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I believe that aspects of evolution have been widely supported by science and indicated by ample evidence of nature. Now in the human condition there is evidence but no proof, but it would seem reasonable to a rational man to assume there is some validity. Now the time frames for selection and random chance to effect these changes in humanity, is the usual sticking point where evolution gets dicey. Until we can date the origins of mankind more precisely it will remain murcky. For point of view I am not an athiest but believe in God, however I think Genesis is largely, if not all allegory. I believe that a perfect devine being would use the nature he created to bring his plan into fruition rather then circumvent his own laws and larger creation (nature) of which science is a predicter.
Quote (Cato @ Jan. 29 2008,02:25) I believe that aspects of evolution have been widely supported by science and indicated by ample evidence of nature. Now in the human condition there is evidence but no proof, but it would seem reasonable to a rational man to assume there is some validity. Now the time frames for selection and random chance to effect these changes in humanity, is the usual sticking point where evolution gets dicey. Until we can date the origins of mankind more precisely it will remain murcky. For point of view I am not an athiest but believe in God, however I think Genesis is largely, if not all allegory. I believe that a perfect devine being would use the nature he created to bring his plan into fruition rather then circumvent his own laws and larger creation (nature) of which science is a predicter.
Hi CatoThere is one major problem in the study of human evolution, that rain forests are not good places for forming fossils. As our very distant ancestors lived in rain forests the fossil evidence is a bit sketchy. I don't think there is any problem with timescale. If you want problems, try the myth of our genetic diversity springing from Noah and his family in a few thousand years.
You write as a deist, if I read this correctly. If the creator has used 'nature' to cause humans to evolve, how have the conditions of earth been manipulated in orger to ensure our very recent arrival by natural selection, being here for only 185 thousand years, following 3.7 billion years of life on earth?
Stuart
Stuart,
That is indeed the question. If it was not nature as you seem to allude to (and for this celestial events would be considered part of nature, meteor strikes, etc.), then evolution as natural selection and random change are not the prime causes. Which would then lead to some non-natural cause. Are you implying some supernatural or extraterrestial causation? From your previous posts I doubt this. So this may be an intellectual query? At any rate that is why it is still theory (though a largely respected one) and not a law, there is evidence but still a lack of proof. As per Noah and the gang, I am not sure. There may have been a Noah and flood but I have problems with the details, and doubt the scale of the alleged incident for some of the reasons you gave. I have doubts about much that was written in the Old Testament particularly. I am not willing to write it all off en mass but recognize the limitations of the times. A regional event to a writer of old may have seemed like a world-wide event. At any rate I am sure there is a mixture of fact and myth. Which is the great danger of people taking things from the Bible too literally.
The world and the earth are 2 different things.
Some think they are the same but the earth is the globe and the world is the part where men live.
The bible says that the world is an enemy to the righteous and we shouldn't love the world. Surely that is not to be taken as the earth.
Exodus 9:29
Moses replied, “When I have gone out of the city, I will spread out my hands in prayer to the LORD. The thunder will stop and there will be no more hail, so you may know that the earth is the YHWH's.1 Corinthians 10:26
for, “The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it.”Psalm 24:1
The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it;The last verse shows us that the world is a subset of the earth or contained within the earth realm.
Quote (Stu @ Jan. 29 2008,05:46) Quote (Cato @ Jan. 29 2008,02:25) I believe that aspects of evolution have been widely supported by science and indicated by ample evidence of nature. Now in the human condition there is evidence but no proof, but it would seem reasonable to a rational man to assume there is some validity. Now the time frames for selection and random chance to effect these changes in humanity, is the usual sticking point where evolution gets dicey. Until we can date the origins of mankind more precisely it will remain murcky. For point of view I am not an athiest but believe in God, however I think Genesis is largely, if not all allegory. I believe that a perfect devine being would use the nature he created to bring his plan into fruition rather then circumvent his own laws and larger creation (nature) of which science is a predicter.
