name a few.
All of whom you name (from what I could find) have an inside view of the religion. This doesn't help us at all when offering comparisons and similarities to other religions, in order to properly classify the religion in question. In order to do that, we have a field of study dubbed, unsurprisingly, comparative religion.
It does not matter if one believes what the religion offers as long as all of the same information is available to them. Religion is a big player in world affairs. An unbiased assessment of the various belief systems, and a comparison of them, are the only reasons needed to do in depth studies into various world religions. These have been done, and many of them suggest that the Trinity is a form of soft polytheism in the same vein as Hinduism.
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We have witnessed many instances of a population splitting in two and become too diverse to reproduce. We have seen animals lose and gain whole organs. And guess what... we've seen the exact same thing happen due to extreme inbreeding in both midieval Europe and the hills of Kentucky. This isn't really evolution as much as it is genetic science (Read: recessive genes). If there isn't diversification of the genetic pool, the population suffers traumatic changes, such as losing the ability to reproduce. This alone should be a severe argument against the idea of "positronic mutations".
Except that this isn't in populations with a non-viable number. (Read, they don't inbreed). I'm not talking about losing the ability to reproduce within the population, but losing the ability to reproduce with another branch of their own population.
E.g: Take a population of drosophila and split it in two populations that are each viable. Add new environmental selective pressures to population 1, keep population 2 able to breed with the greater world of drosophila. Wait.
After X period of time, population 1 will still be able to breed with population 1, and population 2 will still be able to breed with population 2, but population 1 will not be able to breed with population 2.
We've seen this many times in the lab, and in the field.
P.S.
I have no idea what a "Positronic mutation," is, and neither does Google.
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There is no scientific difference between 'micro' and 'macro' evolution than time. Incorrect. Microevolution allows for small characteristical differences within certain boundaries whereas Macroevolution is the changing of an entire popluation into an entirely different genus. If you isolate a population of Apes in a zoo, I would put money that that population will never become humans without an interspersion of human DNA (aka, abberant cross-breeding).
There is no scientific difference between the two other than time. Evolution is simply genetic change over time. The amount of change depends primarily on mutation rate, and time.
In scientific circles, the terms micro and macro are simply used to discuss different amounts of time over which evolution occurs. Micro over a few generations, macro over thousands/millions of years. The difference is quantitative.
The term as generally used by anti-evolutionists attempts to portray a qualitative difference between micro and macro evolution. There is no difference, other than time, in the processes involved in the two. There are no 'boundries' other than mutation rate and time. Mutation rate is fairly constant, so the only differnece is time. While this does (depending on how much time you allot) restrict the possible number of mutation, it does not indicate that, with more time, any barrier would exist.
Scientifically speaking, if you accept one, the other in necessarily true.
If you isolate a population of apes in a zoo, they may already be humans. (Humans are apes).
If you isolated Chimps, Gorillas, or Bonobos, then you should never expect them to become human, no matter the time given. Humans evolved in a specific environment, with specific changes. Changing that environment will change the evolutionary path of a creature. If a population of Chimps large enough to sustain a viable population were to be bred in a zoo for X years, you should expect them to become more adapted to their environment. Personally I would expect a decrease in intelligence (due to not having to solve problems in order to receive food), decrease in average muscle density (they don't need them, and muscles 'cost' energy. If they are not needed, and still cost, they will be selected against), increase in placidity (if a poorly-behaved Chimp is less likely to get food, they will be selected against), etc...
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There is no such regulation. Evolution acts on all parts of the genetic code equally. So basically, Time is God. With Time, all things are possible, right?
Not all things. Evolution is restricted to making a population fit to its environment. In many cases this will result in decreasing the physical strength or fitness of the population when they don't need them.
For instance, it may be impossible for there to be a population which evolves wheels as their natural form of locomotion. Wheels are good for roads, but terrible for natural terrain. For this reason, it may be impossible for there to evolve a creature which has nature wheels.
Even if some natural environment were to be road-like, there are complications in supplying blood to such a free-rotating appendage. The only way for this would be possible would be for it to be a secretion grasped by the animal, and not part of the body itself.
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I will be quite honest. I have not studied the fossil record since High School. As such, I am not currently equipped to debate recent findings. I would point to examples such as "Nebraska Man" (formulating an entire "missing link" from a tooth of a pig) as how scientists can allow themselves to be carried away by their excitement.
