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The Implications of Evolution: Ideas Have Consequences

I wouldn't dare argue that there's not a consensus but neither can you argue that there is not a considerable number of other scientist (and I'm not limiting my comments to biologist alone) who simply do not believe in evolution.
They are free to try and come up with other paradigms and lobby for consensus
 
Or a theologian pretending to be a scientist

Also, any scientist up to and including Nobel Laureates who insist that God does not exist and science proves it isn't much of a scientist either.
 
I don’t care much about the free will vs determinism debate. As far as I am concerned, if it feels like fee will, that is good enough for me. But supposing that there is indeed free will, it has nothing to do with a “God” but is merely the result of this fabulous “brain” in Homo sapiens that has resulted from billions of years of evolution.
He avoided answering my direct response to that in his OP, he just wrote 'na huh':

You discussed free will and correlated it to evolution. And religion. Now, please answer my direct questions to your comments on free will: even the Christian God gave us free will. Says so in the Bible. He gave us the free will to decide to follow Him or not. So...was that God wrong?

I have follow ups re: evolution, but he wont address the question.
 
He avoided answering my direct response to that in his OP, he just wrote 'na huh':

You discussed free will and correlated it to evolution. And religion. Now, please answer my direct questions to your comments on free will: even the Christian God gave us free will. Says so in the Bible. He gave us the free will to decide to follow Him or not. So...was that God wrong?

I have follow ups re: evolution, but he wont address the question.

He’s not very good at answering questions, only demanding that we answer his.
 
ANYBODY else.
"ANYBODY" other than various levels of government should be in control of American kids' education? ANYBODY!??! No need for training, no call for standardized education of those who would be teaching??

You really need to think for a few minutes before responding because ANYBODY could offer just a few problems for the kids in schools.
 
Really? What makes you believe that belief in the veracity of evolution is not in fact widespread and near universal among the scientific community?
Having studied the subject for a number of years, having read numerous books and articles, watched numerous videos, debates, etc. I can safely say that that it is not "near universal".

Opinions on this are wide ranging.
 
"ANYBODY" other than various levels of government should be in control of American kids' education? ANYBODY!??!
Hell yes! Privatize all of it so it will be answerable to parents.
No need for training, no call for standardized education of those who would be teaching??
Strawman. Never said that.
You really need to think for a few minutes before responding because ANYBODY could offer just a few problems for the kids in schools.
As opposed to the problems we have now?!?!?!
 
There’s been quite some discussion regarding the “science”--or, more accurately--the lack thereof regarding evolution and it seem that there is a very important part of this conversation that is being overlooked.

Ideas have consequence. That is a inescapable fact. And some years ago, in a debate with Phillip Johnson (University of California, Berkley), William B. Provine, PhD. and Evolutionary Biologist at Cornell University summarized the implications of evolution. You can see a blurb of that debate where he summarizes the ideas presented below
here.

To be sure, the ideas he listed were not his own but this was the first--and only time--I’ve been aware of anyone summarizing all of these implications together.

I will bold Dr. Provine’s ideas and then add additional quotes, thoughts, etc. in normal type to simply bolster Dr. Provine’s points.

And as you read this, please keep in mind that Dr. Provine is pro-evolution.

Per Dr. Provine, evolution means that there are:


1. No gods or purposive forces.
2. No life after death.
3. No ultimate foundation for ethics
.
4. No ultimate meaning in life.

5. No free will.


Do you agree?

no of course not because thats illogical and tin foil hat batshit nuttiness
Reality proves all if wrong every day, all of it is factually wrong

if a person needs religion for those things that person has issues
 
Part II of II

4. No ultimate meaning in life.
a) If we have evolved from the primordial ooze, then we are not created in God’s image.
b) Human life is no more important than any other life.