Hi CatoThere is one major problem in the study of human evolution, that rain forests are not good places for forming fossils. As our very distant ancestors lived in rain forests the fossil evidence is a bit sketchy. I don't think there is any problem with timescale. If you want problems, try the myth of our genetic diversity springing from Noah and his family in a few thousand years.
You write as a deist, if I read this correctly. If the creator has used 'nature' to cause humans to evolve, how have the conditions of earth been manipulated in orger to ensure our very recent arrival by natural selection, being here for only 185 thousand years, following 3.7 billion years of life on earth?
Stuart
Hi Stu,
So you know the facts
and are just waiting for the evidence to come along?And you say we believe in myths?
Hi Stu,
Despite the fact of supportive evidence ever emerging about men dropping from trees you are utterly convinced of your views being fact. Sometimes your faith is awe inspiring.Quote So you know the facts
Yes, quite a few of them.Quote and are just waiting for the evidence to come along?
No, the facts are the evidence.Quote And you say we believe in myths?
Yes.Quote Despite the fact of supportive evidence ever emerging about men dropping from trees you are utterly convinced of your views being fact. What? This makes no sense to me.
The fossil record is a fact. Noah’s flood is a myth. I can normally tell the difference between historical fact and myth. The christian fundamentalist has either been brought up to be ignorant of the difference, or has deluded himself to the same effect, which is really very sad.
Stuart
Quote (Nick Hassan @ Jan. 31 2008,05:12) Hi Stu,
No such record for men
but you believe.
Faith.
Sorry, what do you mean 'no such record'?Stuart
Hi Stu,
You say
” I can normally tell the difference between historical fact and myth. “
Really?
And how do you do this?
Is it some sort of a gift?Quote (Stu @ Jan. 30 2008,20:52) I can normally tell the difference between historical fact and myth.
Wow what a gift.People could come to you for questions like “Is there life on other planets” and you could answer and we wouldn't need to spend all that money to find the answer and in turn the money could be spent helping the poor and that.
OK, now that we all know you have this gift, lets put it to the test. PS, you are not allowed to look it up on Google or Wikipedia, or any website for that mater.
Here is the first question:
Was Piltdown Man a myth/lie or fact?
Was Java Man a gibbon, man, or a missing link?Thanks.
Hi t8 and Nick
Historical facts are events for which there is good evidence that they actually occurred. The Titanic sank. There is a ship down there. Our language is based significantly on the fact of the Roman invasion of Britain, along with the other parts of language derives as a result of French invasions, the German invasion and the Danish invasion. Every day our speech reflects the facts of those military events. Julius Caesar was murdered in the forum in 44BC. There are so many corroborating independent accounts of it that it would be perverse to deny it.
Your god is a myth. There is not a single objective piece of empirical evidence, nor any piece of sound reasoning for its existence. Noah's flood and arc are myths for the same reason; there is no need even to go into the absurdity of them.
Piltdown man was not a myth. It was a lie.
I have to admit to some quick research to find you a quote from Answers In Genesis:
“‘Java man’ has been renamed so as to now belong to the category of Homo erectus.”
Stuart
Hi Stu,
Jesus Christ was less famous than Julius but his revelations about his and our God are very extensive and you should research them as your life derives from that God and your future is very much in His hands.Quote (Stu @ Jan. 31 2008,20:03) Hi t8 and Nick Historical facts are events for which there is good evidence that they actually occurred. The Titanic sank. There is a ship down there. Our language is based significantly on the fact of the Roman invasion of Britain, along with the other parts of language derives as a result of French invasions, the German invasion and the Danish invasion. Every day our speech reflects the facts of those military events. Julius Caesar was murdered in the forum in 44BC. There are so many corroborating independent accounts of it that it would be perverse to deny it.
Your god is a myth. There is not a single objective piece of empirical evidence, nor any piece of sound reasoning for its existence. Noah's flood and arc are myths for the same reason; there is no need even to go into the absurdity of them.
Piltdown man was not a myth. It was a lie.
I have to admit to some quick research to find you a quote from Answers In Genesis:
“‘Java man’ has been renamed so as to now belong to the category of Homo erectus.”
