The Creation vs Evolution debate thread...

[CaptainHaplo]

Ok - some ground rules.

#1 - This is a DEBATE. Calling people names or throwing out insults because someone disagrees with you is not a debate. If you cannot contribute maturely, don't post.

#2 - Nothing said here should be taken personally. Educated people disagree all the time, without having their feelings hurt.

#3 - Debate means your backing up your viewpoints with logical reasoning and where available, reasonably respectable sources. Anyone can claim the moon is made of green cheese.

#4 - On the subject of sources, since this is going to include religious issues, its only fair that both religious and "anti" religious (debunking) sources may both be used.

#5 - It is up to each poster (and hopefully readers) to review the available material and keep a somewhat open mind in this discussion, so that both sides may learn a bit and grow.

#6 - Anyone with a willingness to add CONSTRUCTIVELY to the debate, on either side, is welcome to join in.

If you can't abide by these rules, then do everyone a favor and go find another thread to hang out in. There are some mature and smart people here that can actually have a discussion. In other words, Trolls are unwelcome.

With that said, I will make another post to get the debate started.

[CaptainHaplo]

I will be presenting the side of scientific creationism. This means that I will bring forward evidence of a "young" earth, rebut as best I can challenges to such evidence with logic and fact, as well as demonstrate how evolution is a flawed theory lacking credible evidence.

How old is the earth? No one was alive to see its beginning, so there is no direct testamony to that beginning. However, a "Young Earth" - aka a planetary age somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old is demonstrated by a number of scientific facts.

#1 Let us look to the sky in the night and see our celestial neighbor - the Moon. The gravitational pull between the Earth and Moon causes the Earth’s oceans to have tides. The tidal friction between the Earth’s terrestrial surface and the water moving over it causes energy to be added to the Moon. This results in a constant yearly increase in the distance between the Earth and Moon. This tidal friction also causes the Earth’s rotation to slow down, but more importantly, the energy added to the Moon causes it to recede from the Earth. The rate of recession was measured at four centimeters per year in 1981, however, according to Physicist Donald B. DeYoung:

"One cannot extrapolate the present 4 cm/year separation rate back into history. It has that value today, but was more rapid in the past because of tidal effects. In fact, the separation rate depends on the distance to the 6th power, a very strong dependence ... the rate ... was perhaps 20 m/year ‘long’ ago, and the average is 1.2 m/year.

Because of this, the Moon must be less than 750 million years old -- or 20% of the supposed 4.5 billion-year age of the Earth-Moon system theorized by evolution.

#2 Oil Wells - When oil wells are drilled, the oil is almost always found to be under great pressure. This presents a problem for those who claim "millions of years" for the age of oil, simply because rocks are porous. In other words, as time goes by the oil should seep into tiny pores in the surrounding rock, and, over time, reduce the pressure. However, for some reason it doesn't.

#3 Our Friend the Sun - Measurements of the sun's diameter over the past several hundred years indicate that it is shrinking at the rate of five feet per hour. Assuming that this rate has been constant in the past we can conclude that the earth would have been so hot only one million years ago that no life could have survived. And only 11,200,000 years ago the sun would have physically touched the earth.

#4 The Air We Breathe - Carbon-14 is produced when radiation from the sun strikes Nitrogen-14 atoms in the earth's upper atmosphere. The earth's atmosphere is not yet saturated with C14. This means that the amount of C14 being produced is greater than the amount that is decaying back to N14. It is estimated that a state of equilibrium would be reached in as little as 30,000 years. Thus, it appears that the earth's atmosphere is less than 30,000 years old. In fact, the evidence suggests it is less than 10,000 years old.

#5 "Mother" Eve's DNA - In 1989 scientists said that they had compared the Mitochondrial DNA of various different races of people and concluded that they all came from a single woman (they called her Eve) who lived from 100,000-200,000 years ago.This story was widely reported in the press. A few years later scientists actually measured the rate of Mitochondrial mutations and discovered that they changed about 20 times faster than was earlier reported. This means that "Eve" did not live 100,000-200,000 years ago but rather only 5,000-10,000.

