No problem, this is the line I find fault with: I exert no effort in trying to make up for my sin or Adam's because I am completely incapable of it. You miss the subtle beauty of Christianity in that Christains recognize that they are unable to bridge the chasm between them and God and that it is only because God chose to bridge that connection that humans can again be in right relationship with their creator. We obviously don't subscribe to the same system of belief, but do you at least understand the difference between the way you stated it and the way I did?
As asked earlier, what do you think about the "Out of Africa" (OOA) hypothesis? /////////////////////////////////////// Cranial clues boost OOA theory http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2007071...70718183440;_ylt=AlSJ0uP2ZQI_PgbpYCLux8fPOrgF Wed Jul 18, 2:34 PM ET PARIS (AFP) - Twenty years after it was popularised, the "Out of Africa" theory, which posits that modern humans originally came from Africa before spreading out in a global conquest, has received an emphatic boost, scientists said on Wednesday. Rival theories about the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens, as anatomically modern man is called, say humans either came from a single point in Africa or among different populations in different parts around the world, who evolved independently from a forebear, Homo erectus. The "Out of Africa" scenario has been underpinned since 1987 by genetic studies based mainly on the rate of mutations in mitochondrial DNA, a cell material inherited from the maternal line of ancestry. The "multiple origins" school, meanwhile, points out that human skulls from around the world have clearly different characteristics, and argues that this proves our species evolved in slightly different forms more or less simultaneously. In a study released by the British journal Nature, University of Cambridge researchers combined both techniques. Analysis of genetic diversity among human populations is backed by evidence from 4,500 male skulls from around the world, demonstrating we all came from a single area in Africa, the authors say. They found that the farther a population is from Africa, the smaller the genetic diversity. This was the result of a "bottleneck," or interbreeding among a smaller gene pool that occurred when migrating populations were temporarily reduced by war, disease or some other catastrophe. The loss in genetic diversity was mirrored by a corresponding loss in diversity among skull characteristics. Applying a benchmark of characteristics, they found that the most varied skulls were from southeastern Africa -- and the diversity progressively declined the farther the skull was from Africa. "We have combined our genetic data with new measurements of a large sample of skulls to show definitively that modern humans originated from a single area in sub-Saharan Africa," said lead researcher Andrea Manica of the university's Department of Zoology. The team tested the "multiple origins" theory on these two tools, and found "this just did not work," said fellow researcher Francois Balloux. In 2000, Swedish research based on the molecular clock estimated that H. sapiens sapiens emerged about 121,500 to 221,500 years ago, and the migration out of Africa was about 52,000 years ago, give or take 27,500 years.
I do. I have always been a bit foggy on the concept of original sin to begin with. I figure it was just one method that was developed by who knows who to keep the flock in line. But the overall point which nobody seems to be willing to cop to other than you is the whole idea that everything was just magically created rather than evolutionarily developed over a long period of time. People would rather remain mute than admit that they believe in such magic which leads me to believe that their convictions aren't as deep as they pretend they are. No one here, other than you, will commit to such a belief but will rant endlessly about the faults of evolutionary science. Telling I'd say.
Some say Australopithecus is still with us. Closer than you think... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus
Mother nature do no such thing. Only mankind in stupidity of neglect of obvious weakness, or act of aggression can create disaster which wipe out population like dinosaurs. I agree it will happen - but only because people stupid.
