Evolution

Some believe that Faith is belief in, devotion to, or trust in somebody or something, especially without logical proof. Is that something you would agree with and believe is consistent with what the Bible says about Faith?

 

Not exactly. You use the term "logical proof", an of course we don't have that, but we do have evidence. As I said in my previous post, pistis implies evidence, and the apostles rose to the challenge (Acts 17;31; Acts2:22-36). My concept of faith is also influenced by David De Silva's historical understanding of faith conveyed in Honor, Patronage, Kinship, and Purity: Unlocking the New Testament Culture, dealing with the cultural context of the first century Mediterranean world. He sees faith as not just a belief or feeling, but a pledge of trust or commitment of clients to their patron, Jesus Christ. William Cantwell Smith, in Faith and Belief, makes the interesting observation that until the seventeenth century, belief, at least in English, meant to give oneself, to commit. And I am also influenced by Luther's concept of faith as a "joyful bet". Putting it together, the Bible is not requiring blind faith. My faith is consistent with the available evidence, and based on what I consider to be substantial evidence (not certainty;otherwise it wouldn't be faith; not even courtroom proof). It is also a pledge of trust or commitment to take a chance in the absence of conclusive proof. I emphatically reject the notion all too common among fundamentalists that faith requires believing in things that are hard to believe, by confusing metaphor with fact. Marcus Borg notes the confusion between two concepts of faith: faith as assensus, giving assent to certain beliefs ( I believe in talking snakes, I believe Jonah was swallowed by a whale, etc.) and faith as fidelitas, faithfulness to a relationship with God and Jesus Christ. Faith is a fiduciary relationship based on trust. It doesn't require us to defend slavery, stoning people, sexism, mauling youths by bears, homophobia, six day creations, quickie circumcisions with flint knives, etc.

 

"logical proof" is not mine but part of the dictionary definition I used in asking you the question.

Although I think that there is what is called "Blind Faith", I don't believe that it has any part in Christianity nor do I believe the Bible calls for it.

And although you may "emphatically reject the notion all too common among fundamentalists that faith requires believing in things that are hard to believe, by confusing metaphor with fact".

I believe that the Bible says that there are some things about Christianity that are going to be hard to understand and yet we need to believe them, so I don't quickly reject what the Bible says just because on the surface it appears hard to believe.

 

Evolution is a proven scientific fact. Evolution within a species, that is.

There is no proof that any species has become another species. Not just man from monkey. ANY SPECIES.

So, as far as the origin of life paradigm, no. Evolution does not account for the sudden and disparate appearance of individual species on the earth.

If you would like to read an essay on the current state of science on this subject you can read the intro and first chapter of a book I'm working on regarding these same issues.--->CLICK HERE TO READ THE BLOG

You can skip the intro if you like cause the piece is quite long. Just scroll down to the first chapter. If you're interested in this sort of thing. It's all there.

After reading this, you'll understand why the two things (evolution and the beginning of life paradigm) are similar in function but are completely separate in definition. They are not the same thing. Evolution defines the natural progression of a species through time. Not it's origins.

Plus, after reading this, a person will actually know what they're talking about when this subject is breached.


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MATTER OVER ANTIMATTER
We find beauty in symmetry, but without a key piece of asymmetry, we wouldn't be around to appreciate the finer things. In the realm of particle collisions and quantum processes, antimatter is produced as often as ordinary matter. In fact, the big bang should have produced equal amounts of both—not a good thing, because each piece of antimatter would destroy an equal amount of matter. The big bang should thus have created universe of only light and energy, free of any solids, liquids or gases.

It's possible that the big bang did indeed create enough antimatter to create anti-suns, anti-planets, anti-galaxies and the like, and that they exist somewhere in separate pockets of the universe. But decades of observations of deep space make that possibility seem unlikely.

