Evidence for God from Science

The chimp DNA is almost exactly that of our own, indicating that is were closely related.

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:Everyone assumes one religion is correct-atheists may say that no theistic/pantheistic religion is correct, but only because he assumes his is correct. Also, law of non-contradiction-all religions contradict each other, so you can't even have two religions correct at the same time...it wouldn't make sense. Just imagine atheism and Christianity behing true...there IS a God, YET there is NO God.

Also, just waving the magic wand of mutations doesn't work. Mathematically speaking, mutations don't give you a fighting chance to explain life naturalistically. You can hop onto the bottomless pit thread on the Cambrian Explosion...

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:First of all, if we are physically similar to chimps, you'd expect that...common design fits the facts as well as common descent. The relationship is neutral-it doesn't back up anyone's claims.

I do not assume religion is correct, I have no religion. Religion is based on beliefs of the unknown. I know my beliefs are real because I can see them. You, however, choose to see beliefs that you cannot see, thus you have faith, while I have certainty. I have no problem with that, I'm just trying to explain to you why evolution is such a popular theory.

Design can say whatever it wants to. If it wants a pink bunny to create everything, then so be it. You don't need evidence for design. You do however need to PROVE that evolution is correct, or even a theory as the thread states. So I told you that we are close to chimps in DNA, evidence for my claim.

Before Darwin, homology was defined morphologically and explained by reference to ideal archetypes -- that is, to intelligent design.

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:A little taste of hypocrisy...you don't have faith? Really? Prove you exist. Prove that the assumptions of science, as well as your personal assumptions, are true. You can't-you have faith they are true. So don't be the annoying kind of person that says "I don't have faith, you stupid people do" because everyone has faith-the foundation of reason is faith-faith in assumption that one cannot prove. And, a better one-prove that there is such thing as a beneficial mutation that adds information instead of subtracting...you have faith that such a thing exists-something you cannot see mind you...something that seems to not exist.

AttentionKMartShoppers wrote:*Sigh* another bgood-ignores what I say and keeps on going. I said that similarity is neutral-it does not back up either your beliefs or mine. Homology fits both beliefs equally.

SoccerfreakAB2 wrote:Hypocrisy, you say? If you want to talk about hypocrisy, take a good look at yourself and everything religion once stood for. Your entire life revolves around science, whether you like it or not. Science has made man live longer and happier. It is religious skeptics like you that make the road difficult to these technological and theoretical advancements. People like you would have scorned Galileo for trying to say the Earth revolved around the Sun, you would have hated Columbus for saying the Earth is a sphere and not flat. And you hate Darwin now because once again a theory is proposed that goes against the will of your personal belief.

SoccerfreakAB2 wrote:Prove I exist? The fact that you are communicating with me is proof that I exist. That two rational thoughts can coincide and intertwine via internet is proof enough. And then what if we don't exist? Or anyone else? Then what am I thinking? Why am I moving? Is it my brain telling me that all of this is happening? Well, my brain exists then. As humans our knowledge is limited to what we see. That is the extent of "knowing" and truth. You are going beyond the limit of that knowledge, by asking me to prove I exist. Even religion remains in that limit because we can know whether or not a God exists.

SoccerfreakAB2 wrote:I don't really understand what you mean by "add information." I assume you mean alter information, which is the basis for the mutation in itself. Dinosaurs are now believed to have created the first birds. Can I actually prove it to you? No. Yet the evidence is far more logical than that of creation where "God made birds" suffices. The velociraptor, who was found in areas of the world once covered by little ice ages, was also found with fuzzes on it, the first proto-feather so to speak. After a longer ice age, the dinosaur may well have grown feathers to protect from the cold. Also, the movement of the velociraptor, where it moves it two stubby arms out in front, then to the back, resembles almost exactly that of a bird movement with wings. This is a recent find on the Discovery channel. I would say flight is pretty beneficial.

