Oh you guys are sucking me back iiiiinnnnnnnn. I can't ignore this. >_<

1. I was the one who stated "I'm sure if I sat down today and wrote a paper writing a Bible would require inspiration from God and I do not claim to have that on how life on Earth began using today's scientific theories, some scientist a few thousand years from now with more advanced knowledge would read it and laugh his head off at my ignorance, just as some people laugh about the ignorance of the people who wrote the Bible." My point here was that is it easy for us to point out scientific flaws in the Bible because our scientific understanding is more advanced than it was then. MK, it is possible to write a perfectly clear non-ambiguous paper that contains scientific facts that is later found to be incorrect.

2. A circle is flat, a sphere is not. If Isaiah mentions a globe or sphere anywhere, then the point is true. But if all he says is "circle", then he very well may have still thought the Earth was flat. Your other points on the insight of Bible authors are well-taken. As I stated in #1, I did not mean to say that they were stupid or ignorant about absolutely everything.

3. Everyone keeps using analogies with inanimate objects. Its called "biology" for a reason--its about living things. Evolution occurs through the transmission of genetic information, not electricity. Now if your laptop has some DNA in it & you manage to have a baby with your laptop, then we can talk some more about computers as common ancestors of humans. ;)

4. Let's review the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium from high school biology class. One of the requirements of evolution is that natural selection occurs. Natural selection barely operates on modern humans. Think about it--people with mental retardation, premature babies who need life support to live--would not survive if we out living the tough life hunting & gathering. Science and modern society allows our species to escape the limitations of natural selection. Also, natural selection does not occur if there is immigration or emigration out of a population.

5. For the last time--evolution does not say life arose from chemicals or particles or whatever. Evolution does not say where life arose from, period. That's a whole other area of biology (or chemistry) altogether. Evolution proposes there was a living organism (where it came from is unknown, and if you think it came from God then that's not evolution's business) and that living thing reproduced and its descendants became different over the generations, until eventually some were no longer the same species as their ancestor.

If you fully understand evolution and still choose not to believe it, then fine. However, time and time again I see that people do not properly understand it, hence I feel the need to speak out as above. I personally believe it is possible to believe in both evolution & God, although it requires a non-literal interpretation of the Bible to do so. For all those who have a literal interpretation or don't believe in evolution--fine, but please don't make incorrect statements about evolution because of it.

Ciscokid--I wasn't replying to just you, but also MK (who misquoted & misunderstood me on the scientific paper thing) and to FMR2008. Not all my points were directed towards you, although several were.

Even if the Bible was inspired by God (which we both seem to believe), that doesn't mean the authors wrote things correctly. However God communicated to the authors, I don't think it was clear enough for the authors to fully understand (I kinda talked about this in some posts way back, but if you didn't read them I don't blame you, this is an incredibly long thread). I can imagine a lot getting lost in translation between a divine being & humans. Just because I don't believe in a direct interpretation of the Bible means I think God lied--I think the authors just didn't get it quite right. I acknowledge this is my personal belief and neither you nor others are held to follow it.

I don't doubt we share a lot of DNA with chickens and such. After all, we share a lot of the same organs, and all our cells are fairly similar. Consider though, that a single wrong base in a DNA strand--one wrong base in the hundreds of millions found in a single strand--is what causes the crescent-shaped cells of sickle cell anemia. A small difference in DNA goes a long way.

We cannot successfully mate with chimps because we are different species from chimps, separated by many thousands of years of evolution. Both our species and the chimp species arose, somewhere back on the phylogeny, from a common ancestor. The earliest Homo sapiens very likely were able to mate with that ancestor, before further evolution away from that ancestor occurred & behavioral or physiological isolation set in. This is demonstrated in ring species (A quick summary for anyone who doesn't know what I mean: Ring species have a population living in a ring around a barrier, such as a desert or ocean, that they cannot cross. The 2 groups of individuals where the population rejoins on the other side of the barrier cannot mate because they have become separate species, but each can still mate with the transitional individuals closer to the population's origin). Also, sometimes species that are closely related enough (usually more recently diverged from each other) can breed, although not always successfully. Examples are the black ducks & mallards (closely related enough to successfully produce viable offspring), and horses & mules (which are related enough to breed, but different enough that their offspring are sterile).