Evolution is REAL people... God not required Hello, Come on people... Evolution is a force of nature that has been proven to exist in almost every scientific discipline. As noted previously all facets of the forces involved may not be fully understood but it still exists. Call it Theory or fact it all resolves back to the same thing.. it is an observable force in our undertanding of life. Evolution has been proven to be the guiding force behind life. Here is some misinformation that the Creationist side uses to argue against Evolution.... Take a look if you dare.. 1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law. Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty--above a mere hypothesis but below a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses." No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution--or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter--they are not expressing reservations about its truth. In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS defines a fact as "an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as 'true.'" The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time. Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling. All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain. 2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest. "Survival of the fittest" is a conversational way to describe natural selection, but a more technical description speaks of differential rates of survival and reproduction. That is, rather than labeling species as more or less fit, one can describe how many offspring they are likely to leave under given circumstances. Drop a fast-breeding pair of small-beaked finches and a slower-breeding pair of large-beaked finches onto an island full of food seeds. Within a few generations the fast breeders may control more of the food resources. Yet if large beaks more easily crush seeds, the advantage may tip to the slow breeders. In a pioneering study of finches on the Gal?pagos Islands, Peter R. Grant of Princeton University observed these kinds of population shifts in the wild. The key is that adaptive fitness can be defined without reference to survival: large beaks are better adapted for crushing seeds, irrespective of whether that trait has survival value under the circumstances. 3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created. This blanket dismissal of evolution ignores important distinctions that divide the field into at least two broad areas: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution looks at changes within species over time--changes that may be preludes to speciation, the origin of new species. Macroevolution studies how taxonomic groups above the level of species change. Its evidence draws frequently from the fossil record and DNA comparisons to reconstruct how various organisms may be related. These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has been upheld by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants and fruit flies) and in the field (as in Grant's studies of evolving beak shapes among Gal?pagos finches). Natural selection and other mechanisms--such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization--can drive profound changes in populations over time. The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not--and does not--find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly. Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed credit for creating life on earth (or even particular species), the purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has yet produced such evidence. It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor. 4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution. No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept. Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist of the University of Washington surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none. In the past two years, surveys done independently by Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University and Lawrence M. Krauss of Case Western Reserve University have been similarly fruitless. Creationists retort that a closed-minded scientific community rejects their evidence. Yet according to the editors of Nature, Science and other leading journals, few antievolution manuscripts are even submitted. Some antievolution authors have published papers in serious journals. Those papers, however, rarely attack evolution directly or advance creationist arguments; at best, they identify certain evolutionary problems as unsolved and difficult (which no one disputes). In short, creationists are not giving the scientific world good reason to take them seriously. 5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution. Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how speciation happens, the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral relationships of birds and dinosaurs, whether Neandertals were a species apart from modern humans, and much more. These disputes are like those found in all other branches of science. Acceptance of evolution as a factual occurrence and a guiding principle is nonetheless universal in biology. Unfortunately, dishonest creationists have shown a willingness to take scientists' comments out of context to exaggerate and distort the disagreements. Anyone acquainted with the works of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University knows that in addition to co-authoring the punctuated-equilibrium model, Gould was one of the most eloquent defenders and articulators of evolution. (Punctuated equilibrium explains patterns in the fossil record by suggesting that most evolutionary changes occur within geologically brief intervals--which may nonetheless amount to hundreds of generations.) Yet creationists delight in dissecting out phrases from Gould's voluminous prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution, and they present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species to materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs. When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that seems to question evolution, insist on seeing the statement in context. Almost invariably, the attack on evolution will prove illusory. 6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor. The deeper error is that this objection is tantamount to asking, "If children descended from adults, why are there still adults?" New species evolve by splintering off from established ones, when populations of organisms become isolated from the main branch of their family and acquire sufficient differences to remain forever distinct. The parent species may survive indefinitely thereafter, or it may become extinct.