“Animal liberationists do not separate out the human animal, so there is no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” - Ingrid Newkirk, Founder and President of PETA

“All we are doing is catching up with Darwin. He showed in the nineteenth century that we are simply animals. Humans had imagined we were a separate part of Creation, that there was some magical line between Us and Them. Darwin’s theory undermined the foundations of that entire Western way of thinking about the place of our species in the universe” - Peter Singer, Darwinian Evolutionist, Bioethics Philosopher, Endowed Chair in Bioethics, Princeton University
- Weikart, Richard. The Death of Humanity: and the Case for Life. New York, NY: Regency Faith, 2016

“[Peter] Singer is so consistent in rejecting human dignity and placing humans on par with animals that he even thinks bestiality is perfectly fine.”
- Weikart, Richard. The Death of Humanity: and the Case for Life. New York, NY: Regency Faith, 2016

“On the basis of his Darwinian worldview, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes completely rejected natural rights…[h]e explicitly denied that anyone had a ‘right to life.’”
- Weikart, Richard. The Death of Humanity: and the Case for Life. New York, NY: Regency Faith, 2016

“In 1927 Holmes delivered the famous Buck v. Bell decision that gave legal sanction in the United States to compulsory sterilization laws, which many states enacted to promote eugenics.”
- Weikart, Richard. The Death of Humanity: and the Case for Life. New York, NY: Regency Faith, 2016

“Because of the limitations of present detection methods [1993], most birth defects are not discovered until birth…However, if a child was not declared alive until three days after birth…the doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering.” - James Watson, PhD, Evolutionist, Molecular Biologist, Geneticist, 1962 Nobel Laureate
- Hanegraaff, Hank. The Face that Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution. Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 1998.

“The most merciful thing a large family can do for one of its infant members is to kill it.” - Margaret Sanger (1879 – 1966), Darwinian Evolutionist, Founder Planned Parenthood
- Hanegraaff, Hank. The Face that Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution. Nashville, TN: Word Publishing, 1998.


5. No free will.
a) We are the product of mindless, purposeless forces.
b) As such, we cannot be expected to act in any thoughtful way but are forced by evolution to simply react to the circumstances surrounding us (“cause and effect”) (“determinism”).

Do you agree?

Discuss.

I don't understand how anyone would need a "god" in order to have ethics.
LMAO. Such silliness.

To answer your question: No I do not agree with any of that. Dont need an imaginary friend to have "meaning" in my life.
 
Hell yes! Privatize all of it so it will be answerable to parents.
Oh yeah, low-income parents would have so much power over corporate attorneys. Charter schools have shown improved test results in low-income districts - on average, but lower test results in middle income districts. Then there are several for-profit companies that have very poor results.
Strawman. Never said that.
Of course you didn't say "no training required for teachers" but you did write ANYBODY could teach
As opposed to the problems we have now?!?!?!
Many of the problems we have now - the real ones, not the imaginary ones that certain groups promote - are a direct result of unequal funding for school districts. With funding for public schools generally based on property taxes, affluent districts have far more dollars available for their schools than do urban, low-income districts.
 
Having studied the subject for a number of years, having read numerous books and articles, watched numerous videos, debates, etc. I can safely say that that it is not "near universal".

Opinions on this are wide ranging.

Uh huh. Do you have an actual Citation for this?
 
And yet there are many who would disagree with that.

Consider the fact that on one hand you have any number of scientist up to and including Nobel Laureates who insist that God does not exist and science proves it.

On the other hand you have any number of scientists up to and including Nobel Laureates who insist that God does exist and science proves it.

If this was simply a matter of science both sides could come together and "re-do" the science. But that is not possible.

What both sides are "arguing" over is the evidence (fossil record, earth age, whatever) and the evidence of how that evidence came to be.

Probably the best comparison I've read (I honestly don't remember where I read this but I seem to recall it being from a neutral source) regarding the study of evolution is that evolution is like a crime scene. You have a body and a number of other related or potentially related clues. Now as the crime scene investigator (evolutionist or I.D.er), their job is to figure out what happened.

I think this comparison has some merit. But whereas a crime scene has a fresh body, blood splatter, fingerprints, bullet casings, surveillance video, witnesses, etc., your evidence regarding evolution / intelligent design is far more limited and is--depending on your point of view--thousands or even billions of years old so the comparison does have some limitations.
This is not an accurate characterization of the study of evolution. You don't have to look at million year old fossils to know that evolution is real. It's not a process that exists solely within the past. You can observe the mechanics of evolution occuring right now, in real time. No species ever stops evolving. You can actually see natural selection causing species to evolve, especially in species that reproduce rapidly, like insects and bacteria.
 
Read the Genesis account. How does it describe a day?

Genesis 1:3-5
"3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day."

While you are technically correct, God did divide the day and night on the first day.

Even so what was the periodicity of that day? A day on Jupiter isn't the same length as a day on Earth. We are still left with a good possibility that the reference is outside the normal Earth day/night cycle

Does it?!?!

Where?

What I see is...

