Evidence for God from Science

Hi Proinsius,

Regarding an alternative model, ID is not one of them. Darwinians skew the facts that IDst want to replace evolution. If you look at William Dembski's or Kirk Durston's work, the goal is to mathematically define FCSI (functional complex specified information) and use it to detect design in biological systems, this approach is very common in other fields such as archeology and SETI (as Gman has pointed out), the context is different, however. The ID movement is very concerned with the mechanism involved to explain the complexity and diversity of life, nowhere does ID say evolution is not true, simply how it happened, most accept that it did happen.

Creationism IS another model, but old-earth creationists such as myself don't believe it happened out of thin air (even if it did, we could never prove such a thing), that it magically popped into existence. I believe God created the earth and subsequent life just as the bible explains, but also that the bible is not a science textbook so the details are left out for us to figure out. Gman brought up the order of creation in genesis, as much as I agree with that it still does not go into the gory details. So while its an alternative model it still isn't exactly going to replace MET.

So we are left to play it their way. If you would like to look into other hypothesis that suggest an alternative mechanism for evolution that override the Darwinian one (which by natural selection + genetic drift + random mutations attempts to blindingly explain all of complexity, diversity and function in biological systems).

These alternative mechanisms also make real predictions, they are testable, and they fit quite well with a discrete fossil record ( such abrupt appearances of phyla) etc...I suggest reading "Semi-meiosis as an Evolutionary mechanism" by Prof. John A. Davison.

Link

Another interesting read is the PEH(prescribed evolutionary hypothesis):

PEH

If you are interested and would like to read more see here: Link to papers

Mike Gene proposes a similar front-loading hypothesis as outlined in the Design Matrix.

(I had to edit this grammatical disaster of a post )

Good points godslanguage.. Religion is relevant to science in that it can furnish a conceptual framework in which science can exist. Christianity did furnish the conceptual framework in which modern science was born. Science can therefore verify and falsify the claim of religion. When religions make claims about the natural world, they intersect the domain of science and are in affect making predictions in which scientific investigations can either verify or falsify.

Although the Bible has an order to it and is making claims how we and the universe came into existence, I think we can agree it was never intended to be a science book however...

Gman: glad to see that I am, again, largely in agreement with you.

The reason I say that I am torn about religion being taught in schools is that I do believe religion is an important part of humanity. I don't really trust that the majority of people, parents, are in a position to openly and honestly communicate the wealth and variety of religion in the world today, I certainly can't claim to be in that position. It is often citied that many of the troubles in the world today are due to differences in religious thought, I feel if children were educated without bias on the theology and cultural aspects of at least the main players in world religion, and non-religion, then it may go some way to alleviating these troubles. For example I don't believe the world will necessarily become a better place to live if the children of some atheist parents are schooled only on the evils of Chritianity and vice versa. If any other subject like maths, science, language or art was left solely to my parents I feel I would be sorely lacking in the insights I have gained from many wonderful, and not so wonderful, teachers over the years.

The problem is that many parents are resistant to these ideas, they do not want their children coming home from school at a young age holding some very difficult to answer questions regarding the family faith or non-faith they are being brought up with - being brought up in a fairly strict Roman Catholic environment by parents with little to no interest in theology confirms this for me, my mother went from strong theism to strong atheism due to the worldly actions of one individual. To my knowledge non-denominational schools in Scotland are required to pick a base system, in practice normally Protestant Christianity, which is practiced in school eg. reasonably regular services, with the option for parents to allow their children to be excluded from these activities. Religious lessons exploring the wealth and variety of religion still takes place but in my mind this is from a model which is by nature biased to one particular system, teaching staff are also more likely to choose to work in a school which subscribes to their own ideas and this further complicates the matter of non-biased teachings.

If a decent curriculum for religion is put in place I'm not sure that parents should be in any position to request their child not be taught about different religions any more than they should be able to request their child be taught only about music with no mention of art or drama. That is what home schooling is for.

I'm not too hopeful that I will live to see such a system.

My personal response to my daughter being taught some very definite ideas about God or religion is to occasionally counter her assertions with opposites: if God is man who lives in the sky, maybe God is a woman who lives in the ground etc... Further chat leads me down the path of admitting my own ignorance and to not just believe what people say - no one knows any better than you do especially me, mum and your teacher in these matters.

Oops. I seem to have gone off topic a little, sorry

godslanguage: thanks for a very insightful post. I'll admit to having skimmed and largely dismissed the info you presented at the top of page two.

The ideas presented in the links are very interesting and exactly what I was looking for. I've often looked at diagrams of chromosomes from different species presented side by side with colour coding to represent corresponding sections. They are used as teaching devices to show the percentage of similarity between species, those links go a great way to providing a solution to my nagging idea as to why there are in completely different places.

