OK, For creation we have an all powerful God. He creates us. We live. What we supposedily need to evolve is matter. Matter cannot come from nothing and cannot change to be living. We.. live? The dinosaurs, mammels and reptiles died off, but humans survived? We're very weak compared to most dinosaurs. Most were far faster and far better hunters than we are, but yet they died.

"Evolutions Foundation Missing?

WHAT is the essence of Darwin’s theory of evolution? “In its full-throated, biological sense, . . . evolution means a process whereby life arose from nonliving matter and subsequently developed entirely by natural means.” Darwinian evolution postulates that “virtually all of life, or at least all of its most interesting features, resulted from natural selection working on random variation.”—Darwin’s Black Box—The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, by Michael Behe, associate professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Irreducible Complexity—Evolution’s Stumbling Block?

When Darwin developed his theory, scientists had little or no knowledge of the amazing complexity of the living cell. Modern biochemistry, the study of life at the molecular level, has revealed some of that intricacy. It has also raised serious questions and doubts about Darwin’s theory.

The components of cells are made up of molecules. Cells are the building blocks of all living creatures. Professor Behe is Roman Catholic and believes in evolution to explain the later development of animals. However, he raises serious doubts about whether evolution can explain the existence of the cell. He speaks of molecular machines that “haul cargo from one place in the cell to another along ‘highways’ made of other molecules . . . Cells swim using machines, copy themselves with machinery, ingest food with machinery. In short, highly sophisticated molecular machines control every cellular process. Thus the details of life are finely calibrated, and the machinery of life enormously complex.”

Now, all of this activity is taking place on what scale? A typical cell is only one thousandth of an inch [0.03 mm] across! In that infinitesimal space, complex functions vital to life are occurring. (See diagram, pages 8-9.) Little wonder that it has been said: “The bottom line is that the cell—the very basis of life—is staggeringly complex.”

Behe argues that the cell can function only as a complete entity. Thus, it cannot be viable while being formed by slow, gradual changes induced by evolution. He uses the example of a mousetrap. This simple apparatus can function only when all its components are assembled. Each component on its own—platform, spring, holding bar, trap hammer, catch—is not a mousetrap and cannot function as such. All the parts are needed simultaneously and have to be assembled for there to be a working trap. Likewise, a cell can function as such only when all its components are assembled. He uses this illustration to explain what he terms “irreducible complexity.”

This presents a major problem for the alleged process of evolution, which involves the appearance of gradually acquired, useful characteristics. Darwin knew that his theory of gradual evolution by natural selection faced a big challenge when he said: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”—Origin of Species.

The irreducibly complex cell is a major stumbling block to belief in Darwin’s theory. In the first place, evolution cannot explain the leap from inanimate to animate matter. Then comes the problem of the first complex cell, which must arise in one fell swoop as an integrated unit. In other words, the cell (or, the mousetrap) must appear out of nowhere, assembled and functioning!"

Hands up, all those who have run screaming from the excessively long posts?....

Long posts don't bother me....I just pass'em by

uhh unless they are interesting

Hands up, all those who have run screaming from the excessively long posts?....

I second that.

Feels like I am in church from his posts.

Well, do a little reading up on Genetic Anthropology and Human Evolution which fly's in the face of question of if evolution is real or not, including Human evolution.

Human kind is supposed to be what, 5,000 years old or some such? Yet Humans can be traced back at least 40,000 years geneticaly... As they discover better preserved tissue samples they gain more detailed information supporting the whole thing...

anyway...

IPlural: I agree with you wholeheartedly, but 'the powers that be' who fuel a lot of the posted material above have spent good money trying to discredit carbon dating. You might find human DNA in a bone that tests out at 40k years, but to them it is always gonna be a bone of uncertain age and provenance. Like my old History professor used to say, "If it wasn't reasoned into them, you won't reason it out of them..."

Ami....the wallpaper image was superfluous at best.

Hands up, all those who have run screaming from the excessively long posts?....

I've just got a lot of evidence to back up my claims.
You don't have to read them if you don't want to, but if you feel you'd like to comment on what I say, then you might want to read them.

I second that. Feels like I am in church from his posts.

Is it a good thing, or bad, that my posts make you feel you're in church?