Hypocrisy, you say? If you want to talk about hypocrisy, take a good look at yourself and everything religion once stood for. Your entire life revolves around science, whether you like it or not. Science has made man live longer and happier. It is religious skeptics like you that make the road difficult to these technological and theoretical advancements. People like you would have scorned Galileo for trying to say the Earth revolved around the Sun, you would have hated Columbus for saying the Earth is a sphere and not flat. And you hate Darwin now because once again a theory is proposed that goes against the will of your personal belief.

Prove I exist? The fact that you are communicating with me is proof that I exist. That two rational thoughts can coincide and intertwine via internet is proof enough. And then what if we don't exist? Or anyone else? Then what am I thinking? Why am I moving? Is it my brain telling me that all of this is happening? Well, my brain exists then. As humans our knowledge is limited to what we see. That is the extent of "knowing" and truth. You are going beyond the limit of that knowledge, by asking me to prove I exist. Even religion remains in that limit because we can know whether or not a God exists.

I don't really understand what you mean by "add information." I assume you mean alter information, which is the basis for the mutation in itself. Dinosaurs are now believed to have created the first birds. Can I actually prove it to you? No. Yet the evidence is far more logical than that of creation where "God made birds" suffices. The velociraptor, who was found in areas of the world once covered by little ice ages, was also found with fuzzes on it, the first proto-feather so to speak. After a longer ice age, the dinosaur may well have grown feathers to protect from the cold. Also, the movement of the velociraptor, where it moves it two stubby arms out in front, then to the back, resembles almost exactly that of a bird movement with wings. This is a recent find on the Discovery channel. I would say flight is pretty beneficial.

God wouldn't create two creates 98% alike in DNA. Logically, it supports evolution.

What of the 97% (or 98% or 99%!) similarity claimed between humans and chimps? The figures published do not mean quite what is claimed in the popular publications (and even some respectable science journals). DNA contains its information in the sequence of four chemical compounds known as nucleotides, abbreviated C,G,A,T. Groups of three of these at a time are 'read' by complex translation machinery in the cell to determine the sequence of 20 different types of amino acids to be incorporated into proteins. The human DNA has at least 3,000,000,000 nucleotides in sequence. A proper comparison has not been made. Chimp DNA has not been fully sequenced..
Where did the "97% similarity" come from then? It was inferred from a fairly crude technique called DNA hybridization where small parts of human DNA are split into single strands and allowed to re-form double strands (duplex) with chimp DNA [2]. However, there are various reasons why DNA does or does not hybridize, only one of which is degree of similarity (homology) [3]. Consequently, this somewhat arbitrary figure is not used by those working in molecular homology (other parameters, derived from the shape of the 'melting' curve, are used). Why has the 97% figure been popularised then? One can only guess that it served the purpose of evolutionary indoctrination of the scientifically illiterate.

Interestingly, the original papers did not contain the basic data and the reader had to accept the interpretation of the data 'on faith'. Sarich et al. [4] obtained the original data and used them in their discussion of which parameters should be used in homology studies [5]. Sarich discovered considerable sloppiness in Sibley and Ahlquist's generation of their data as well as their statistical analysis. Upon inspecting the data, I discovered that, even if everything else was above criticism, the 97% figure came from making a very basic statistical error - averaging two figures without taking into account differences in the number of observations contributing to each figure. When a proper mean is calculated it is 96.2%, not 97%. However, there is no true replication in the data, so no confidence can be attached to the figures published by Sibley and Ahlquist.

What if human and chimp DNA was even 96% homologous? What would that mean? Would it mean that humans could have 'evolved' from a common ancestor with chimps? Not at all! The amount of information in the 3 billion base pairs in the DNA in every human cell has been estimated to be equivalent to that in 1,000 books of encyclopaedia size [6]. If humans were 'only' 4% different this still amounts to 120 million base pairs, equivalent to approximately 12 million words, or 40 large books of information. This is surely an impossible barrier for mutations (random changes) to cross [7].