7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth. The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. Astrochemical analyses hint that quantities of these compounds might have originated in space and fallen to earth in comets, a scenario that may solve the problem of how those constituents arose under the conditions that prevailed when our planet was young. Creationists sometimes try to invalidate all of evolution by pointing to science's current inability to explain the origin of life. But even if life on earth turned out to have a nonevolutionary origin (for instance, if aliens introduced the first cells billions of years ago), evolution since then would be robustly confirmed by countless microevolutionary and macroevolutionary studies. 8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance. Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving "desirable" (adaptive) features and eliminating "undesirable" (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days. 9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa. This argument derives from a misunderstanding of the Second Law. If it were valid, mineral crystals and snowflakes would also be impossible, because they, too, are complex structures that form spontaneously from disordered parts. The Second Law actually states that the total entropy of a closed system (one that no energy or matter leaves or enters) cannot decrease. Entropy is a physical concept often casually described as disorder, but it differs significantly from the conversational use of the word. More important, however, the Second Law permits parts of a system to decrease in entropy as long as other parts experience an offsetting increase. Thus, our planet as a whole can grow more complex because the sun pours heat and light onto it, and the greater entropy associated with the sun's nuclear fusion more than rebalances the scales. Simple organisms can fuel their rise toward complexity by consuming other forms of life and nonliving materials. 10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features. On the contrary, biology has catalogued many traits produced by point mutations (changes at precise positions in an organism's DNA)--bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example. Mutations that arise in the homeobox (Hox) family of development-regulating genes in animals can also have complex effects. Hox genes direct where legs, wings, antennae and body segments should grow. In fruit flies, for instance, the mutation called Antennapedia causes legs to sprout where antennae should grow. These abnormal limbs are not functional, but their existence demonstrates that genetic mistakes can produce complex structures, which natural selection can then test for possible uses. Moreover, molecular biology has discovered mechanisms for genetic change that go beyond point mutations, and these expand the ways in which new traits can appear. Functional modules within genes can be spliced together in novel ways. Whole genes can be accidentally duplicated in an organism's DNA, and the duplicates are free to mutate into genes for new, complex features. Comparisons of the DNA from a wide variety of organisms indicate that this is how the globin family of blood proteins evolved over millions of years. 11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life. Evolutionary biologists have written extensively about how natural selection could produce new species. For instance, in the model called allopatry, developed by Ernst Mayr of Harvard University, if a population of organisms were isolated from the rest of its species by geographical boundaries, it might be subjected to different selective pressures. Changes would accumulate in the isolated population. If those changes became so significant that the splinter group could not or routinely would not breed with the original stock, then the splinter group would be reproductively isolated and on its way toward becoming a new species. Natural selection is the best studied of the evolutionary mechanisms, but biologists are open to other possibilities as well. Biologists are constantly assessing the potential of unusual genetic mechanisms for causing speciation or for producing complex features in organisms. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and others have persuasively argued that some cellular organelles, such as the energy-generating mitochondria, evolved through the symbiotic merger of ancient organisms. Thus, science welcomes the possibility of evolution resulting from forces beyond natural selection. Yet those forces must be natural; they cannot be attributed to the actions of mysterious creative intelligences whose existence, in scientific terms, is unproved. 12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve. Speciation is probably fairly rare and in many cases might take centuries. Furthermore, recognizing a new species during a formative stage can be difficult, because biologists sometimes disagree about how best to define a species. The most widely used definition, Mayr's Biological Species Concept, recognizes a species as a distinct community of reproductively isolated populations--sets of organisms that normally do not or cannot breed outside their community. In practice, this standard can be difficult to apply to organisms isolated by distance or terrain or to plants (and, of course, fossils do not breed). Biologists therefore usually use organisms' physical and behavioral traits as clues to their species membership. Nevertheless, the scientific literature does contain reports of apparent speciation events in plants, insects and worms. In most of these experiments, researchers subjected organisms to various types of selection--for anatomical differences, mating behaviors, habitat preferences and other traits--and found that they had created populations of organisms that did not breed with outsiders. For example, William R. Rice of the University of New Mexico and George W. Salt of the University of California at Davis demonstrated that if they sorted a group of fruit flies by their preference for certain environments and bred those flies separately over 35 generations, the resulting flies would refuse to breed with those from a very different environment.