The scientific community never accepted Nebraska man. The fossil was originally brought to light by Henry Fairfield Osborn, who though it might belong to an extinct hominid. Hearing this, the London Illustrated News hired artist Amedee Forestier to depict what kind of creature the tooth might have belonged to, and the resulting illustration is where the misconception that scientists had formulated the features of the Nebraska man comes from. Osborn was not impressed with the illustration, calling it: "a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate".
Even Piltdown man, archeology's most notorious hoax, many scientists were skeptical of the fossil, and it was eventually revealed by scientists as a hoax.
I agree that scientists can sometimes get a bit overexcited by their finds and extrapolate too far, but that's where the scientific community and the scientific method check them.
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Actually, there is a dispute on the issue. That is why we are having this discussion at all. Global Warming activists use the exact same tactic when presenting their "arguments" about how the earth is going to freeze over in 30 years.
Less than 1 in 300 scientists in relevant fields rejects evolutionary theory. For comparison, roughly 4 in 300 historians reject the holocaust.
The debate over evolution arises not from the scientific community, but from the religious community. A great number of religious people reject evolution because of perceived conflicts with their holy book, and wish to prevent evolution from being taught, because the believe it is false on religious grounds. It is from this quarter that the debate arises. Inside the scientific community, there isn't a debate.
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Quite simply, sir. Similar characteristics between two species would lead to similar weaknesses and susceptibility to the same type of viruses. Remember, there are a limited number of amino acids, which means that quite a bit of DNA is going to contain similar information. Similar weaknesses will lead to the same problems in the same places. It isn't a big difficulty. So here is the question. Are these similarities necessarily pointing to a similar ancestor, or are they pointing to a common origin (ie, God)?
They point to a similar ancestor, as I'll demonstrate below.
While there are a limited number of amino acids, there's quite a variety as to how these can be structured in sequences. A difference in the sequence may change the information, but many times it will not. Neither amino acids nor chains of amino acids have weaknesses which would suspect them to specific viral infections. (This is one of the problems we're having with inserting DNA into a host using virus casings. We can insert the DNA, but we can't control where it will end up, because any one spot is as susceptible as any other.)
A retrovirus stores its information in RNA. A virus will use reverse transcription to insert DNA material at a random location into one of the host's chromosomes. If the virus happens to infect a germ cell and you go on to reproduce, the virus is passed onto all subsequent generations. (Roughly half of your children will have this in their DNA, as half of the DNA a child receives is from the other parent.)
What's important is that the viral DNA is always at the same location in every generation.
Since the insertion point is random, there is a 1 in 3,000,000,000 chance of two non-related creatures having the same ERV in the same spot.
If we take a look at the K class ERVs, we share 16 of them with chimps.
If evolution is true, and the we share a common ancestor with chimps, the odds of this happening are 1 in 1.
If evolution is untrue, and the viruses just happened to infect both species in the same places, the odds of this are 1 in 2.0574x10^138.
And like I said, that's only K class ERVs. Humans have roughly 98,000 ERVs, most of which chimps also have in the same locations in their genomes. Not only do most of these appear in chimp genomes, but they also appear in gorillas, orangutans, and macaques. I'm not going to bother calculating these odds, as I don't have a calculator that can do this kind of math.
The reason that these could not have come from God is because Titus 1:2 states that "In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;"
A lie is intentional deception. If he placed viral code in our genes when those viruses never happened, this is deceiving, and it is intentional. It would be a lie.
The reason we prefer evolutionary theory to the idea that a designer (who may lie) did this is Occam's Razor, which tells us to not needlessly multiply entities. Evolutionary theory is the simplest, most complete theory to explain what we see in our genes.
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Earth is not a closed system. Based on the unprovable Flux Theory, yes, Earth is not a closed system. However, the Bible says that the current earth is going to end, and that it had a definite beginning. So our current rendition of earth, at least, is a closed system. You would have to prove that our universe is the mere spawn of past universes before the "open system" argument remotely makes sense. Otherwise, we still have zero explanation for how we got here. Cause-and-effect is scientific logic 101.
I've never even heard of flux theory (are you talking about oscillatory universe?). The Earth is not a closed system because it receives energy from the sun. The solar system can be generally regarded as a closed system because it does not receive enough energy from elsewhere to offset its entropy. The sun's deterioration allows life on Earth, because it offsets our entropy with its own.
If you want to go back all the way, we end up at the big bang, before which current physics falls apart. The big bang supplied all the energy necessary to form everything in the universe. Where that came from is still being researched.