Well, do a little reading up on Genetic Anthropology and Human Evolution which fly's in the face of question of if evolution is real or not, including Human evolution. Human kind is supposed to be what, 5,000 years old or some such? Yet Humans can be traced back at least 40,000 years geneticaly... As they discover better preserved tissue samples they gain more detailed information supporting the whole thing... anyway...

Carbon dating isn't correct. Something that is 2,000 years + old (this is just a random number) releases such a small... ity-bity amount of carbon thats its extremely difficult to date it properly. What scientists say is just a guess, for the most part.

IPlural: I agree with you wholeheartedly, but 'the powers that be' who fuel a lot of the posted material above have spent good money trying to discredit carbon dating. You might find human DNA in a bone that tests out at 40k years, but to them it is always gonna be a bone of uncertain age and provenance. Like my old History professor used to say, "If it wasn't reasoned into them, you won't reason it out of them..."

Not to be insulting, but your quote can be applied to evolutionists as well.

For evolution, which i'll say again for those who might have missed it, a piece of non-living matter cannot just go from non-living to living. And matter cannot just jump to be here, or slowly form to be here either. It defies all logic. Energy cannot just be here from nothing. Think of 'the beginning' when there was absolutely nothing (in evolution).. Can something spawn from nothing? No, it can't. We ALL know this as fact whether we admit it or not. No matter how large or small of a piece of matter or energy, it CANNOT spawn from nothing. This alone disproves evolution.

Carbon dating isn't correct. Something that is 2,000 years + old (this is just a random number) releases such a small... ity-bity amount of carbon thats its extremely difficult to date it properly. What scientists say is just a guess, for the most part.

Really?

The absolute dating methods most widely used and accepted are based on the natural radioactivity of certain minerals found in rocks. Since the rate of radioactive decay of any particular isotope is known, the age of a specimen can be computed from the relative proportions of the remaining radioactive material and its decay products. By this method the age of the earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old. Some of the radioactive elements used in dating and their decay products (their stable daughter isotopes) are uranium-238 to lead-206, uranium-235 to lead-207, thorium-232 to lead-208, samarium-147 to neodymium-143, rubidium-87 to strontium-87, and potassium-40 to argon-40. Each radioactive member of these series has a known, constant decay rate, measured by its half-life, that is unaffected by any physical or chemical changes. Each decay element has an effective age range, including uranium-238 (100 million to 4.5 billion years) and potassium-40 (100,000 to 4.5 billion years)

Yeah there are not any FACTS backing that up either I am sure

The radioactive carbon-14 method of dating is used to determine the age of organic matter that is several hundred years to approximately 50,000 years old. Carbon dating is possible because all organic matter, including bones and other hard parts, contains carbon and thus contains a scalable proportion of carbon-14 to its decay product, nitrogen-14. The carbon-14, along with nonradioactive carbon-13 and carbon-12, is converted to carbon dioxide and assimilated by plants and organisms; when the plant or animal dies, it no longer acquires carbon, and the carbon-14 begins to decay. The conventional method of measuring the amount of radioactive carbon-14 in a sample involved the detection of individual carbon-14 decay events. In the 1980s a new procedure became available. This technique involves the direct counting of carbon-14 atoms through the use of the accelerator mass spectrometer and has the advantage of being able to use sample sizes up to 1,000 times smaller than those used by conventional radiocarbon dating. The accelerator mass spectrometer technique reduces the amount of statistical error involved in the process of counting carbon-14 ions and therefore produces dates that have smaller standard errors than the conventional method.

Your just oh, 48,000 years off target with your claim that it is a failure

Your cracking me up...

R3fr said: "For evolution, which i'll say again for those who might have missed it, a piece of non-living matter cannot just go from non-living to living. And matter cannot just jump to be here, or slowly form to be here either. It defies all logic. Energy cannot just be here from nothing. Think of 'the beginning' when there was absolutely nothing (in evolution).. Can something spawn from nothing? No, it can't. We ALL know this as fact whether we admit it or not. No matter how large or small of a piece of matter or energy, it CANNOT spawn from nothing. This alone disproves evolution. "


No, wrong. Science has left that attitude behind a hundred years ago. Living things are made of non-living things. Energy can be stored in non-living, or even apparently non-energetic materials, like combinations of acids and metals to make a battery. The Sun is not alive, and it is the source of our energy, our life, nothing would live here without it. Particles spawn from apparently nothing in situations bordering on the impossible (nature abhors a vacuum).