13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils--creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance. Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups. One of the most famous fossils of all time is Archaeopteryx, which combines feathers and skeletal structures peculiar to birds with features of dinosaurs. A flock's worth of other feathered fossil species, some more avian and some less, has also been found. A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus. Whales had four-legged ancestors that walked on land, and creatures known as Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus helped to make that transition [see "The Mammals That Conquered the Seas," by Kate Wong; Scientific American, May]. Fossil seashells trace the evolution of various mollusks through millions of years. Perhaps 20 or more hominids (not all of them our ancestors) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans. Creationists, though, dismiss these fossil studies. They argue that Archaeopteryx is not a missing link between reptiles and birds--it is just an extinct bird with reptilian features. They want evolutionists to produce a weird, chimeric monster that cannot be classified as belonging to any known group. Even if a creationist does accept a fossil as transitional between two species, he or she may then insist on seeing other fossils intermediate between it and the first two. These frustrating requests can proceed ad infinitum and place an unreasonable burden on the always incomplete fossil record. Nevertheless, evolutionists can cite further supportive evidence from molecular biology. All organisms share most of the same genes, but as evolution predicts, the structures of these genes and their products diverge among species, in keeping with their evolutionary relationships. Geneticists speak of the "molecular clock" that records the passage of time. These molecular data also show how various organisms are transitional within evolution. 14. Living things have fantastically intricate features--at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels--that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution. This "argument from design" is the backbone of most recent attacks on evolution, but it is also one of the oldest. In 1802 theologian William Paley wrote that if one finds a pocket watch in a field, the most reasonable conclusion is that someone dropped it, not that natural forces created it there. By analogy, Paley argued, the complex structures of living things must be the handiwork of direct, divine invention. Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species as an answer to Paley: he explained how natural forces of selection, acting on inherited features, could gradually shape the evolution of ornate organic structures. Generations of creationists have tried to counter Darwin by citing the example of the eye as a structure that could not have evolved. The eye's ability to provide vision depends on the perfect arrangement of its parts, these critics say. Natural selection could thus never favor the transitional forms needed during the eye's evolution--what good is half an eye? Anticipating this criticism, Darwin suggested that even "incomplete" eyes might confer benefits (such as helping creatures orient toward light) and thereby survive for further evolutionary refinement. Biology has vindicated Darwin: researchers have identified primitive eyes and light-sensing organs throughout the animal kingdom and have even tracked the evolutionary history of eyes through comparative genetics. (It now appears that in various families of organisms, eyes have evolved independently.) Today's intelligent-design advocates are more sophisticated than their predecessors, but their arguments and goals are not fundamentally different. They criticize evolution by trying to demonstrate that it could not account for life as we know it and then insist that the only tenable alternative is that life was designed by an unidentified intelligence. 15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution. "Irreducible complexity" is the battle cry of Michael J. Behe of Lehigh University, author of Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. As a household example of irreducible complexity, Behe chooses the mousetrap--a machine that could not function if any of its pieces were missing and whose pieces have no value except as parts of the whole. What is true of the mousetrap, he says, is even truer of the bacterial flagellum, a whiplike cellular organelle used for propulsion that operates like an outboard motor. The proteins that make up a flagellum are uncannily arranged into motor components, a universal joint and other structures like those that a human engineer might specify. The possibility that this intricate array could have arisen through evolutionary modification is virtually nil, Behe argues, and that bespeaks intelligent design. He makes similar points about the blood's clotting mechanism and other molecular systems. Yet evolutionary biologists have answers to these objections. First, there exist flagellae with forms simpler than the one that Behe cites, so it is not necessary for all those components to be present for a flagellum to work. The sophisticated components of this flagellum all have precedents elsewhere in nature, as described by Kenneth R. Miller of Brown University and others. In fact, the entire flagellum assembly is extremely similar to an organelle that Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium, uses to inject toxins into cells. The key is that the flagellum's component structures, which Behe suggests have no value apart from their role in propulsion, can serve multiple functions that would have helped favor their evolution. The final evolution of the flagellum might then have involved only the novel recombination of sophisticated parts that initially evolved for other purposes. Similarly, the blood-clotting system seems to involve the modification and elaboration of proteins that were originally used in digestion, according to studies by Russell F. Doolittle of the University of California at San Diego. So some of the complexity that Behe calls proof of intelligent design is not irreducible at all. Complexity of a different kind--"specified complexity"--is the cornerstone of the intelligent-design