I am sorry to hear your bio classes treated origin-of-life and origin-of-species as one and the same. I guess I am lucky to say I have not had that experience, in neither high school nor college. With that, I am going to sleep! XD

I would just like to say for the record that 85% of this is WAY above my head LOL. Now you all know how I feel when MisterKelley spends hours watching random documentaries on the History Channel or Discovery Channel - and meanwhile; three minutes of that stuff and my brain feels like its going to explode.

Im quite enjoying the discussion though.:)

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Me too, Kelley.  Now, where's our church?:-)

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Maybe there was a species of lizards who increased their lung-capacity......and learned how to breathe fire to protect itself from those annoying little knights and their quests for damsels in distress

LOL I hate reading this at work when I come across statements like these and I have to suppress laughter because I'm suppose to be working!

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cisco, the thing is, you keep resting on this idea that evolution has not, cannot, and will not be observed.

This is just not true.

The theory of evolution is supported by observations. You use the phrase "macroevolution" to get out of this - the idea that we haven't observed it over tens of thousands of years.  But, the things is, gravity as a theory has not been observed on the planet Mars, but scientists are pretty sure that gravity works the same way there.  So, under your logic, gravity as well shouldn't be accepted because we haven't observed it on other planets like Saturn. 

You call "generalizations" a logical phallacy.  But that's how we apply sciencific findings -- through these "generalizations".  The observations that have been made that support evolution theory have been extrapolated over time, in much the same way that the theory of gravity we have seen on earth have been extrapolated -- or generalized, as you put it -- to cover how we're pretty sure it works on other planet, or other objects in the sky.  This "generalization" has allowed us to go to the moon.

If the scientific community applied your theory of science -- or what it takes for "faith" to become actual "knowledge" -- it would pretty much halt scientific progress as we know it. 

So we'll just disagree - I believe that the enough observations have been made to extrapolate to the world at large to support evolutionary theory.  You don't. 

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My new favorite website: www.poptimal.com

"I'd hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, or insanity, but they've always worked for me." Hunter S. Thompson

"If we evolved from monkies why arent we still evolving"

We are still evolving.  Maybe not in the way you are thinking (so I'm not trying to argue if you in fact meant something else).

Compare how we, as humans, look today compared to a few centuries ago.  We are much taller.  Our brains are larger.  Our eyes are largre, and farther apart.  Our noses are getting smaller, and our jaws are shrinking in size.  Humans used to have enough room in their mouths for wisdom teeth, for example.  Now, most of us do not.

This is evolution.  We ARE evolving.

Regarding your conflict with Tsunami -- let me say this:

why would there be any difficulty in clearly communicating His ideas and intentions for any other purpose?

As I understood Tsunami's (very well-written) post, the issue is not God's clarity in communication in one area but not in another - but how the person received the message.   People can say - or write - many, many things -- and not all of it can be accurate.  Thus, the problem may not be in how clearly God communicated -- but basic human error in how the message was translated. 

We just can't make extrapolations and assume they are true if we don't have evidence for them.

But we do. . .all the time.  If I administer a medication to Ana, and it works to cure her disease, I'm going to extrapolate to Beth.  And if I do it on Anna and Beth and Chris, I'm going to extrapolate that it will also help Amy and Ben and Carla. 

All experimentation is done on a sample first, and then extrapolated to the whole.  We can never really observe all of anything, really.  We take our best guess -- in other words, we observe, then logically apply to others.  Thus, we observe natural selection within a species, and then extrapolate outside of it.

Again, look at the theory of gravity (gravity also being, like evolution, a theory only).  Gravity, although we generally accept it as fact, is really just a theory.  We can say that because we have not observed it on the planet Mars that it has not been proven.  Yet the fact that it has not been proven does not mean that it is not a useful theory to understand the universe.  And if we did not act on that understanding, we could not have gone to the moon.  Yet we did.  We went to the moon. 

But if scientists had treated the theory of gravity the same way you treat the theory of evolution, then the moon landing would never have happened.  This is what I believe, and why your understanding of science halts scientific progress. 

Because the understanding of evolution affects genetics, and the understanding of genetics affects how we treat sickness and disease. 

We haven't turned into ducks yet. ;-)

Key word there -- yet.

__________________________________________
My new favorite website: www.poptimal.com

"I'd hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, or insanity, but they've always worked for me." Hunter S. Thompson