One myth that is deeply ingrained in our culture is that of the supposed "warfare between science and religion." Science deals with fact; religion deals with nice stories, at best. Whenever there is a conflict, obviously science wins the day. This myth goes deeper than just who has the best interpretation of the data. It's as if there is, of necessity, a conflict between the two, and religion has to be shown to be inferior to science.

One story that seems to serve this myth especially well is the story of Galileo. You've probably heard about Galileo's celebrated battle with the church over his views on the nature of the universe. As the story is typically told, Copernicus discovered that the earth revolves around the sun. Galileo, who agreed that the earth was not the center of the universe after all, then developed his work. Supposedly the church wanted to keep man at the center of God's creation and thus as the supreme part of the created order. To move earth out of the center was to somehow lower man. Thus, the church persecuted Galileo and eventually silenced him, showing its raw power over society.

George Bernard Shaw said, "Galileo was a martyr, and his persecutors incorrigible ignoramuses."{2} Says writer Patrick Moore, "The Roman Catholic Church attacked Galileo because the [heliocentric] theory was not reconcilable with certain passages of the Bible. As a consequence, poor Galileo spent most of his life in open conflict with the Church."{3} However, reason ultimately prevailed and science won the day over religious obscurantism.

The problem with this story is that it ranges from the true to the distorted to the blatantly untrue! Galileo's primary trouble was with secular scientists, not with the church. It was when he began reinterpreting Scripture to promote his cause and publicly ridiculed the pope that he got into big trouble.

"The Galileo story was developed by French Enlightenment thinkers as part of their anticlerical program," says Philip Sampson, "but by the late nineteenth century it had created a language of warfare between science and religion." Science became the fount of reasoned knowledge, and religion was "reduced to ignorance and dogma."{4} To accomplish this, however, history had to be distorted.

Let's see what really happened with Galileo. It needs to be noted up front that in Galileo's day the theories of scientists were not thought to give an actual account of the way the heavens worked; they simply provided models for ordering the data. They "were regarded as the play things of virtuosi," as George Sim Johnston put it.{5} "To the Greek and medieval mind, science was a kind of formalism, a means of coordinating data, which had no bearing on the ultimate reality of things."{6}

The fact is that the church didn't care all that much about what Copernicus and Galileo thought about the order of the universe, scientifically speaking. Copernicus' book on the subject circulated for seventy years without any trouble at all. It was the scientists of the day who opposed the theory, because it went against the received wisdom of Aristotle. Copernicus believed that his theory actually described the universe the way it was, and this was unacceptable to the academics. When Galileo published his ideas, it was the ridicule of fellow astronomers that he feared, not the church.

According to Aristotle, the earth was at the center of the universe, and all the rest of the universe was situated in concentric spheres around it. From the moon out, all was thought to be perfect and unchanging. The earth, however, was obviously changing and thus imperfect. All matter in the universe was thought to fall downward toward the center of the earth. The earth is therefore like the trash bin of the universe; it was no compliment to man to emphasize his place on earth. In other words, to be at the center of the universe was not a good thing!

To now say that the earth was out with other planets where things had to be perfect was to seriously undercut Aristotle's ideas. So when Galileo published his notions it was the ridicule of fellow astronomers that he feared, not the church.

It's true that Galileo got into hot water with the church, but it was not because his theory moved man physically from the center of the universe; that was a good thing, given Aristotle's views. Man was already considered small in the universe. Most people already believed that the earth was created for God, not for man. "The doctrine that the earth exists for man's use," says Philip Sampson, "derives from Greek philosophy, not the Bible."{7} Thus, the Copernican theory "ennobled" the status of the earth by making it a planet. So the church in general didn't see the heliocentric theory as a demotion.