arguments of William A. Dembski of Baylor University in his books The Design Inference and No Free Lunch. Essentially his argument is that living things are complex in a way that undirected, random processes could never produce. The only logical conclusion, Dembski asserts, in an echo of Paley 200 years ago, is that some superhuman intelligence created and shaped life. Dembski's argument contains several holes. It is wrong to insinuate that the field of explanations consists only of random processes or designing intelligences. Researchers into nonlinear systems and cellular automata at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere have demonstrated that simple, undirected processes can yield extraordinarily complex patterns. Some of the complexity seen in organisms may therefore emerge through natural phenomena that we as yet barely understand. But that is far different from saying that the complexity could not have arisen naturally. "Creation science" is a contradiction in terms. A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism--it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms. Thus, physics describes the atomic nucleus with specific concepts governing matter and energy, and it tests those descriptions experimentally. Physicists introduce new particles, such as quarks, to flesh out their theories only when data show that the previous descriptions cannot adequately explain observed phenomena. The new particles do not have arbitrary properties, moreover--their definitions are tightly constrained, because the new particles must fit within the existing framework of physics. In contrast, intelligent-design theorists invoke shadowy entities that conveniently have whatever unconstrained abilities are needed to solve the mystery at hand. Rather than expanding scientific inquiry, such answers shut it down. (How does one disprove the existence of omnipotent intelligences?) Intelligent design offers few answers. For instance, when and how did a designing intelligence intervene in life's history? By creating the first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species designed, or just a few early ones? Proponents of intelligent-design theory frequently decline to be pinned down on these points. They do not even make real attempts to reconcile their disparate ideas about intelligent design. Instead they pursue argument by exclusion--that is, they belittle evolutionary explanations as far-fetched or incomplete and then imply that only design-based alternatives remain. Logically, this is misleading: even if one naturalistic explanation is flawed, it does not mean that all are. Moreover, it does not make one intelligent-design theory more reasonable than another. Listeners are essentially left to fill in the blanks for themselves, and some will undoubtedly do so by substituting their religious beliefs for scientific ideas. Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable. Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the effort.
Wrong--TheCaveTroll isn't the only one here that believes that way. This topic has been posted before--and ya'll are like stone walls....you say that you have an open mind and we don't---yet you won't listen, reserach, or take the time to really look into the holes that are in evolution.
Evolution has been proved so many times that it is strange that so many people disbelieve in it but believe in light theory. Actually light theory is less proven than evolution. As to the original question if we as the human species have achieved our highest potential, the answer is yes because we are destroying the planet. I say this because of over population of our species. Anybody that studies biology knows that with a sufficent food source, vermin will over populate until there is a crash in the population. The lemming is a perfect example.
It has nothing to do with ironing out details. It will always remain a theory like Gravitational Theory, Planks Theory and the Theory of relativity. Ruben
Yeah - Because God likes to play mind games despite the repeated statements in Devorim and Shimos that this is exactly contrary to the nature of the real God. Sometimes I wonder if people actually read the holy books in their original let alone read theories on Biological Sciences. Ruben
I dont agree. Thats the thing about reality and facts as compared to matters of the divine. One can say god created the earth and man and there is no evolution but this can never be proven until god is proven. Nothing about god has ever been proven and I have a feeling it never will. God remains a belief and is unproven suve to certain people subjectively...we must turn off logic as the concept of god goes against all logic and what we know of reality so we must believe it without proof. It is what we make it...it has nothing to do with science and should never be mixed or used as a substitute for scientific study, research, etc... To explain the existence of man through god is using an unproven concept to explain an unknown, it is folly. One must first pove God exists objectively before it could ever be allowed into any equation or be the answer to anything concerning the physical. FACT and REALITY exist outside our minds and separate from us. It is as it is, not how we make it. Thus people can SEE evidence of it, they can search for it, and there is a chance that enough real fossil evidence will be discovered to fill in all the pieces. once enough evidence is unearth that only the people who put their hands over their ears and go 'LALALALALA' are holding out...believers in god, as always, will still be able to say that god started evolution, thus they never have to let go of god. Thats the great thing about god, and in fact it is the reason why we created god...to fill in the blanks that we either do not know or cannot know...and it is as we make it. it may remain a scientific theory...but the main point is that one must know that scientific theory doesnt mean its not a fact that something exists. There are many things that we know exist but remain a theory as we are not sure beyond doubt of exactly how it happens, but know for a fact it happened or happens... If you place God in the world of science it would not be a scientific theory but simply a theory...We not only do not know the nature of god, there is no evidence that such a thing exists.
