|
PrexicKehdaki -> RE: Ask an atheist! (6/26/2008 9:45:22 PM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: earthless
As a former atheist and rabid hater of Christianity.. there is so much I could interject into this discussion. Darwinian (macro) Evolution is not science, it is faith-based guesses at best and sheer fiction at worst.
You may disagree with it but it is science.
It's both falsifiable and has predictive power.
Also, macro evolution is simply a lot of micro evolution over a long period of time.
Evolution is an observable fact. We see bacteria evolving and we use evolution to breed different dogs. Creationists proclaim that evolution cannot create an entirely new species. This usually comes from the misconception that evolution occurs in straight lines. That's not the case. It's divergent. In other words, one group of organism will begin to evolve in TWO DIFFERENT directions. Once these two different directions evolve so much that the two paths cannot mate, then speciation occurs.
Speciation, macro evolution, HAS been observed in finches, fruit flies, types of grass, etc.
In fact, a couple of weeks ago cultures of E. coli that have been maintained for 20 years now by Richard Lenski and recently, in his paper, he describes how one of his populations evolved the ability to metabolise citrate, something E. coli cannot do by definition.
It is clear to anyone who looks at the evidence with an open mind that apes becoming man (Peking man, etc) is false. Peking man and the like are not a distant relative but rather dinner.
quote:
ORIGINAL: earthless
To say that "hominids" like Peking man and his partners are closely related to humans because both can walk is akin to saying that a hummingbird and a helicopter are closely related because both can fly.
In reality, the distance between an ape who cannot read or write and a descendant of Adam who can compose a musical masterpiece or send a person to the moon is the distance of infinity.
No matter how many years the evolutionist postulates, chance operating on natural processes can no more create a chimp than it could create a cell. Sorry for the rant, but so much can be said.
Dr. Louis Bounoure, former director of research at the French National Center for Scientific Research, calls macro evolution "a fairy tale for grown-ups." I call it a cruel hoax! In fact, the arguments that support evolutionary theory are astonishingly weak.
First, the fossil record is an embarrassment to evolutionists. No verifiable transitions from one kind to another have as yet been found. Charles Darwin had an excuse; in his day fossil finds were relatively scarce.
Today, however, we have an abundance of fossils. Still, we have yet to find even one legitimate transition from one kind to another.
Homo habilis, homo rudolfensis, homo georgicus, homo ergaster, homo erectus, homo cepranensis, homo antecessor, homo heidelbergensis, homo rhodesiensis, homo neanderthalensis, and finally.. homo sapiens
We have many MANY transitional fossils for each homo genus.
quote:
ORIGINAL: earthless
Furthermore, in Darwin's day such enormously complex structures as a human egg were thought to be quite simple - for all practical purposes, little more than a microscopic blob of gelatin.
Today, we know that a fertilized human egg is among the most organized, complex structures in the universe. In an age of scientific enlightenment, it is incredible to think people are willing to maintain that something so vastly complex arose by chance.
Like an egg or the human eye, the universe is a masterpiece of precision and design that could not have come into existence by chance.
If you study evolution, you'll find it's not by chance. Natural selection is all but chance. They are complex, but have been given plenty of time to evolve.
quote:
ORIGINAL: earthless
Finally, while chance is a blow to the theory of evolution, the laws of science are a bullet to its head.
The basic laws of science, including the laws of effects and their causes - energy conservation and entropy - under gird the creation model for origins and undermine the evolutionary hypothesis.
While I would fight for a person's right to have faith in science fiction, we must resist evolutionists who attempt to brainwash people into thinking that macro evolution is science.
The entropy argument has long been refuted over and over again, earthless.
"Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics."
This shows more a misconception about thermodynamics than about evolution. The second law of thermodynamics says, "No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body." [Atkins, 1984, The Second Law, pg. 25] Now you may be scratching your head wondering what this has to do with evolution. The confusion arises when the 2nd law is phrased in another equivalent way, "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." Entropy is an indication of unusable energy and often (but not always!) corresponds to intuitive notions of disorder or randomness. Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.
However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can't have more usable energy still? Creationists sometimes try to get around this by claiming that the information carried by living things lets them create order. However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order from disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?
The thermodynamics argument against evolution displays a misconception about evolution as well as about thermodynamics, since a clear understanding of how evolution works should reveal major flaws in the argument. Evolution says that organisms reproduce with only small changes between generations (after their own kind, so to speak). For example, animals might have appendages which are longer or shorter, thicker or flatter, lighter or darker than their parents. Occasionally, a change might be on the order of having four or six fingers instead of five. Once the differences appear, the theory of evolution calls for differential reproductive success. For example, maybe the animals with longer appendages survive to have more offspring than short-appendaged ones. All of these processes can be observed today. They obviously don't violate any physical laws.
--talkorgins.org
|
|
|
|