The fact is that Galileo was on good terms with the church for a long time, even while advancing his theory. He made sure that the idea he was attacking of the incorruptibility of the universe with its perfect heavens and imperfect earth was an Aristotelian belief and not a doctrine of the church. "Indeed," says Sampson, "the church largely accepted his conclusions, although the die-hard Aristotelians in the universities did not. . . . Far from being constantly harried by obscurantist priests, he was feted by cardinals, received by Pope Paul V and befriended by the future Pope Urban VIII."{8} As historian George Santillana wrote in 1958, "It has been known for a long time that a major part of the church intellectuals were on the side of Galileo, while the clearest opposition to him came from secular circles."{9} He wasn't afraid of the church; he feared the ridicule of his fellow scientists!

What did get Galileo in trouble with the church were two things. First, because the church had historically followed Aristotle (as did secularists) in interpreting scientific data, it wanted hard evidence to support Galileo's views, which he did not have. For Galileo to insist that his theory was true to the way things really were was to step outside proper scientific boundaries. He simply didn't have enough hard data to make such a claim. The problem, then, wasn't between religion and science, but between methods of interpreting the data. But this, in itself, wasn't enough to bring the church down on him.

The bigger problem was Galileo's manner of promoting his beliefs. To do so, he reinterpreted Scripture in contradiction to traditional understandings, which ran counter to the dictates of the Council of Trent. Perhaps even worse was his mockery of the pope. His treatise, Dialogue Concerning the Chief World Systems, took the form of a debate. The character that took Aristotle's view against the heliocentric theory was called Simplicio. His "role in the dialogue is to be a kind of Aunt Sally to be knocked down by Galileo. . . .Galileo puts into Simplicio's mouth a favorite argument used by his friend Pope Urban VIII and then mocks it. In other words, he concluded his treatise by effectively calling the very pope who had befriended him a simpleton for not agreeing with Galileo. This was not a wise move," says Sampson, "and the rest is history."{10} In fact, Galileo himself believed that the major cause of his trouble was the charge that he had made fun of the pope, not that he thought the earth moved.

So the condemnation of Galileo did not result from some basic conflict between science and religion. It "was the result of the complex interplay of untoward political circumstances, political ambitions, and wounded prides."{11} However, the myth continues to bolster the status of secular, naturalistic thought by making religion look bad.

So is there warfare between science and religion? Hardly. This is really warfare between worldviews.

But the story is totally false. It was pure fiction until it was turned into a phony historical claim by late-19th century Darwinists who used it to slander Christians.

The spherical shape of the Earth was known to the ancient Greeks, who even made some pretty good estimates of its circumference. Christian theologians likewise knew that the Earth was a sphere. The only two Christian writers who seem to have advocated a flat Earth were a 4th-century heretic, Lactantius, and an obscure 6th-century eccentric, Cosmas Indicopleustes.

The modern Flat Earth Myth originated with the 19th-century American writer Washington Irving. In his fictional History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), Irving wrote that flat-Earth churchmen had opposed Columbus on the grounds that he would fall off the edge of the Earth if he tried to sail across the Atlantic. In actuality, Columbus's opponents knew not only that the Earth is a sphere, but also approximately how big it is. Since they (like Columbus) knew nothing about the Americas, it was quite reasonable for them to believe that a voyage to the Far East would not be a good investment.

The Flat Earth Myth remained clearly in the realm of fiction until Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859. Then two of Darwin?s followers presented it as actual history in books that defended Darwinism against imaginary attacks from ignorant Christians: John Draper?s The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), and Andrew Dickson White?s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). The pseudo-historical propaganda of Draper and White has been thoroughly discredited by twentieth-century historians.

Apparently, however, Graur doesn't read much history. Instead, he unknowingly caricatures critics of Darwinism on the basis of a myth that the Darwinists themselves fabricated.

SoccerfreakAB2 wrote:I do not assume religion is correct, I have no religion. Religion is based on beliefs of the unknown. I know my beliefs are real because I can see them.