Evidence for God from Science

Danieltwotwenty wrote:

RickD wrote: Daniel,
Take this to its logical conclusion, and try to look at it objectively. If certain ethnic groups, or races, whatever you want to call them, are considered "less evolved", such as black Africans and aboriginal Australians, then tell me logically how that doesn't lead to racism. Stick to my point. Focus. White American slave owners used this same rationale to justify the enslavement of black Africans. You know the old "right to life, liberty, etc. for all men" didn't apply to slaves because they weren't considered "men". They were less than human in the eyes of many slave owners/traders. I'm not saying all those slave owners used Darwinian evolution for their racism, but maybe they did(it was written in 1859 I believe).

Evolution says that there is one race, the human race, there are very little difference between us and the small differences there are are not racist reflections at all, it is humans that discriminate based on differences not evolutionary processes.

Daniel,
Tell me how Darwinian evolution taken to its logical conclusion, DOES NOT promote racism. Instead of being emotional and losing respect for me, show me where I'm wrong.
Surely you understand how native Australians have been treated as less than human, don't you?

I am not emotional at all, just dumb founded by the straw man coming from someone I regard as intelligent.

As stated before evolution points out small differences within the one race of beings (evolution does not account for all these differences either as others have stated.), racism is discriminating because of said differences. Evolution is an explanatory model of how God created us, racism is a human creation of how we can discriminate against people who are not the same as us. There are also a whole host of other types of discrimination, do we hold evolution responsible for sexism, if we follow your logical conclusion about evolution and apply that O.E.C it would make God responsible for racism because he created us.

Daniel,

Darwinian evolution (as proposed by Darwin) included all of the racist beliefs of Darwin. His racism cannot be separated from the rest of his beliefs. Just look at his own words.

Different evolutionary models, other than Darwin's model, have to be tested on their own. I'm not lumping all evolutionary beliefs into one.

Let me make this clear if I wasn't clear before. Darwinian evolution specifically, is a racist model, as seen by Darwin's own words.

neo-x wrote:Rick, Ivel is right, furthermore you are now unintentionally making the same kind of argument, atheists usually make against the bible being used to condone slavery or genocide or crusades. Also its the same as saying that cars promote accidents or swimming promotes drowning. We know thats not true. Its a non-sequitur. The conclusion is false and is not warranted, my friend.

To reiterate what I said in my last post to Daniel, Darwin, evidenced by his own words, was racist. That racism was seen in, and was a part of Darwin's evolutionary model. Therefore, Darwinian evolution promotes racism.

neo-x wrote:read this article
The article is quite harsh towards creationist movement, but I think it makes valid points in defense of the science of evolution being wrongly labeled as promoting racism.

Again, I'm not claiming evolution as understood today, is racist(I haven't found any evidence yet, to lead me in that direction). And second, couldn't you have found a better source than a communist website?

RickD wrote:

neo-x wrote:read this article
The article is quite harsh towards creationist movement, but I think it makes valid points in defense of the science of evolution being wrongly labeled as promoting racism.

Again, I'm not claiming evolution as understood today, is racist(I haven't found any evidence yet, to lead me in that direction). And second, couldn't you have found a better source than a communist website?

And that is what I was saying Rick, evolution has come a long way in 170 years. Darwin's personal ethics with respect to evolution, good or bad are irrelevant to the discussion. Because when you use words like darwinian evolution, to the reader it simply means evolution, nothing else. Evolution is not a concept anymore Rick. Back in darwin's day it was because he had no proper genetic proofs of it, we now have.

Neo wrote:
And that is what I was saying Rick, evolution has come a long way in 170 years. Darwin's personal ethics with respect to evolution, good or bad are irrelevant to the discussion.

It's absolutely relevant. Darwin made it part of his theory.

Neo wrote:
Because when you use words like darwinian evolution, to the reader it simply means evolution, nothing else.

That's why I specified what I meant. I think we need to define 'evolution', in the context of the discussion. There are too many meanings and kinds of evolution.

Neo wrote:
Evolution is not a concept anymore Rick. Back in darwin's day it was because he had no proper genetic proofs of it, we now have.

There you go painting evolution with a broad stroke, Neo. Some evolution is observable. Some evolution, like molecules to man, is assumed. Molecules to man is not verifiable. Because living things share dna(building blocks), doesn't prove a common ancestor. It just as easily(if not more) can mean common designer. So no Neo, you can continue to claim molecules to man(macro evolution) is a fact. But repeating it ad nauseum doesn't make it so.

