Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Time For Class Proving Evolution

So what you have found is maybe a mutant or another species. How would the "new" creature hear if the old stuff was not correct and the "new" stuff wasn't correct? It would be easy pickens for the preditor.

If evolution were true you could not find something half way between with all the other fossils that would permiate the fossil record. Like a pre-bat with a little bit longer fingers so that the membrane could later grow between them. Of course in the mean time it could not run as fast as it used to and could not fly at all so survival of the fittest would weed it out.

You're just in denial.

Nothing created everything...

The constant desire to accuse individuals who accept the science of evolution as somehow being non-believers is truly remarkable. One can easily accept the existence of God, and of evolution. They're not mutually exclusive, unless you're of a literalist religious persuasion. And if you are, why do you care? We all pretty much end up in Hell in your view anyway.

Cut-pasted from this thread -http://orbisvitae.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=43055

Certainly we can expect (based on existing fossil evidence) that before there were bats that there were organisms similar to the modern tree shrew.

What a transitional fossil is ...

By analogy from observing existing organisms:

Fossil {B} is transitional if it shares some traits with fossil {A} that are not shared with fossil\organism {C} AND it shares some traits with fossil\organism {C} that are not shared with fossil {A} AND it shares more traits with both fossil {A} and fossil\organism {C}.

We do not predict that you will find evidence of the "- (evolutionary path) - " nor does evolution predict that all {B} will be found, all that is predicted is that IF a fossil is found that it will show transitional characteristics, traits between ancestors and descendants as well as shared traits with ancestors, shared traits with descendants and shared traits with ancestors and descendants and many shared traits with both.

Thus from some ancestral shrew-like animal 65 million years ago, similar to this {A}:


... to the 54 million year old "new" bat fossil {B}:


... to this modern bat skeleton {C}


We can see that {B} is indeed intermediate between {A} and {C} but that more characteristics are shared by all three than are different between {A} and {C} AND that {B} shares some traits with {A} that it does NOT share with {C} (four claws on front arms, long tail, no echolocation) and it shares some traits with {C} that it does NOT share with {A} (long fingers being the most evident}.

Thus {B} is an intermediate fossil along the transition from non-bat to bat.

When you ask for a transitional bat fossil, this IS one.

Another cut-paste - this from www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999647
The New Scientist reports on Nov., 13th, 2004, in an article titled Rogue finger gene got bats airborne, that
A change to a single gene allowed bats to grow wings and take to the air, a development that may explain why bats appeared so suddenly in the fossil record some 50 million years ago. ... Although it is a small developmental change, if it allowed the ancestors of bats to grow extended digits it could explain how bats evolved flight so rapidly,...Relatively few transitional forms would have existed just briefly before being displaced by more advanced forms.

Apologies for the cutting and pasting but I don't have much spare time just now. Also the transition from running to flying would not be likely. A much more likely transition is from tree climbing- jumping from branch to branch- gliding from branch to branch and from tree to tree- flying. All gradual - no big changes all at once.

Very nicely put!

Call it a faith based belief system.Its a choice not truth.

I thought only God was all-knowing.

You say they are not mutually exclusive. And yet the time frames ARE exclusive. The order of God's creation and man's evolution ARE exclusive. If God sent a world wide flood it would create the "geological column" evolutionists try to use to prove God does not know how to communicate.

We who believe God is capable of communcation believe those who claim to believe the God of the Bible would use evolution cause unbeleivers to wonder what other mistakes God made. Those of us who believe God is capable of communication believe He inspired his prophets and apostles to write His Words accurately.

We don't want the distorters to take others with them.

"...the untuaught and unstable distort the Scripture to their own destruction."

I was raised as a good Methodist boy. The idea of Evolution fits in very well with the Methodist discipline. In fact I was close to adulthood before I knew there was a huge divide among Christians on the subject.

Methodism, in part, teaches a reliance on reason for understanding God's creation. You have the Bible as your guide, but things like direct experience, scientific study, and the like are perfectly reasonable additional resources. God his revealing himself every day to us. The idea is not to always look at it through the eyes of Men long dead, but be prepared to see It fresh each day and understand It for what it really is.

An example of this would be car repair. At the time the Bible was written, there were no automobiles. However, if you understand the Bible, you should be able to look at a car repair manual and judge what is appropriate and what is hooey. Because automobiles are not mentioned in the Bible, it does not mean they do not exist or that they should be suspect or that there is some other reason for them being there besides Henry Ford coming up with the idea and getting the ball rolling.

Now we come to Evolution. I have no doubt that folks in the Bible had an incomplete knowledge of science. I also have no doubt that the direct revelation of God would be filtered through human understanding before it hit the written page. This is reasonable.

I don't have to doubt my religion, simply because there are inconsistencies in the Bible. I only have to have faith that in reading the Bible I will have connection with the Almighty and that His guiding hand will lead me towards the truth in the end.

With Evolution, I cannot believe that any Man 2000-10,000 years ago would have the grasp of things like Geology, Astronomy, etc. that help form our modern view of the world. Therefore, I cannot believe that any man of that time would have been able to grasp the nearly-incomprehensible gradualness and subtlety that Natural Selection suggests. If God had sat down next to him on a log and explained it to him as best He could, I am certain that there would be misunderstandings-- not because of the imperfection of the Tutor, but rather the ignorance of the student.

I am comfortable, therefore, in accepting a bunch of the things in this world that are contrary to my understanding of the Bible. If the Bible says it was all created in 6 Days, I need to square that with my modern understanding that it happen over 12 Billion years. If the Bible says man was created from clay and woman from a rib of the man, I have to square that with my own understanding of how things work. It is that challenge that helps me understand what Really happened. For that purpose, God gave me both Faith and Reason and the ability to understand the power and limitations of each.