So, some sort of asymmetry occurred that skewed the universe's evolution toward matter. It would not have taken much—just one extra matter particle for every billion particle-antiparticle pairs. Researchers have discovered an asymmetry between the behavior of matter and of antimatter, called charge–parity violation, which could have skewed things to our side of the material world. But for this subtle bias to translate into an excess of matter, the primordial universe would have had to go through a wrenching period of imbalanced conditions, and so far no one knows how that might have happened.

 

SEX
Or put another way, why do males exist? Were it not for the maleness program set off by that scrub of a chromosome called Y (it contains a few dozen genes, compared with the X chromosome's 2,000 to 3,000), all human embryos would proceed down a default developmental path and become female.

The earliest life reproduced asexually, but at least one billion years ago, sex emerged. Today, it would be hard to find a multicellular organism that does not reproduce sexually (although some can reproduce both ways, like the Komodo dragon and its parthenogenic ability). But why sex evolved and persists is not entirely clear. All things being equal, a group of clonal reproducers should proliferate faster than competing sex mavens and drive them extinct. After all, asexuals don't have to spend time and precious energy looking for mates and thinking up better witticisms than, "Come here often?"

Thankfully for sexual creatures, all things are not equal—and considering how wildly successful it is, sex must be highly adaptive. Certainly, sex efficiently mixes the gene pool, but just how that mixing improves evolutionary fitness is not entirely clear. Perhaps it weeds out or masks mutations, most of which are deleterious, better than cloning does. Or maybe sex equips organisms with defensive genes to better fend off parasites and the diseases they bring.

 

LANGUAGE
At some point after chimpanzees and humans diverged from a common ancestor six million years ago, we developed the capacity to talk—and to gossip, argue, complain and pontificate. But because soft tissue like the vocal cords, larynx, tongue, uvula and brain are not preserved in the fossil record, we don't know when our ancestors evolved the physical capacity to make speech or how long it took to develop.

Other animals can communicate—the alarm calls of prairie dogs to warn of a nearby predator, say, or the meowing of a hungry cat to tell its owner to put food down. But they lack the complexity and grammar of language. And how babies develop the capacity has been thoroughly debated without clear resolution. Maybe humans have an inborn "universal grammar," as Noam Chomsky asserts, or maybe it emerges as part of the general processing of our big brains and the surrounding culture.

In her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Languages (Viking 2007), Christine Kenneally asked several key researchers if a boatload of babies landed on a desert island, would they develop language? Almost all agreed that they would develop some form of communication, but they disagreed if a fully formed, "normal" language would emerge.

 

August 24, 2009

That's No Vestigial Organ, That's My Appendix
A study in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology finds that many more animals have appendixes than was thought, and that the appendix is not merely a remnant of a digestive organ called the cecum. All of which means that the appendix might not be so useless. Steve Mirsky reports:

Two years ago, Duke University Medical Center researchers said that the supposedly useless appendix is actually where good gut bacteria safely hide out during some unpleasant intestinal conditions.

Now the research team has looked at the appendix over evolutionary history. They found that animals have had appendixes for about 80 million years. And the organ has evolved separately at least twice, once among the weird Australian marsupials and another time in the regular old mammal lineage that we belong to.

Darwin thought that only a few animals have an appendix and that the human version was what was left of a digestive organ called the cecum. But the new study found that 70 percent of rodent and primate groups have species with an appendix. And some living animals have a cecum and an appendix. If Darwin had known about species that had both organs, he probably would have revised his views of the appendix, the researchers note.

Ironically, it’s natural selection that keeps the human appendix from shrinking away completely. Because smaller ones are more likely to become infected. And keep your genes out of the pool.

—Steve Mirsky

 

Why do people who have there appendix removed not die from the lack of "good bacteria?"

You do realize what the original purpose was to modern day humans and is now still to other animals correct?

 

Ask the the guy who wrote the article, I just posted what I found.

 

Maybe you shouldn't take such credulous non sense as fact, oh wait I forgot who I speaking with.

 

I thought you were the one who thought scientists knew what they talking about.

 

Everyone is a scientist, I never said I believed in everything every, or even one scientist says or has said.