RickD wrote:

Neo wrote:
And that is what I was saying Rick, evolution has come a long way in 170 years. Darwin's personal ethics with respect to evolution, good or bad are irrelevant to the discussion.

It's absolutely relevant. Darwin made it part of his theory.

Neo wrote:
Because when you use words like darwinian evolution, to the reader it simply means evolution, nothing else.

That's why I specified what I meant. I think we need to define 'evolution', in the context of the discussion. There are too many meanings and kinds of evolution.

Neo wrote:
Evolution is not a concept anymore Rick. Back in darwin's day it was because he had no proper genetic proofs of it, we now have.

There you go painting evolution with a broad stroke, Neo. Some evolution is observable. Some evolution, like molecules to man, is assumed. Molecules to man is not verifiable. Because living things share dna(building blocks), doesn't prove a common ancestor. It just as easily(if not more) can mean common designer. So no Neo, you can continue to claim molecules to man(macro evolution) is a fact. But repeating it ad nauseum doesn't make it so.

No, only the mechanism needs to be verifiable Rick and it is. The same way you can't verify God, you can't verify what has already happened by waiting for it to happen before your eyes. That is an unreal expectation and it won't happen. The common design/designer idea does not hold at all, it's a philosophy construct to answer a theological question, its not science at all. Common designer or not, the only way anything has happened is through evolution, call it guided or driven by natural selection. There is no alternative to evolution when it comes to joining the dots. There simply isn't.

It absolutely proves a common ancestor, just check your child's DNA. You are carrying your great great great great grandparents DNA...and that same DNA, is also tracing into chimps, apes, bananas and your child. Your child and your great grandparents prove it. It's common ancestor.

You should read about it Rick, seriously...by your statements earlier I only deduced that you seem to think of evolution as these creation scientists and preachers put it. You should do you own study rick, form your own opinion from your own research.

RickD wrote: Just because there may have been worse racists than Darwin in his day, that doesn't mean he wasn't racist. Racism is and has always been, wrong. Just because white society may have accepted racism at the time, that doesn't mean it wasn't morally wrong.
...
I'm hearing the argument from others(pro evolution) that evolutionists have learned a lot since Darwin proposed his theory, which shows Darwin was wrong about a lot of what he said. That doesn't change the fact that what Darwin wrote was racist. His beliefs as he wrote them, are racist.

RickD wrote: To reiterate what I said in my last post to Daniel, Darwin, evidenced by his own words, was racist. That racism was seen in, and was a part of Darwin's evolutionary model. Therefore, Darwinian evolution promotes racism.

Just for clarity's sake, Rick, would you mind clarifying a couple of things?

Firstly, when you say "Darwin was a racist", which definition of racism are you using? "A belief that different races have different characteristics" <definition A>; "a belief that people should be discriminated against on the basis of their race" <definition B>; or a different definition entirely <definition C>?

Secondly, could you provide a couple of quotations that you think demonstrate robustly that Darwin fits that definition, and a few words to say why you believe the quotation fits the definition?

If you're arguing for definition A then I'd agree with you to a certain extent. I wouldn't agree with what you seem to be implying, though, which is that Darwin uniquely deserves to be singled out for castigation as a racist. We know that different genetic groupings of people share certain traits (and Darwin actually had a surprisingly nuanced understanding of this fact), but I imagine that you don't typically go around accusing people of racism solely because of this. Yes it's racism by a narrow, technical definition, but it comes without the moral baggage that is ascribed to the word in normal use.

If you're arguing for definition B, then I really can't see how you'd make your case except through selective and misquotation. You can find numerous quotations that throw up red flags to the modern reader, but you don't have to read a very great deal of Darwin before you understand that he grasped the fact that all peoples are of the same species, that no race can be pigeonholed accurately by any single characteristic, and that every person of every race deserves compassion. In the same way, one could attempt to build an argument around a handful of genocidal passages in the Bible, but one would have to be either incredibly lazy or willfully dishonest to describe the book as a whole as racist.

DNA is simply the life code of a species - it's the blueprint for what makes one a man, monkey or mouse. If there is a common Designer, and that Designer created all of the life coding at His disposal, which He utilized across countless species, then why think it is impossible that various species share genetic similarities and components without them being related/evolved/had shared ancestors?

My wife is a programmer. She daily works with complex code for a variety of software products. Every software, while individually unique, also shares a few similarities in functionality and the code used to create it. But there are always coding components of which they do NOT share. But as the very same available code can be used - or not - as appropriate/as needed, across multiple products, we see a great diversity of software products created independently from each other, dependent upon individual designers creating similar and yet often radically different software products. But shared coding components in no way mean that one software derived from another one. They were all created independent of each other using various portions and individually unique arrangements of the available code used.