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We can, however, take the information that is available (DNA, Mitochondrial DNA, Paleontology, etc...) and derive a theory from them. Okay... pull out a chess board. Put a king on one of the border squares. Then put that king in checkmate using three pieces (in no particular order). Now... looking at that chessboard, can you give a reverse play-by-play of exactly what happened? Of course not. However, that is the very game that evolutionary theory plays. When I was in High school, they said the earth was probably about 4-5 billion years old. Now we are over 13 billion. However, given the current rate of contraction of the sun (five feet an hour) at 13 billion years ago the earth was inside the sun. That doesn't sound hospitible for life of any kind.
Your chess analogy doesn't work. We don't have some blank slate that we have to back-track to find out what happened. What we have is multiple lines of information that all fit a single conclusion.
For instance, DNA evidence tells us that we're more closely related to rodents than to marsupials. It also tells us that rodents are closer to rabbits than to humans, that we, rabbits, and rodents are all more closely related to dogs than to marsupials. What can we derive from this?
A phylogenetic tree. This tree will show that something split to become both marsupials, and the group that contains dogs, rabbits, rodents, and humans. The later branch will then split into a group that contains dogs, and a group that contains rabbits, rodents, and humans. That branch will then split into one that contains rabbits/rodents, and another that contains humans.
The fun thing is that the trees we can derive like this from different disciplines all line up perfectly, meaning that these splits must have occurred. Since we then know how closely related two trees are, we can see where each of them live on earth, and how they got there, extrapolate back to the point where two branches must have diverged, calculate how much time would be required for the number of mutations between the two branches to have occurred, and dig to the rock layer in the location that corresponds to that point, and we have had a successful track record of finding 'intermediate' forms this way.
So not only does evolutionary theory make valid predictions, it is useful.
As for the age of the Earth.
The earth is thought to be 4.54 billion years old. The universe is thought to be 13.73 billion years old (+/- 0.12 billion years). Life is thought to have emerged 3.7 billion years ago.
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Except that natural selection is based on a variety of factors such as environment and an already living population. So now we are having to assume tha "Evolution" was able to select the fitness of species of animals based on an, at some point, non-existant environment (because plants hadn't come around yet). Some of those first atoms became plants and some became animals... even though both are carbon based life forms? Aside from severe genetic tampering from the outside, atoms don't shift from being ambulatory life forms to nonambulatory life forms, or vice versa. You are having to assume an awful lot to come up with a decent theory. I believe it was William Jennings Bryant who said that the creationist had to only make one assumption... "God".
Not entirely correct.
"Environment" does not only deal with life, but with non-life as well. Fitness is selected for the environment, which includes temperature, radiation, soil composition, etc...
Further, Evolution only deals with living entities. The study of pre-life is called abiogensis, and while interesting, is not our topic.
The current theory goes that the first cell was extremely simple. From this cell evolved into the Prokaryota (non-nucleus containing cells) and Eukaryota (cells with a nucleus) domains. Some of the Eukaryota domain diverged into plants, and later (600 million years), another portion of Eukaryota, one that hadn't become plants (and there was still relatively simple) diverged into animals.
I really don't see how this poses problems.
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You are using a very poor definition of foreknowledge. "Foreknowledge does not equate forebearance"-- Arminius. God knowing "ABC" is going to happen does not mean that He forced "ABC" to occur. Next!
That only applies to a normal person. God is all-seeing, and created everything. By being the first cause, he would have set every event henceforth into motion. Your argument only works for non-omnipotent entities.
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You wonder why Christians reject open theism? Because the Bible specifically relates a tale of a God who is intricately involved with the day to day operations of the world.
I included basically for a reason. The Bible, and many other holy books, teach that god has an active role in certain affairs. This, however, doesn't mean he moves every atom by hand.
Personally, I find a deity who builds a proper house, then only has to fix minor issue more impressive than one that has to hold together every board by hand. The first shows intelligence and guile, the second shows stubbornly obstinate, shallow deity.
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Based on what? Which is more impressive... a clock that mechanically keeps ticking, or the Sisteen Chapel? I'm endlessly impressed by a God who says "let there be..." and there is. My words don't carry that kind of power. If God is all-powerful, then it is not inconcievable or even intellecutally offensive that the earth was created in six days. Why? Because God is all-powerful. If He can do as He pleases, anything is truly possible.
Which is more impressive; God simply speaking the Sistine Chapel into being, or him creating a ball of energy which grows into stars, which lead to planets, which (at least once) leads to life, which leads to the Sistine Chapel being built?