#6 Look at all the People - Today the earth's population doubles about every 50 years. If we assumed only half of the current growth rate and start with one couple, it would take less than 4,000 years to achieve today's population.

#7 The Dead Sea - The Dead Sea is in Israel. It is receives fresh water from the Sea of Galilee via the Jordan River. The Dead Sea has a very high salt content. Even so, it continues to get saltier since it has no outlet other than by evaporation. Scientists have measured the amount of salt added each year by the Jordan River; and they have also calculated the amount of salt in the Dead Sea. From these it is possible to estimate how long this process has been going on for. Assuming a constant rate of salt/water flow, and a zero salt level at the beginning, then the age of the Dead Sea is only 13,000 year old.

Additional detail and sources regarding these evidences along with others may be researched at the following links:

http://www.earthage.org/youngearthev/evidence_for_a_young_earth.htm
http://www.trueorigin.org/mitochondrialeve01.asp

Creationism relies on a literal interpretaion of the bible about the nature of the planet and a solid belief that it is infallible.
Since it is very easy to show the bible is wrong then creationism makes no sense......end of topic.

[Skybird]

A hallucination and fictional writing wanting to be compared to scientific methodology and work processes and their resulting conclusions - as if Tolkien's fantasy and imagination could be compared to the theories of Einstein or Darwin.



Tolkien's narration of how the world was created, as to be found in the first chapter of The Silmarillion, "Ainulindale", is a very beautiful and poetic piece of narration arts, and probably the most beautiful text of it's kind that I know of. But it is a fantasy, no scientific theory. It would not make sense to compare it to scienctific theories, since it fails to qualify as a scientific work result from the very beginning on.

Nuff said.

[nikimcbee]

The funny thing I think about this debate that if you dig deep enough, both sides come down to "faith". The science term for faith is a theory.
Here's the oh-ffical mcbee policy on the subject.

The purpose of religion is to prepare you for the afterlife. So, I say follow your teachings, live a good life, and the rest will work itself out. So I say it doesn't really matter how old the earth is or where man/life came from in the end; the bottom line is, were you a good person?

I think both extreames are to bent on that they are right and the other is wrong. I'd say there's a lot of truth to both sides of the argument.

I really don't get that worked up about the topic, but I do find it really funny to watch both sides fall all over themsevles to prove the other is wrong.

[Reece]

Well I personally find it more believable that the world was created, rather than the whole thing being just a fluke!! But that is my opinion.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by nikimcbee

The funny thing I think about this debate that if you dig deep enough, both sides come down to "faith". The science term for faith is a theory.

Well said!! It all comes down to what one believes in.

List me under the evolution column. And I see no reason why God could not have created the world and that's the process he employed. That's what I believe.

[goldorak]

Originally Posted by nikimcbee

The funny thing I think about this debate that if you dig deep enough, both sides come down to "faith". The science term for faith is a theory.
Here's the oh-ffical mcbee policy on the subject.

The purpose of religion is to prepare you for the afterlife. So, I say follow your teachings, live a good life, and the rest will work itself out. So I say it doesn't really matter how old the earth is or where man/life came from in the end; the bottom line is, were you a good person?

I think both extreames are to bent on that they are right and the other is wrong. I'd say there's a lot of truth to both sides of the argument.

I really don't get that worked up about the topic, but I do find it really funny to watch both sides fall all over themsevles to prove the other is wrong.

Nikimcbee you fail to understand just what a scientific theory is.
I doubt you would even understand what the scientific method is all about. Man this is an age of scientific obscurantism.
Carl Sagan must be screaming in his grave.