Also nicely chimes in nicely with my ideas about there being far more juicy gossip at the bedrock of current evolutionary thought.

I will have a look at the other links over the next few weeks, hopefully.

I would like to post those links over on the Atheist Toolbox to see what some of the more evolutionary savvy posters opinions are. I thought I better ask, or a least mention, first for fear of appearing to head off elsewhere to gain ammunition for a response, this is not my intention and seems better than just waiting it out a month or two and doing it anyway.

Well I just watched the History Channel and they renamed her Lucy. That pretty well says it. They couldn't even settle on a name let alone a theory.

diamondeb wrote:Well I just watched the History Channel and they renamed her Lucy. That pretty well says it. They couldn't even settle on a name let alone a theory.

I just watched it too.. Called "The Link" of course (not missing). They claim that it broadly appears to be a lemur skeleton but it also has some other primate (monkey) characteristics as well. Their basic claim is that the skeleton does not have a toilet claw or tooth comb where modern lemurs do. But then again, could this simply be microevolution in action? It's still a lemur.. A crushed one albeit.

Then all of a sudden they made a light speed jump to Lucy (because she came around 3.2 million years ago) and compare it to her. Their conclusion is that it relates to all apes including man based on a ankle (talus) bone (that it walked upright). I thought they would....

Interesting that towards the end of the show that Dr. Donald Johanson (from Arizona State University) says that a lot of people don't believe in evolution, and he says to them that he doesn't believe in evolution either. He proceeds, "any more than gravity that is... It's a fact... So gravity is a law, it's a fact. It's an observable thing, the exact same thing as evolution.." He goes on, "We've come to the point now where evolution is the GRAND explanation for the diversity of all life. All life that there is and all life that there will ever be. Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution.." Like now he is trying to sell the deal.. Give me a break.

I'm going to remember this statement by Johanson and use it in my arsenal. We get this all the time here that no one "ever" claims that evolution is a fact, nor the giver of all life... Well Dr. Johanson has just claimed that evolution is the alpha and omega, the god of all life...

Reason's to Believe has a pretty good response to it (podcast)...

http://www.reasons.org/missing-link.html

Gman wrote: Nonetheless it is easy to see why scientific naturalism is an attractive philosophy for scientists. It gives science a virtual monopoly on the production of knowledge, and assures scientists that no important questions are in principle beyond scientific investigation. The important question, however, is whether this philosophical viewpoint is merely an understandable professional prejudice or whether it is the objectively valid way of understanding the world.

Then how do so many scientifically literate devout Christians, both scientist and non-scientist, support evolution?

IgoFan wrote:Then how do so many scientifically literate devout Christians, both scientist and non-scientist, support evolution?

By realizing what evolution can do and cannot do.... And that it isn't the GRAND explanation for all the diversity of life contrary to what Johanson says too..

Gman wrote:

IgoFan wrote:Then how do so many scientifically literate devout Christians, both scientist and non-scientist, support evolution?

By realizing what evolution can do and cannot do.... And that it isn't the GRAND explanation for all the diversity of life contrary to what Johanson says too..

They support the evolution that science supports. You know, the evolution that you don't support.

How can they do that? I'm sure you've run into one of them. Are they stupid? Ignorant? Confused?

IgoFan wrote:They support the evolution that science supports. You know, the evolution that you don't support.

Darwinian evolution is not science, it's an assumption...

IgoFan wrote:How can they do that? I'm sure you've run into one of them. Are they stupid? Ignorant? Confused?

There are no other choices according to their view. Their vending machine is broken. It can only spew out one product... Milk duds.

zoegirl wrote:

Ahh, some interesting controversy continuing here!
http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/ ... edent.html

Times wrote: . . . As Henry Gee (@cromercrox), Nature's palaeontology editor, put it on Twitter:

When something has been dead for 47,000,000 years, you'd have thought that they'd have spent a little more time on it at this end.

[ ]

. . . .

The team behind the Ida discovery are claiming that adapids like Darwinius are actually members of the haplorrhine group, which contains anthropoids like us and tarsiers. But as Laelaps says, their evidence for this is extremely limited:

By moving the adapids into the haplorrhine group they can then make the claim that anthropoids evolved from the adapid stem and not tarsiers or omomyids. The problem is that they are using just one genus, Darwinius, to change the placement of an entire group without using any cladistic analysis! This is not good science.

The bottom line is that the hypothesis that Darwinius is closer to anthropoids than tarsiers or omomyids does not have strong support. Even though the authors of the paper constructed a very simple cladogram they did not undertake a full, rigorous cladistic analysis to support their claims. I am baffled as to how they could stress the significance of this fossil without undertaking the requisite research to support their hypothesis.