As for life, Carbon is the basis for life on earth, a non-living material. Your DNA are chemicals, you are made of metals, water, non-living compounds. The vitamins you take in are minerals, acids, metals carried by other living things. You can be rendered down to find that you are made of 100% non-living material. A nickel's worth of zinc stands between you and insanity. Is a galvanized bucket alive?

Actually a great deal that isn't alive contributes to life, and living things are made of non-living material. You have taken the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy and wrongly twisted it to mean something that it doesn't. There is a lot in nature that forms spontaneously from diverse parts, both alive and not. An atheist would call it chance, a Creationist would call it design, but to act like it doesn't happen is blindness.

Sorry to be harsh, but I would stick to cut and paste.



[Message Edited]

P.S. what you are doing is simply making your own definition of 'energy' and 'life' that suits your argument. If you make up all the definitions, then no one can disprove the arguments you make out of them. If I have one problem with Watchtower literature, it is the knack they have of doing that. I respect, for instance, your right to believe that blood transfusions are wrong, but the 'scientific' material used to support it is dubious at best. Why make belief into science? Why do you need to make something spiritually true to you, physically true to everyone else; unless it is just to prove every one else wrong?

If either side of the argument should see anything about me in this discussion, it is that I *despise* people portraying belief as "Fact". If you want to believe in Creation, or the wrongness of some modern medicine, then you have my full support in doing so. Don't, though, try to twist science to validate your subjective beliefs.


[Message Edited]

For evolution, which i'll say again for those who might have missed it, a piece of non-living matter cannot just go from non-living to living. And matter cannot just jump to be here, or slowly form to be here either. It defies all logic. Energy cannot just be here from nothing. Think of 'the beginning' when there was absolutely nothing (in evolution).. Can something spawn from nothing? No, it can't. We ALL know this as fact whether we admit it or not. No matter how large or small of a piece of matter or energy, it CANNOT spawn from nothing. This alone disproves evolution.

Sorry, but that's a specious statement. When you say 'defies all logic', who's logic are you talking about? Where do you draw the line between living and nonliving? We've created amino acids from simple compounds (without using an existing lifeform to create it). And while an amino acid may not be categorizable as living in the strictest sense, it is certainly one of the components of a living system. Additionally, DNA is essentially a polymeric chain composed of a sequence of 4 different molecules (ACTG) in varying combinations. None of those component molecules, in and of themselves, can be strictly defined as living (even the DNA molecule itself is not technically alive, it encodes the information required to produce the compounds that eventually take on the obvious aspects of life, eg. us and plants and animals, etc.).

There is a functional theoretical mechanism for the evolution of species, even from the primordial ooze. Whether the details of that framework are correct or not is a valid subject of discussion, but the evidence clearly details a linear time to complexity relationship in the history of living things. There are varying theories about the proximate cause of abiogenesis, but there is nothing in our current scientific knowledge that abrogates the process in principle.

Your argument is a strawman. No evolutionary scientist is arguing that something came from nothing. All of the atomic and molecular chemical precursors existed and can be legitimately argued to form the foundation of the formation of life.

As mentioned before, I'm a believer, and I believe in creation, but in a creation that includes cosmology, evolution, physics, etc. There is *no* conflict in that position.

When you get right down to it, there really are only two ways we can look at the existing evidence from which we form our understanding of the universe (and life and evolution). Either the evidence is directly related to and / or caused by the actual process of evolution, or it was placed there in that fashion (presumably by God). In either case, we should interpret that evidence based on our knowledge and whatever position the evidence supports. As our knowledge grows (or we get more evidence or information), we will adjust our viewpoints and theories to account for that new knowledge.

Carbon dating isn't correct. Something that is 2,000 years + old (this is just a random number) releases such a small... ity-bity amount of carbon thats its extremely difficult to date it properly. What scientists say is just a guess, for the most part.

Radiocarbon dating, as it is properly called, is the process of determining the age of something that processed carbon at some point (living material for the most part) and detecting the ratio of carbon 14 (the isotope) to carbon 12 (normal) based on the ratio of the two in the atmosphere. The half-life of carbon 14 is 5730 years. When the organism (for example) dies (stops processing carbon), the ratio of C14 to C12 starts to decrease as C14 decays (it isn't a matter of releasing carbon). The decay is logarithmic (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc.). If the starting ratio is 1:5 (for example, then after 5730 years, the ratio will be 1:10. For ideal conditions, the practical upper limit of radiocarbon dating is about 50,000 years (about 9 half-life cycles of the decay process).