If God is all-powerful, then I agree that it's possible for him to have created everything, as it is, exnihilo. However, it is also not inconceivable that he created everything by using the big bang. If the evidence leads us to conclude that the universe came from a big bang, then why not accept that line of evidence? Not only is it where the evidence leads us, but I personally find it more impressive than ex nihilo creation. (Considering that the point of energy that formed the big bang would have needed an origin anyways. Why not assume that he created that ex nihilo, and that everything else followed from that origin?)
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Except that both require an extremely intelligent individual who knows the in's and out's of how computer programs operate. Unless the evolution of XP was a joyful accident, I see that as no more impressive than simply programming XP. Why? Because the programmer knew exactly how the various programs were going to operate. Sorry to knock some of the glimmer off of computer programming for you, but programs are mere sets of electronic switches that open and close. Since the programmer has to know what switches will do what to actually accomplish anything useful, I don't see an "evolved XP" as any more important or impressive as XP itself actually is.
Programmers do no know exactly how binary works, or how it effects things. Most know a handful of computer languages that pre-existing programs then translate into a desired result.
When higher-level languages were devised, they allowed programmers to stop using binary, and to use these more human-like languages to acheive the same result that binary did. Higher-level languages were a great advance in computer technology, and have allowed for all of the programs we enjoy today.
If you don't see evolving a program as more impressive than creating one line-by-line, then you apparently have little or no programming experience. Higher-level languages essentially take much simpler commands, and then do the work that a binary programmer would have had to do by hand.
Programming an entire program is difficult and time consuming. Every time someone finds or creates a way to expedite this process, via a higher-level language, or a new trick within the program, while retaining the same end result they are praised for the intelligence and cunning in the community.
If someone were able to find a way to type a very simple line of code (Let there be Windows XP!) and have the computer take off all the burden by doing the lion's share of the programing, they would undoubtedly be hailed as the most intelligent, ingenious programmer to ever have lived.
The end result may be the same, but the process is much more impressive. If electricity were generated by having people push a giant wheel, this would acheive the same end result as a nuclear powerplant, but be much less impressive.
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The problem with the idea that God (referring only to the Judeo-Christian one here) made a new earth that looks old is that, if you accept the premise that God does not lie, then you must take it literally when the Bible says that "God is not the author of confusion."
If God is not the author of confusion, this invalidates the idea of him creating an old Earth. This is because, if he created an old Earth, then the evidence will lead us to believe that it is old. If he then says that he created it not but 6-10k years ago, then this leads to a conflict; confusion.
Except you are befuddling the definitions of "confusion" and "lie". Aside from the miscontextualization of the verse you are using, we need to remember that the very same volume in which that verse is found says that "It is the glory of God to hide a thing, and the glory of a King to search it out." Consider this, even if you managed to simulate life artificially in a laboratory, it would have been done by a highly intelligent scientist using very precise equipment... not exactly the random chance happening envisioned by modern Darwinists.
Making the Earth appear old isn't "hiding" something, it's deliberately misleading those who have sought out the age of the earth. If the fossil and genetic records show that life all originated from a common ancestor, and this was not so, then this is deliberately misleading those who have dedicated their lives to seeking out the origins of species.
It is, in the most pure sense, lying. As Titius 1:2 clearly states, God does not lie. If the Earth appears old, then it is because it is old.
We can easily create life in the lab. This has been done many times over, and does not prove abiogenesis for the very reason you mentioned. What scientists are looking to do is create life by re-creating the conditions of a pre-life Earth. If this happens, it will validate abiogenetic theory. All the intelligence would have done is re-created similar conditions, not directly influenced those conditions to create life.
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Neither is modern evolutionary theory. Try getting a straight answer on how the first life form appeared. Try getting a straight answer on where the various inorganic materials that formed the Big Bang came from. It's surprisingly imaginitive. As for supporting evidenc... try the Mysterium Tremendum... that is supporting evidence.
Modern evolutionary theory has been demonstrated sound in principle (things do evolve), made testable predictions (locations and depths of fossils, results of anti-septic, etc...), and has more supporting evidence than almost any other science.
The modern evolutionary theory does not deal with how life arose, it deals with life once it was here. The origins of life is a study called abiogensis.
The modern evolutionary theory does no deal with how the universe arose, it deals with life once it has arisen in that universe. The origin of the universe is deal with by quantum physics, and big bang cosmology.
Mysterium Tremendum, the overwhelming mystery, the wholly other, and the numinous.
A feeling of the numinous is in no way supporting of an ex nihilo creation.
There is overwhelming mystery in every facet of life. In art, culture, and even science. It is what makes us truly human. It is not evidence for anything other than humanity.
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