[Shearwater]

Alright now, I've been waiting for this for some while. Thanks CapHap for starting a thread on this topic

To make a start:
One thing that seems to bother me is the conception some people seem to hold that evolutionists (just a label for the sake of convenience; I count myself as one of them) seem to 'believe' in evolution, while creationists seem to 'believe' in, well, creation by God as told in the Bible.
While I'm comfortable with the latter, the first conception is simply not true. Almost every evolutionists I know doesn't believe in the Theory of Evolution. It is simply a theory, amongst many, many others, which seems to offer the most plausible explanation of how different species have evolved over the course of time. Thus, the quality of belief, if you will, is a wholly different one that that of religion. We think it's the most probable - if a theory comes along that explains things in a better and more plausible way along with sufficient evidence, I'm perfectly willing to accept a new theory, and if something better than that theory is formulated, I will proceed likewise. Theories change with evidence and evolve over time, and I'm sure as time goes by, the current Theory of Evolution will witness some refinements or alterations in important aspects. The Theory of Evolution is not, nor was it ever intended, to be a substitute for religion (and if it were, it would have but one single creed as its whole content). It is rather a chapter far from being closed.
Creationism, on the other hand, is based on the Bible, which has been canonized almost two millenia ago and hasn't changed much over the course of time, except from translations and interpretations (though of course, the former always includes the latter to some extent). These interpretations however are the very things that make all the difference.
Speaking as a student of linguistics, the whole area of hermeneutics has caught my interest long ago. To put it simply, there are no positive terms in language, by which I mean that no word has a meaning in itself, but always and only in opposition to other words. Derrida goes a step further and says that even this relative, contextual meaning cannot ever be pinpointed but remains elusive (for which concept he coined the word 'différance', here is a link for anyone interested, but beware, it's a fairly long read). To me it makes it very plausible that we simply cannot interpret the Bible, or any text for that matter, in a literal way.
The question is now: But why should we interpret the Bible in the first place?
The answer is: The meaning of every text is only established via an interaction with the reader. People don't simply read the Bible, they draw conclusions from it. But in order to draw conclusions from a text, you must have questions to the text in the first place which you seek to see answered by it. It again relates to the whole concept of hermeneutics - different people have a different background and ask different questions, and therefore cannot but understand a text in ways different from each other. Of course, this does not mean that every person's reading of the Bible is so vastly different from any other person's that it can no longer be communicated. In fact, most people have similar views, and in the field of religion, this is what some might call 'mainstream religion' or orthodoxy (as denoted by the word kat-holos as in Catholic, meaning 'that which is at the basis of everything'). But the watchword here is 'similar', not 'identical', and even one's own interpretation changes over the course of time.

I do not deride creationists as being stupid, ignorant or simple minded, and I resent evolutionists who do so (Hello Condello). It's especially a problem because it sometimes seems to reduce a person that often have immensely complex and sophisticated ideas to one single concept - "You're a creationist."
Needless to say, I can have issues with all sorts of people. That is the case whenever someone holds a certain belief (in a very broad sense and not restricted to religion) in an unreflected, simplistic way and does not allow the other person to justify him or herself. Closed-mindedness, in one word.

Religious belief always requires a 'leap of faith', and that leap always requires an individual choice. And as long as that that person does not try to impose their views onto my own, it needs to be respected.

[vedrand]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

Creationism relies on a literal interpretaion of the bible about the nature of the planet and a solid belief that it is infallible.
Since it is very easy to show the bible is wrong then creationism makes no sense......end of topic.

[August]

This very cool video pretty much shows that creationist theory can't be as simple as that:

The Known Universe by the American Museum of Natural History:

[Biggles]

Originally Posted by August

This very cool video pretty much shows that creationist theory can't be as simple as that:

The Known Universe by the American Museum of Natural History:

The video was very cool indeed (!), but can you develop your argument?

[Nicolas]

Originally Posted by vedrand

Who creates the creationism like you described?
For believers the bible and God is enough to accept that He created the universe. The bible says is bad for a man the lack of science. It's not right to put facts and science away. God and science are a perfect match; he knew how to create an universe, and your soul...

[Nicolas]

You want proof? a big one?
God says that he will not reject you if you come to him.
You need to do it with humility.
Have faith and ask sincerely to him that you really need to know if he exist, that you are unsure. That you invite him to talk with you, to show to you, you wont hear him, or see things, the eye to see God is in the spirit.
Jesus said that if you knock the door the door will open.

If i can't talk this, please sorry but this topic is totally useless.

[AngusJS]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

How old is the earth?

Much older than 10,000 years.

http://www.youtube.com/user/potholer.../5/w5369-OobM4