Out with the old if it no longer fits in with the new kinda thing.

 

No, a theory never changes is wayyyy better than one that is updated whenever new information becomes available. Science is and should be a pissing contest about who can get it "right first time", rather than an ongoing process to seek truth.

This is what sucks: science cannot be taught if no theory is taught in the absence of a better one. Evolution may not be 100% proven, or even 10% proven, but it's wrong for anyone to imply that this fact alone validates their desire to have their own batshit version of reality treated as "just as unproven" and thus taught as if it were scientific theory. Relative proof might be a bit of an oxymoron. But it's vital, because in its absence, someone can argue that, unless you SAW something not happening, it's as likely to have happened as anything else. Then we end up in a situation where Intelligent Design (a theory revived from the Dark Ages for some god unknown reason) is as likely and as legitimately teachable as the existence of The Battle Of Hastings.

 

People have had accidents where half their brain is destroyed and did not die, does that mean that half the brain is a Vestigial Organ? I think most will agree, that even though people can live without arms or legs or even many different organs, that doesn't mean that those things are Vestigial and have no purpose and are not really needed.

 

I think you know you're talking crap at this point. The only "function" that the appendix serves is to maybe at some point get peritonitis and kill you. You do understand how that makes it different from a limb that you can do without, right?

(EDIT: The study you've cited very much does not support any notion of a designer, by the way. So simply meekly referring back to something that you posted doesn't count as an explanation. Just thought I'd nip that one in the bud.)

OK, I've got another one for you: if Man is designed to perfection, how come my g-spot is up my ass and my vomit trigger is slightly further down my throat than I can comfortably reach?

 

Once again your sarcasm falls short. It would only mean something if what the Bible says is a theory, which it's not. It was not authored by man who does not know what he's talking about but by God who does know and thus it does not need to be changed with every wind of change in man's imperfect thinking.

 

1) I know that's what you believe (or, if you feel like being pedantic, I know that that is what you have said on numerous occasions). You know from experience that I am not persuaded by it.

2) My post didn't mention the Bible, or any other holy text.

3) You (or someone very much like you) have cited that constant changes and amendments to the theory of evolution (but no other theory, for some reason) as evidence to support a slur on its validity. My post was simply to point out that that argument does not follow, and that updating a theory as new evidence emerges makes it STRONGER, not weaker.

4) If the Bible claims to be absolute, then it is claiming to be a theorem, not a theory, and as such is subject to far greater burdens of proof than the theory of evolution, which only claims to be (strongly) evidenced. So far I've seen nothing even approaching objective proof of the creation. There are very few theorems primarily because so little can be proved absolutely, but if you have something more persuasive than "the Bible says the Bible is true so it is", "the Bible is popular so cmon, how much proof do you want?" or something to the tune of "the fact that we are here is proof that a very specific account of the creation is true", I'd love to see it, although really I think you should be presenting it to New Scientist first as someone might try to rip you off.

5) Your description of man's thinking as "imperfect" is unsupportable. Firstly, you lack a point of reference to compare it to in order to make that statement, and secondly, since perfection implies a function that something is perfect for, you would have to show some evidence that you know what thinking is for, which you have yet to do.

 

Once again it seems you've jumped into a discussion with out getting your facts straight. The study I cite addressed the fact the appendix has a "function" other then the one you mention. Just because other parts of the body can also develop infections that can kill you and thus are removed does not mean that is their only "function".

I never said that it supported the notion of a designer. It merely states that the idea of it being a vestigial organ is not true. which is the point I was making.

Get a life.

 

So?

That's true but the fact that you continually make this same argument against the Bible would allow one to think this is just another example.

Updating the theory that the Earth is flat does not make that theory, "STRONGER, not weaker".

The Bible is not a "theorem" and thus does not need to be proven. The Bible is merely a statement of fact for our benefit and we can choose to believe it or not.

First, I would say God's thinking is a good point of reference and second the Bible indicates what thinking is for.