And so, to assume that shared aspects of DNA PROVE that various species evolved from other species (Rick's molecules to man) is but one unproven scenario. As, again, there is more than one way of looking at the genetic data.

As the various macro evolutionary scenarios are not observable, one can only ASSUME that DNA shows proof of ancestral, genetic relations across species. And, by the way, scientific methodology, analysis and hypotheses do not always lead to certain truth. As many correlations have more than one possible explanation, whose explanations are sometimes beyond the abilities of current scientific analysis. And saying it WILL eventually be proven IS NOT PROOF! I laugh every time I see someone say that macro evolution is an established scientific fact. Actually, what IS a fact is that millions believe the unproven - THAT, I'll concede.

While you laugh, I am quite disappointed.

PerciFlage wrote:

RickD wrote: Just because there may have been worse racists than Darwin in his day, that doesn't mean he wasn't racist. Racism is and has always been, wrong. Just because white society may have accepted racism at the time, that doesn't mean it wasn't morally wrong.
...
I'm hearing the argument from others(pro evolution) that evolutionists have learned a lot since Darwin proposed his theory, which shows Darwin was wrong about a lot of what he said. That doesn't change the fact that what Darwin wrote was racist. His beliefs as he wrote them, are racist.

RickD wrote: To reiterate what I said in my last post to Daniel, Darwin, evidenced by his own words, was racist. That racism was seen in, and was a part of Darwin's evolutionary model. Therefore, Darwinian evolution promotes racism.

Just for clarity's sake, Rick, would you mind clarifying a couple of things?

Firstly, when you say "Darwin was a racist", which definition of racism are you using? "A belief that different races have different characteristics" <definition A>; "a belief that people should be discriminated against on the basis of their race" <definition B>; or a different definition entirely <definition C>?

Secondly, could you provide a couple of quotations that you think demonstrate robustly that Darwin fits that definition, and a few words to say why you believe the quotation fits the definition?

If you're arguing for definition A then I'd agree with you to a certain extent. I wouldn't agree with what you seem to be implying, though, which is that Darwin uniquely deserves to be singled out for castigation as a racist. We know that different genetic groupings of people share certain traits (and Darwin actually had a surprisingly nuanced understanding of this fact), but I imagine that you don't typically go around accusing people of racism solely because of this. Yes it's racism by a narrow, technical definition, but it comes without the moral baggage that is ascribed to the word in normal use.

If you're arguing for definition B, then I really can't see how you'd make your case except through selective and misquotation. You can find numerous quotations that throw up red flags to the modern reader, but you don't have to read a very great deal of Darwin before you understand that he grasped the fact that all peoples are of the same species, that no race can be pigeonholed accurately by any single characteristic, and that every person of every race deserves compassion. In the same way, one could attempt to build an argument around a handful of genocidal passages in the Bible, but one would have to be either incredibly lazy or willfully dishonest to describe the book as a whole as racist.

Perci,

I'll get to a response when I have time.

Philip wrote:DNA is simply the life code of a species - it's the blueprint for what makes one a man, monkey or mouse. If there is a common Designer, and that Designer created all of the life coding at His disposal, which He utilized across countless species, then why think it is impossible that various species share genetic similarities and components without them being related/evolved/had shared ancestors?

Regarding the bolded bit, it's not genetic commonality per se that provides support for the idea of common descent, but rather the way those commonalities are distributed between species, and the extent to which they accord with other observations.

Let's extend your software analogy a little bit, and think of software having a "genotype" - the raw code written by software engineers - and a "phenotype" - the final software package that you install and run on your computer, complete with graphics sounds, and whatever other functionality it provides.

Now, one might notice that two pieces of software have very similar phenotypes. For a very trivial example, two different pieces of banking software might provide the ability to calculate interest payments based on a customer's balance. The two pieces of software might even have user interfaces that look very similar, right down to the choice of font and placement of buttons. Digging beneath the surface, though, you might find the genotypes of the two pieces of software to be very different. They might have similar code written in two different languages, or they might have vastly different code written in the same language. They could, of course, also be very similar, and have roughly comparable code written in the same language.

This ability for the phenotype and genotype of software to be radically different is where the analogy to DNA falls down. Genetic and physical traits are extremely closely tied in living creatures. If a group of species share a unique physical trait - the ability to produce milk, for example - you can bet they will share a great deal of genetic similarities. You can also bet that, within that particular group of species, the more any two creatures differ in their morphologies, the more they will differ in their genes.