There are clearly limitations to radiocarbon dating. First is that the atmospheric ratio isn't constant over time. The ratio of C14 to C12 is based on the ratio in the atmosphere at the time the organism, etc., was actively processing carbon. Second, sample size is important. Smaller sample sizes are less accurate than multiple readings from a large sample size (including multiple sample sources from the same target area). Third, radiocarbon dating is sensitive to contamination from influxes of carbon containing substances, either between the time the source existed and now, or caused by handling. Fourth, being a logarithmic process, there are upper and lower limits to detection. You can't carbon date something that's only, say, 10 years old, as the margin of detection error is greater than the decay over a 10 year period. At the other end, once the C14 has decayed sufficiently, the amount left to detect is extremely small, and the margin of error issue creeps up again.

That said, radiocarbon dating is very good at characterizing the age within a reasonable margin of error for objects between about 300 to about 30,000 years. With a good sample size that's uncontaminated, there no rational reason for doubting the accuracy of the process.

IPlural

You beat me to it

BakerStreet

If either side of the argument should see anything about me in this discussion, it is that I *despise* people portraying belief as "Fact". If you want to believe in Creation, or the wrongness of some modern medicine, then you have my full support in doing so. Don't, though, try to twist science to validate your subjective beliefs.

Exactly right!

Is it a good thing, or bad, that my posts make you feel you're in church?

Bad. if I want to have someone quote bible verses at me i will go to church, not WC.

No offence of course.

Very true, and at the same time I do admit it is just as wrong for those on the side of evolution to just disregard Creation out of hand. Especially when based upon deeply ingrained emotional automatic responses for whatever reason one might retain them.

You know, I do apologize for some of my posts based in those same auto-responses, at times the human condition can end up being all consuming and using the Emotional Mind to design reality tends to lend confusion at best for the most part and almost always blatant ignorance of social grace ( for me at least ).

Seems the mechanics of Social Cognition and Automatic response comes into play when one least expects it

Kona I almost responded to his questioning you on that because it lent something other than presenting the verses as a means of considering information presented as possibility. As if you were being dared into some kind of abreaction reaction, or to put you in your place.

Of course, it might just be how I read the words as they lay on the screen without the ambient information of psychical presence.

I am glad I did not and I totally agree 100% with what you've stated.

And no I am not attempting or intend what I said above to disrespect Church, Faith, the Bible or his beliefs.

But do not agree with the means in the least if my perception is in fact correct.

r3fr: Perhaps (as Jafo put it earlier in this thread) God created evolution...

hmmmmm....

If we are going to talk about written books that where cast down for us to read from God as fact, it is hard to prove. I can believe all I want in God and the Bible, I nor anyone here can prove any statement in there is specicifally God's word.

Its called faith.



Strangely enough, most religious people will answer that statement I made above by quoting something from the Bible as fact instead of useing the Bible as a guide (as it is really intended I believe) to some physical evedence or worked out theory. Any book written well has references to others. I beleive the Bible (as well as some others) are written for faith not provability.


Does anyone know how many religions or faiths there are around the world who would feel just as strongly about thier bliefs and facts as written in their holy scripture?


(This is why I love my church. They don't try to ignore the fact that there are not other ways of looking at things and use the Bible as an example. They know there is a difference between faith and answers and beliefs)



As human beings, we should understand that there is no way we can understand the complexity of this universe created or otherwise. That includes the Bible (one example) and the multiple faith types that come from it. I think if you try to be more rational and open it is easier to see that a belief can be wrong and a fact can be mis-understood.


Many here have their opinion about creation or evolution and some have many sources to back their opinion up. Nevertheless it can be said from reading the posts so far that we all are pretty much working on other peoples work and trust that they did the work and research right. Not a belief but an assumption that the previous work was done correctly.


The belief starts when no one questions the 'facts'.




This thread has given me allot to think about. I really didn't think about evolution or creation working together until now.



Lets call it creat-U-lution

yeah, why couldn't God create evolution?


I think we are getting to stuck in the terms of these words. Evolution might be more than the term states. Creation might well be part of the effect.