Stuart
Stuart,With you I am reminded of the words of Thomas Paine who wrote in 1794, “But the belief of a God is so weakened by being mixed with the strange fable of the Christian creed, and with the wild adventures related in the Bible, and the obscurity and obscene nonsense of the Testament, that the mind of man is bewildered as in a fog. Viewing all these things in a confused mass, he confounds fact with fable; and as he cannot believe all, he feels a disposition to reject all. But the belief of a God is a belief distinct from all other things, and ought not to be confounded with any. The notion of a Trinity of Gods has enfeebled the belief of one God. A multiplication of beliefs acts as a division of belief; and in proportion as anything is divided, it is weakened.”
My point being that belief in God is separate from believing in Christian doctrine or a literal immutable Bible. You have made a point before about throwing out the baby with the bathwater, just leave yourself open to the possibility you may be doing the same. There are many things in the world we know as fact now that we could not have proved in the past. I doubt if God will ever be able to be proved or disproved in the future, but the possibility exists. Just because a lot of Bible stories are incredible doesn't necessarily mean everything behind them is nonsense as well.
Quote (t8 @ Jan. 31 2008,08:48) Wow what a gift. People could come to you for questions like “Is there life on other planets” and you could answer and we wouldn't need to spend all that money to find the answer and in turn the money could be spent helping the poor and that.
OK, now that we all know you have this gift, lets put it to the test. PS, you are not allowed to look it up on Google or Wikipedia, or any website for that mater.
Here is the first question:
Was Piltdown Man a myth/lie or fact?
Was Java Man a gibbon, man, or a missing link?Thanks.
He can look it up on google if he wants to. After all, who's stopping him from doing it? Evolution is false, t8, you make it sound like it's true by your two questions.acertainchap, the point was that Piltdown Man was a fraud that lasted for decades and this shows how easily people even in the scientific community can be deceived. Makes you wonder at the things that people believe today.
In addition to that, Java Man is dubious as the man who discovered it namely Dubois (no pun intended) found a skullcap, a femur, and a few teeth and there is doubt as to whether all these bones represent the same species.
The whole point about these ape men is that imagination plays a big part. Using scant evidence, they put bones together and claim them to be a bridge between man and the ancestor of apes.
It's like the Trinity Doctrine. You start with the doctrine and then make things fit the doctrine, instead of taking the evidence and asking what does this mean.
Taken from Wikipedia regarding Piltdown Man.
In November, 1953, The Times published evidence gathered by a professor of anthropology from Oxford University demonstrating that the fossil was a composite of three distinct species. It consisted of a human skull of medieval age, the 500-year-old lower jaw of a Sarawak orangutan and chimpanzee fossil teeth. The appearance of age had been created by staining the bones with an iron solution and chromic acid. Microscopic examination revealed file-marks on the teeth, and it was deduced from this someone had modified the teeth to give them a shape more suited to a human diet.
The Piltdown man hoax had succeeded so well because at the time of its discovery, the scientific establishment had believed that the large modern brain had preceded the modern omnivorous diet, and the forgery had provided exactly that evidence. It has also been thought that nationalism and racism also played a role in the less-than-critical acceptance of the fossil as genuine by some British scientists. It satisfied European expectations that the earliest humans would be found in Eurasia, and the British, it has been claimed, also wanted a first Briton to set against fossil hominids found elsewhere in Europe, including France and Germany.
The identity of the Piltdown forger remains unknown, but suspects have included Dawson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin A.C. Hinton, and Arthur Conan Doyle as well as numerous others.
* Teilhard had traveled to regions of Africa where one of the anomalous finds originated, and was residing in the Wealden area from the date of the earliest finds.