This strong linkage between superficial appearance and underlying code simply isn't a feature of different pieces of software.

Philip wrote:And so, to assume that shared aspects of DNA PROVE that various species evolved from other species (Rick's molecules to man) is but one unproven scenario. As, again, there is more than one way of looking at the genetic data.

As I outlined above, it's not merely the fact that species share similar DNA and morphologies that provides evidence for common descent. It is that the way these similarities are distributed between species agrees strongly with the idea of species sharing ancestry.

Philip wrote:I laugh every time I see someone say that macro evolution is an established scientific fact. Actually, what IS a fact is that millions believe the unproven

Or, rather, millions believe a theory that is internally consistent, well tested, with the ability to explain and predict a range of natural phenomena. Not all "unproven" ideas are created equal - if you can provide an example of any concept in science which is definitively proven rather than just "many correlations" which stack together in a way that puts the concept well beyond reasonable doubt, then I shall be most surprised.

This ability for the phenotype and genotype of software to be radically different is where the analogy to DNA falls down. Genetic and physical traits are extremely closely tied in living creatures. If a group of species share a unique physical trait - the ability to produce milk, for example - you can bet they will share a great deal of genetic similarities. You can also bet that, within that particular group of species, the more any two creatures differ in their morphologies, the more they will differ in their genes.

Oh, so a Designer/God couldn't/wouldn't use similar coding for creating creatures of similar physical traits? Why NOT? Every time someone says that "God couldn't do this or that," he needs to stop himself. If there is a God capable of creating and sustaining a universe that He spoke in to existence, I'd say that line of reasoning doesn't hold up.

This strong linkage between superficial appearance and underlying code simply isn't a feature of different pieces of software.

Of course, no analogy is ever perfect. But what I am asserting is also that a Designer God could use whatever bits of genetic coding - from amongst the entirety of what He has already created and has available to implement - that He so desires to. Are certain parts/lines of code more useful to create certain creatures than others - sure, why wouldn't they be? And that is also my intention in mentioning code used by programmers - as they have at their disposal ALL code possibilities that exist.

Different or even similar coding doesn't mean that one software morphed into another. It simply means that independent software engineers utilized the code they needed/desired from the entirety of ALL code that is available/possible to use, for their projects/creations. Same with God. Similar physical traits and genetic coding could have been used/produced by God as He saw fit/so desired.

Philip wrote: Oh, so a Designer/God couldn't/wouldn't use similar coding for creating creatures of similar physical traits? Why NOT? Every time someone says that "God couldn't do this or that," he needs to stop himself.

Read what I wrote again, because I didn't say that. I said specifically that similarities alone are not evidence for shared inheritance, but that the way genetic similarities are distributed is not inconsistent with shared inheritance.

This is in contrast to software, where the distribution of similarities can actually be used to show that different programs are not the product of descent with modification. If you were to analyse the source code of every piece of software ever written, you'd find that they were contained similarities, but similarities that were actively inconsistent with a universally shared inheritance.

Sometimes I'm shocked by how similar atheist and Christian evolutionists are. They both are adament the theory is stone cold fact. I can't tell them apart. Why I'm shocked is because, the atheist has no other choice, while the Christian should be open to any possible explanation that comes from God. If someone told me God snapped his fingers and it all happened the day before I was born... well I'd probably laugh first, but then I'd say explain yourself and I'd be open to his ideas.

There are problems with evolution. Quite acting like there isn't please. It's making this board unpleasant. I expect that sort of thing from an athiest, but from fellow Christians we should be able to discuss gracefully.

ryanbouma wrote:Sometimes I'm shocked by how similar atheist and Christian evolutionists are. They both are adament the theory is stone cold fact. I can't tell them apart. Why I'm shocked is because, the atheist has no other choice, while the Christian should be open to any possible explanation that comes from God. If someone told me God snapped his fingers and it all happened the day before I was born... well I'd probably laugh first, but then I'd say explain yourself and I'd be open to his ideas.

There are problems with evolution. Quite acting like there isn't please. It's making this board unpleasant. I expect that sort of thing from an athiest, but from fellow Christians we should be able to discuss gracefully.

As a Christian that leans heavily towards evolution, I recognize that the theory is far from complete or hard fact, I am open to all possibilities even Y.E.C but at the same time I really don't think any of it is important, well to me at least. This is why you will rarely see me in these debates because at the end of the day it matters little. Evolution is the best scientific explanatory theory we have at the moment, it's not perfect but what is in this messed up world.

Dan