In short, while Ida is an important fossil, she isn't all that. The authors haven't presented enough evidence to support their claims.

This would be an issue even if this discovery had been announced in the normal way. But it's especially serious given the publicity blitz behind Ida. As I blogged yesterday, a popular book, a documentary, a website and an exhibition have been launched on the back of this find, before it has received full scientific scrutiny. The interpretation of Jorn Hurum and his team may well be wrong. But their story is all that most people are going to hear.

You have to wonder, as did Karen James in a comment on my post yesterday, whether this research was deliberately rushed, and submitted to a journal (PLoS ONE) with a less rigorous pre-publication review system than Nature or Science, to fit with the media schedule. And why did the journal agree to go along with this?
. . . MH

also

science wrote: . . . . "This is the first link to all humans," said Hurum at the press conference.

Many paleontologists are unconvinced. They point out that Hurum and Gingerich's analysis compared 30 traits in the new fossil with primitive and higher primates when standard practice is to analyze 200 to 400 traits and to include anthropoids from Egypt and the newer fossils of Eosimias from Asia, both of which were missing from the analysis in the paper. "There is no phylogenetic analysis to support the claims, and the data is cherry-picked," says paleontologist Richard Kay, also of Duke University. Callum Ross, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois agrees: "Their claim that this specimen should be classified as haplorhine is unsupportable in light of modern methods of classification."

Other researchers grumble that by describing the history of anthropoids as "somewhat speculatively identified lineages of isolated teeth," the PLoS paper dismisses years of new fossils. "It's like going back to 1994," says paleontologist K. Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who has published jaw, teeth, and limb bones of Eosimias. "They've ignored 15 years of literature."

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/co ... 2009/519/1

zoegirl wrote:Good example of media hype, the debate between scientists, good sciece and bad science, and the many scientists who provide controversy. Despite the claims in the original news article, the authors do not have strong evidence fr their claim. This is what science should do, correct the conclusions of one another. Thankfully this is a good example of where they have leapt upon each other and corrected each other. They have examined the evidence and are not willing to give into a hyped theory (even though the current theory still supports evolution).

As with other human endeavors (other academia, politics, relationships), one sees corruption here as well. It is interesting that money seemed to play a crucial role in this particular instance.

To me, it seems that the original scientists are more to blame than the media. Since their methods were bad to begin with, and with attention grabbing conclusions, the media just did their thing without knowing. Normally, that kind of scientific sloppiness would've been caught before publication. The fact that money was involved surprises me not a bit. This kind of situation tarnishes the ability to trust academics, who claim to be unbiased (or unbiased to the best of their ability). I'm sure most specialists do their best to be unbiased - I'm saying that because of one or two bad apples, the whole bushel is called into question. It also makes me wonder how much this actually goes on, but with less glamorous projects that don't get the same amount of scrutiny.

Gman wrote:

IgoFan wrote:They support the evolution that science supports. You know, the evolution that you don't support.

Darwinian evolution is not science, it's an assumption...

IgoFan wrote:How can they do that? I'm sure you've run into one of them. Are they stupid? Ignorant? Confused?

There are no other choices according to their view. Their vending machine is broken. It can only spew out one product... Milk duds.

My question is, how do the many intelligent devout Christians reconcile their religious faith with their support of "Darwinian[sic] evolution"? Surely those Christians don't have the same philosophical naturalism bent that those horribly confused atheists have?

IgoFan wrote:My question is, how do the many intelligent devout Christians reconcile their religious faith with their support of "Darwinian[sic] evolution"? Surely those Christians don't have the same philosophical naturalism bent that those horribly confused atheists have?

And what about those many scientists and people that don't believe Darwinian evolution? Are they stupid? Ignorant? Confused?

Gman wrote:

IgoFan wrote:My question is, how do the many intelligent devout Christians reconcile their religious faith with their support of "Darwinian[sic] evolution"? Surely those Christians don't have the same philosophical naturalism bent that those horribly confused atheists have?

And what about those many scientists and people that don't believe Darwinian evolution? Are they stupid? Ignorant? Confused?

My question first please.

IgoFan wrote:My question first please.

Ok, the question is why do some Christians except darwinian evolution? First off, Bible believing Christians (if they believe that God created everything), do NOT fully embrace Darwinian evolution. If they embrace evolution it is called theistic evolution. Theistic evolution, however, is completely unexceptionable to the public classrooms and to certain scientists due to its theistic premises and conclusion. It is therefore considered invalid and not scientific... Darwinian evolution or neo-Darwinism is a materialist philosophy, which is a worldview based on the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its current form by impersonal chance (not a god). Nowhere will you find theistic evolution taught in any public science book or a public class devoted to it.. That would be completely unacceptable...

Clearer now?