I have a dear friend who is an ex Israeli Paratrooper. She took a question like this to her rabbi many years ago. The rabbi laughed.

"Why would you ever want the two to ever agree? " he chided. "That would make it all too easy."

Well, the pre eminent paleoanthropologist of all time, Stephan Jay Gould, spent a lifetime examining all the schit you guys keep wiki-ing up, plus thousands of other examples, and he said it was impossible for it to have happened "gradually". So, I guess he was FOS, huh?

Do y'all think it's possible that God created everything through evolution? Do y'all think that since 1 day is a 24 hour period with man...that it's also a 24 hour period with the Creator of the universe?

Evolution is defined as a change in gene frequencies over time within a population. There is readily available evidence of this occurring constantly.
Adaptation, or evolution or advantageous traits, can be observed readily in any cellular biology lab in the world, and their results are undeniable.

The genetic code is a universal language...that lends tremendous credence to evolution.

Asking for evidence of evolution, to me, is like asking for evidence of gravity. It's literally everywhere we look. Fossils give us a timeline for changes in lifeforms, genetics allows us to track evolutionary progress by common ancestors...the list just goes on and on.

These discussions are not about transitional fossils,or about Gradualism vs Punctuated Equilibrium,or the great flood and the geologic column or the accuracy of radiometric dating, It's about a turf war. Up untill recent times religion has always been the arbiter of moral and scientific questions. That's changing, the boundries are being moved, as they should be. Religion answers moral questions and science deals with the factual state of the world/universe, two completely different systems that are not in conflict with one another.

I would say religion and science compliment each other. You're right; it is a turf war, but at the heart of it all are two disciplines that are not in conflict. A scentist does not deal in absolutes only probabilities, observable reality, replicatable experimentation, etc. Concepts like Faith in Science have no meaning, or if they do, they are obstructions to scientific thought. That does not make Faith wrong or Science wrong. Faith is a believe and trust in the unknown or the unknowable. Science is skeptical of both. I would not trust my minister to explain uniformitarianism any more than I would trust a geologist to explain transubstantiation. However, you need both Faith and Science to explain the world God has presented us.

Where it becomes a turf war is when one faction attempts to misrepresent what another's discipline is teaching. Belief in Evolution is not a disbelief in God. A relationship with Christ does not preclude a belief in Cosmic Strings or Inflation Theory. Without Science, we will be forever be ruled by despots and heirophants who would prefer us ignorant. Without Faith, we will be rudderless and easy prey for demagogues. We as free men have a responsibility to stand astride the two disciplines and use them to achieve what God has planned for us.

Science and religion do not have to be in conflict, but only if they do not try to answer the same questions.

When you have people drawing from scripture to answer questions as to what was the process for creation or what are the origins of the earth or the lineage of man? Makes it awfully hard to stay out of conflict if you ask me.

Sometimes religion can adopt a stance whereby the revelation of science does not contradict the tenants of religion. My background was not one of them. Raised a southern baptist in a literalist environment I found that when confronted by the cold hard facts on the ground I had a choice: forsake science or allow my religion to crash on the rocks of the evidence. The three letters found after my name on my business cards show the choice I made. That said not all religion is in such a confrontational posture toward religion.

Funny thing, I found that abandoning the constraints of the religion of my youth did nothing to deter my belief in a higher power or a higher calling for mankind. Time has given me a new perspective on religion and its purpose. But that is an even more heretical topic that is probably better left untouched on this thread. :p

Will

The problem with "religion" is that in general it/they were cooked up by less-than-stable people thousands of years ago, then codified by power-hungry opportunists into thing that SHALT NOT BE DISBELIEVED! EVER! NOT ONE BIT-ETH OF IT-ETH, VERILY AND HOW!

So basically if a person really buys into say the Bible as the literal word of God, then they are buying into a book written when the state of human knowledge was quite primitive.

Change comes hard for churches because at their core, they expect people to buy into a bunch of irrational crazytalk. This is their dilemma. Once you've got the sheep to buy in, you can't go changing the story.

Contrary to popular opinion I'm not an un-spiritual person. I've seen enough of this life to feel there is "more". But that's different than signing off on an entire package of beliefs hook line and sinker. Much different.

I'd also like to say that I don't subscribe to Darwinism as written by the dude in 1800-whatever. What I do believe is that the Earth has been around a very long time. Life has been around a very long time. Life changes and improves in a manner analogous to how a free market is supposed to work. Over an unfathomable length of time, truly unfathomable, it grew into the wildly complex, interwoven system we woke up and found ourselves in.

I don't discount the possibility of intervention(s) in the process by other being(s). But that's different than a "God"; it could be a seed meteorite; it could be green women like Kirk boned on Star Trek... it could be 10-armed insectlike space bugs... it could be beings much more subtle than that. It could be nothing at all; the application of time and very adaptable genetic codes could have gotten us here. I don't know.

I do know, it wasn't a bearded dude in the clouds 6000 years ago. That notion is frankly laughable.

Only a liberal would see morality as a bunch of irrational crazytalk.

Par for the course Jeff, well done!

I guess 'morality' is a relative term.....judging by all of the name-calling done on this thread by those who espouse morality.

There's a whole lot more than "morality" in the Bible, and much of it (and hell, some of the "morality", too) is crazytalk.

Do you believe the Bible is the literal word of God, HAJ? Every word of it?