Quote:
Originally Posted by dalmations202
And yet -- science (evolution) says that man came from a premordial soup, or ape, or frog, or or or........ kiss a frog and he becomes a prince - just add time.
And the laws of thermodynamics will not allow for the earth to be over a few thousand years old either.
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Sorry to take you on 2-on-1. It must feel a little overwhelming. STill, I feel like I need to respond to obvious misconceptions you have.
A) You know that that is not what evolution is saying, right? That a frog can *poof* become a man? That would be as ridiculous as a human being literally being created out of thin air from the genetic material of another human being and that clone being able to provide viable offspring without enormous genetic anomalies and birth defects.
1) There is nothing random about evolution at all, other than the observable mutations that occur. We can see genes change before our eyes with bacteria and viruses and can trace back our own genes by following distribution of particular markers. micro-evolution and macro-evolution are one in the same-- one just takes more generations. Thousands of macro-evolutions have happened in your lifetime-- they just happen with creatures that have shorter lifespans (bacteria, etc.) The swine flu is an example of a macro evolution that came about in your lifetime.
2) There is massive evidence of macro evolution. There are literally tens of millions of fossils in museums-- some on display and there are millions of examples in the Smithsonian alone that are sitting in boxes because there literally aren't enough scientists to work on them. In fact, man of the dinosaur "discoveries" of the last decade haven't been from new finds but scientists digging into archived fossil material. Geneticist can trace macro evolutions as well. I think the problem that people have with macro evolution is simply the limits of words rather than the limits of science. Just because we call one thing a monkey and another thing a man doesn't mean there aren't gradations or that the gradations have changed over millions of years. If you saw one example of human from every generation from the last 400,000 years, you'd be hard pressed to really find one example and say "that's a human" and to the previous one-- "that is not a human." That is the nature of evolution-- gradation.
3) There are very explicit traits that Creationist "science" cannot account for. Macro evolution is not something of the past. It exists in your very body. The reptile bones in your skull. Your vestigial tail. Ear muscles that function in many species but are rarely connected in humans. Plica Semilunaris. bone structures shared by everything from bats to whales that weaken tensile bone strength. Cartilage "armor" in humans that leads to thousands of choking deaths. Many of the vestigial elements of our anatomy are harmless, but some hurt our survival. So why would God have given us such things in common with other animals that have absolutely no purpose or actually hurt our survivability? Evolutionary dead-ends don't often disappear-- they just hide in successful species like humans. An evolutionary dead-end is a more likely argument in my mind than "God created us perfect but left us with artifacts of other creatures that do nothing or actually hurt our survivability"
Second, your proposition that the laws of thermodynamics prove a young-earth conception of the Earth is ludicrous and in fact, support the idea of an older Earth instead. Most of the arguments that Creationists use, in fact, mistake the laws completely.
1) The Earth is not a closed system.
2) Entropy is not the same as disorder.
3) even in a closed system, there will always be pockets of lower entropy exist.
The root of the problem is that Creationist "science" is completely anti-scientific. It starts with an objective to prove (the Biblical account) and then moves back from that, instead of starting with nothing and looking for evidence that is verifiable. When something doesn't work-- it is replaced with something that better describes how things work. It spends most of it's time trying to attack science-- and if the arguments are sound, then science answers them. If, however, the science is ludicrous-- like the thermodynamics argument, they don't need to be answered. The other part of creationist science is coming up with a way of piecing together bits of data to create a theory that picks and chooses from the bible and from modern science in a way that carefully protects elements that religious people find key-- like the Earth being at the center of the universe and the physical plausbility of a boat that can hold 2 of every one of the 8.7 million species and a flood that can literally create water from nowhere because the amount of water required to flood the "Earth" would be considerably more than every molecule of water that ever was on this planet.
The fact is, all the young-Earth arguments and arguments against have had have been proven bogus by logic or empirical evidence. There are many gaps in science-- like how life started in the first place, exactly how old the Earth is, and how the universe was created, but evolution and the age of the universe has withstood more than one hundred years of scrutiny and never failed. It's been revised but never failed.
So, I ask you this. Which of the following do you believe:
1) There once was a snake that could talk
2) A human being was cloned from the rib of the only human on Earth and the first man and the clone were able to populate the whole planet without the genetic problems of inbreeding?
3) Many people lived for 1,000 years.
4) There was a boat that housed 17.4 million creatures
5) Humans and dinosaurs shared the Earth
6) There was a flood on Earth that was made up of 2-4 times the amount of water that ever existed on this planet
7) There was a flood that left no fossil or sedimentary record
8) Humans are created perfect in God's eyes
9) The complexity of the Grand Canyon was created by flood waters, even though receding water with that power would simply have created a single, washed out chasm and not the intricate topography of the actual wonder.
10) a man lived inside a whale and came out OK.
11) The chemistry of H20 spontaneously changed to contain carbohydrates and alcohols
So either you believe that basic laws of science like gravity always take effect or you believe that there are exceptions-- that you could fall up, that a snake (without the physical manifestations or intellect to talk) can spontaneously talk. Chemistry can spontaneously be changed. Biological limitations on lifespan can be changed so modern humans average 80-some but biblical characters lived 910 on average and many children die needlessly in the first 20 years. You don't live as if all the laws of nature could be changed at any time, I assume. You depend on gravity and light and chemistry. No one tests gravity before walking, sips their water to make sure it hasn't turned into cyanide. No one lives with the idea that they may be 910-years-old. Sane people don't talk with snakes with the idea that the physiology of the snake may suddenly be altered to allow it the faculties of language and it's anatomy changed to allow it to make human phonemes.