* Hinton left a trunk in storage at the Natural History Museum in London that in 1970 was found to contain animal bones and teeth carved and stained in a manner similar to the carving and staining on the Piltdown finds.The recent focus on Charles Dawson as the sole forger is supported by the gradual accumulation of evidence regarding other archaeological hoaxes he perpetrated in the decade or two prior to the Piltdown discovery. Beginning in 1895, he appears to have made dozens of minor 'discoveries' including the first evidence of cast-iron figure-casting in Roman Britain, a medieval clockface, a flint arrowhead and shaft, and a number of other remarkable finds that were later, long after his early death, proven to be forgeries. On one occasion, as an example, a collection of flints he exchanged with another collector, Hugh Morris, turned out to have been aged with chemicals, a point Morris noted down at the time and which was later unearthed. There were also numerous individuals in the Surrey area well-acquainted with Dawson who long held doubts about Piltdown and of Dawson's role in the matter, but given the sheer weight of scholarly affirmation regarding the find few if any were willing to publicly speak out for fear of being ridiculed for their trouble.
Sometimes he may have appropriated the finds usually made by workmen by reporting them to scientific journals as if they were his own discoveries. Most of his written works proved to be uncredited collations of the work of others, material that but for the period would have drawn outright accusations of gross plagiarism. His History of Hastings castle is a prime example.
His initial motivations may well have lain along the lines of gaining further fame and notoriety in his native Surrey, but it is clear that his increasingly successful early frauds may well have emboldened him to pull off the master stroke that would have landed him his most cherished goal, that of a fellowship in the prestigious Royal Society. It was an ambition that ultimately went unfulfilled.
Quote (Stu @ Jan. 31 2008,19:05) Quote (t8 @ Jan. 31 2008,08:19) Quote (Stu @ Jan. 30 2008,22:11) Quote (t8 @ Jan. 30 2008,21:20) Stu, you forgot to mention evolutionists like Adolph Hitler who believe that one race is better than another and has the right to exterminate the supposed weaker one in order to fulfill the precepts of Evolution. So now we have 3 on the list:
1) Humans contributing to climate change
2) Religious nutters who get a virgin in heaven for every hundred infidels they kill
3) Crazy evolutionists who reasonably compete for an ecosystem as specified in the theory of evolution
Oh dear, it is all new for you but groundhog day for the rest of us. Whose law says that the first person to mention Hitler has lost the argument?I think you'll find it's 72 virgins for killing any infidels. At least that's the received wisdom. Fundamentalists should feel short-changed. They get no virgins for killing abortion doctors.
Stuart
Oh I see.You are allowed to say that those who believe in God are a cause for evil, but not those who believe in evolution.
Right got it.
Yeah right!
Stephen Weinberg: Good people do good, and evil people do evil. It takes religion to make good people do evil.Stuart
I actually agree with you here Stu to some degree. Many a good man has been led astray by religion. That is why I personally do not seek and promote religion rather truth itself.
That said, you could also say that people who do not believe in a judgement have less to lose in their own mind for doing evil as they do not believe in a judgement and therefore it ultimately doesn't matter how they live their lives because we all cease to exist after our short lives.
My dad who is an atheist once said “imagine if no one believed in God, there would be much more crime in the world”. He simply recognized the fact that knowing that there is a judgement and that our lives will be reviewed would obviously help foster living a better life for those who believed.
Such a belief doesn't guarantee that a person will live a better life, but it has certainly had an impact. I am sure we all know or have heard of someone who led a life of crime and changed when they believed in God. People who are serious about their belief in a righteous God have an extra reason to help people in need, live better lives, even pay taxes,.
Of course then there are religions that encourage killing/murder. That is certainly almost more dangerous than atheism as there are rewards for killing, such as getting virgins in heaven. Atheism doesn't reward murderers, but doesn't rule it out if you look at the pure doctrine regarding survival of the fittest. Murder/s can lead inheritance of the victims ecosystem.
Quote (t8 @ Jan. 31 2008,16:40) acertainchap, the point was that Piltdown Man was a fraud that lasted for decades and this shows how easily people even in the scientific community can be deceived. Makes you wonder at the things that people believe today.
I'm sorry, I just could not let this one go.Can anyone not see the total irony in the above quoted statement?[/b
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