It's called FAITH my friend and the world is a whole lot better place when you have a dose of it!! Rather than try to argue against it or even bash it- TRY IT- it sounds like you could benefit from it!! As for proof of God's existence, I see it every time I look at my 2 beautiful daughters or we go camping, etc...I can go on & on.
That is my point, you have to have faith, you have to believe. I am not bashing it, if you have it thats great...if you are able to simply believe and take something like god on faith thats fine...but to say such things as one must have faith is to accept that you arent going to get proof... Most things, they either exist or they dont and my belief has no bearing on that, I dont have to believe in it or have faith because it exists outside of me whether I believe or not. I dont have to have faith in a chair or my dog because they exist in the physical world and in most cases such things can be detected in some way. I dont have to believe, it just is and that can be confirmed. The proof you give is good only for you, it is completely subjective. When I see my daughter, whom I love dearly, I see a little physical being that came about through two humans procreating (as all creatures do). I dont see god but a fragile little human being...I have always been told I WONT see proof of god, I have to have faith. That to me is paramount to someone saying 'take our word for it' and that simply wont do. I have no problem with people who have faith in an invisible all knowing, all powerful being that created everything...I just dont want them teaching such personal beliefs in science classes is all as it isnt science nor is any one personal belief universal. It would be like you, a Christian I assume, sending your child to school and them teaching her that Islam is the one true path to heaven. You wouldnt like it because it isnt what you believe and isnt what you want your daughter to believe. So its best to keep such personal beliefs out of a classroom save maybe to teach a class on world religions and teach them about all religions in the world and through time. There is Church, Temple, Mosque, etc...for teaching about god.
Then you would have those of us who believe in God & creationism subject to only YOUR beliefs being taught in the classroom? Every point you made in your last post only reinforces the concept of FAITH. Faith can't be measured against the physical, mental or academic standards you refer to- you have to decide for yourself whether or not to 'take our word for it' (your words) and believe!! I always make the analogy that having faith is the epitomy of optimism whereas the lack of faith is the epitomy of pessimism. Personally, we have chosen to educate our children in Catholic school where faith can be taught & celebrated rather than be subjected to attack.
well I wouldnt say I want to subject your children to my beliefs as much as simply not teach matters of faith to anyone and leaving that to the parent. Your beliefs shouldnt be attacked, it is your right to believe whatever you like and you shouldnt be attacked for it, I assume it all matter what you define as an 'attack', I am sure we wouldnt agree on that either. I dont think I am a pessimist at all, but I certainly am not just going to believe what I am told, especially when it is something so fantastic as this. If one removes oneself from the fact that we have always been taught it, and told to accept it on faith, and so many people have done so...such ideas as invisible, omnipotent beings, rising from the dead, miracles, saints, etc...it all seems like a fantasy story. Any other subject rather than god and belief in such things might get you put away or a book and movie deal. If I said I have an invisible friend, he knows everything and has super powers...you wouldnt believe me....get enough people to agree with me and I have a religion. I think you did the right thing sending your child to a school where people voluntarily go to learn matters of faith like a faith based school. Its why they are there and you dont have to force it one others. I was also catholic at one time. We are going to raise our child without church and without teaching her about god. She will learn about it. If and when she asks about it I will tell her about all the gods from beginning to end...a history of all religions. I will then tell her that it is her choice as you whether she is going to believe something like god or not and I will not tell her my own ideas about god. I will not keep her from it if she chooses to believe...I just wont indoctrinate her into the concept of god at a young impressionable age where it is so easy to make the child believe in things people otherwise would discard as unbelievable. You can teach a kid to believe anything, ghosts, Santa, the Easter Bunny, Superman, etc...