Genesis 1: 20-23
"And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day."

Which is then followed up by the creatures of the land. IIRC, according to evolution theory, life began in the seas, and then migrated to the air an land, as they evolved.


Breeding is not "evolution". Breeding required direction. Evolution, by definition, is free of any direction.

Says who? Show me the source that says that evolution is only about change free from the hand of man. Yes, we typically reserve the use of the word "evolution" for that purpose, but evolution is the change in a species into a new one over time. Breeding is simply directed evolution, as opposed to natural evolution. It's really not much different from abortion (and I am not getting into the morals or anything else regarding that subject). A miscarriage is a natural abortion. Abortion is simply the termination of a pregnancy. While we typically use abortion for the artificial process, and miscarriage for the natural one, reality is, at this point of lingual use, particularly in the medical field, both are abortions. Likewise, changes in a species into a new one is evolution, whether it occurs naturally or directed by man.

This seems very weak reasoning to me. You are suggesting that God--who had just created matter, space, the universe, et. al.--couldn't created the animals the way He wanted to begin with?

Couldn't? No, I am not suggesting that at all. I am suggesting that He wanted certain processes to govern the functioning of the planet and the universe and created the processes, then used them to achieve other goals. You might as well argue against the idea of the water cycle, asking if God couldn't just make it rain whenever He wanted it to. And actually, if we assume the Flood account real, that rain was probably not sourced from the normal water cycle.

Variation in a kind is not evolution. Dogs remain dogs.

But wolves didn't remain wolves did they? And new breeds arise, as others go away, although more of the former than the later.

Does it? Where do you get that information?

Which part?

Science--real science--can't even do that. At best it can offer an explanation and one that is all too often unsubstantiated.

Yes an explanation on the mechanics of reality. I make no claim that initial explanations will always be correct, but they are what fits the evidence of the time. And usually substantiated, again based upon the evidence available at the time.

I understand your argument here but it does ignore a rather large field of study dedicated to proving the Bible--and therefore God--true.

It doesn't ignore it, nor does it ignore all those trying to prove that God and the Bible are not true. It is a simple statement of fact that there is no evidence either way and thus both possibilities are equal in their potential.
 
Oh yeah, low-income parents would have so much power over corporate attorneys. Charter schools have shown improved test results in low-income districts - on average, but lower test results in middle income districts. Then there are several for-profit companies that have very poor results.

Of course you didn't say "no training required for teachers" but you did write ANYBODY could teach

Many of the problems we have now - the real ones, not the imaginary ones that certain groups promote - are a direct result of unequal funding for school districts. With funding for public schools generally based on property taxes, affluent districts have far more dollars available for their schools than do urban, low-income districts.
Wonderful.

SInce you are so passionate about the subject you should go and start a thread or sumthin' instead of trying to hi-jack this one.

How in the cornbread-hell did we go from science philosophy, the existence of God and the foundation of ethics to public schools, anyhow?
 
I screwed that up.

What I meant to say is that evolution isn't a science for the same reason I.D. isn't a science.

Both take existing evidence and try to explain it within their own existing paradigms. Neither use the scientific method which is why neither can be considered a science.
Any theory in and of itself is not science. Science is the process by which we learn and by which we test theories. Science can happen even if we are not testing any theory per se, although one usually develops in the midst of it. The whole process of "let's see what happens" can be science as long as the process is controlled, and results are recorded. When people say "the science of <subject>" that's more idiom than actual use of the word science. The idea behind evolution itself is solid and valid. The application of it as to which species are evolved from which other ones, might not be spot on, but the application of the theory is different from the theory itself. I think that there is a lot of common conflation of the two in today's world. But if evolution doesn't exist, then where do new species come from? Do they just spontaneously appear?
 
There are many who disagree with your assessment including G. Richard Bozarth and myself.

I seems fundamentally silly to me to say that God created matter, space, time...everything in the universe--including the universe itself--but couldn't make the creature He wanted to but had to rely on evolution which, by the way, He was had to create (evolution, that is) to make the critters He wanted.

Just silly.
Theres a difference between:

1. Not possible.
2. Seems silly.

If you are simply saying that you don't think a god would use evolution, then fine, that's your opinion. If you are saying if evolution is true then it's impossible that a god used it then you need to show evidence to back that up, and you can't do that.

You presented this thread as though it's not possible. You are wrong, or at the very least, the person you are trying to characterize, is wrong. Period.
 
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