Why Christians and conservatives should accept evolution

You have a point.

O RLY?

 

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I had no idea....

That's absolutely appalling!

 

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Oh I know! They should've worked harder, so that everyone was in the upper 50-percentile!

 

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This is a false dichotomy. Why should evolution and creationism be mutually exclusive?

If God is smart, why wouldn't he design the universe in such a way that things would run pretty much without him having to step in all the time? Just as a great chess player plans many moves in advance, when God said "Let there be light", everything was set in motion to unfold as he desired. That would include evolution.

To state it more simply, God created the universe in such a way that intellegent life would evolve.

 

Yay! Great post.

I guess that means Muslims can wear fully-veiled clothing anywhere they want

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But yeah, I think anyone should believe in whatever they want. If they believe in evolution, cool. If not, cool.

Let's get one thing straight here. As a Christian myself, I don't believe that man came from ape. Or that fish started coming out of the water and eventually evolved into amphibians and then reptiles and then mammals.

I do subscribe to Natural Selection and the "survival of the fittest" though. I think Natural Selection is undeniable almost.

 

I wonder how you entertain these, to me, self-conflicting views?

Do you not recognize that ponds with fish in them (or rivers recently polluted by a chemical spill) often have fish dying for lack of oxygen? It seem like every month or so there is a picture in my newspaper of thousands of dead fish killed by lack of oxygen or on TV a few seconds shown of some of the survivors on the surface with mouths open gulping in air.

Surely in the history of life, some adapted to partially meet their oxygen needs from the air instead of 100% from O2 dissolved in H2O. They had a great advantage when the pond they were in got cut off from the main body of water by a dry spell. - I.e. they might have been able to struggle on fins across a yard or two of mud to the main body of water etc. As the eons passed their were more of these “partially-air-adapted” fish and they could stay out of water longer, etc. Some with slightly modified (“abnormal” or “deformed“) fins were more efficient when dragging their bodies over the mud, so they too were being selected for better “fin-legs,” etc.

How can you hold on to your “no-evolution” views when something like this is a certain result of your accepted “natural-selection” / “survival-of-the-fittest” view?

I am not trying to argue with you, or persuade you of anything. Believe whatever you wish.- I am just very curious how your thoughts on this do not seem very self-contradictory even to you.

 

Certainly a possible view, but it does need the "God from nothing" instead of the "matter from nothing" postulate. I can not imagine where either God or matter came from, but am certain matter does exist and have my doubts about God. Thus, with Occam's help, I will not make problem more complex by postulating something I have no evidence or need to postulate.

Thus, I would turn your observation around:

Intelligent life does exist, thus the universe it is in is such that it could evolve.

 

I believe both evolution and creationism and i also believe most of us are from the vega system...so maybe i'm alone here?

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Well, your closing state is certainly true, but doesn't tell us much. My point was simply that the idea of evolution and creation need not be mutually exclusive. By no means did I mean that as proof of God's existance.

My favorite "proof" of God's existance isn't a proof at all, but a cost benefit analysis. Simpy that if one believes in God, lives a good life following the ten commandments, then dies and there is no God; what's the harm? But if one doesn't believe in God, lives sinfully, he then dies and suffers eternal damnation.

So long as you don't belong to a religion that causes you to become a suicide bomber, what do you have to lose?

 

I'm sure that if you believe it's okay for a 12-year-old to perform fellatio on elder priests and stock up on loads of kiddie porn, then does that count?

I believe that gravity is repulsive.
I believe the universe is less than 10^-43 seconds old.
I believe marble is made of silicon dioxide monads.
I believe the periodic table is BS - in fact, I believe in the one with just four.
I believe there is only 1 planet in the solar system.
I don't believe in imaginary numbers, because guess what? They are imaginary!
I don't believe that Stephen Hawking is paralyzed.
I don't believe in the theory of quantum mechanics.
I don't believe in Newtonian dynamics.
I don't believe in atoms, or molecules - only monads.
I don't believe cells make up living things.
I don't believe in the genetic nonsense - no such thing as DNA.
I don't believe in EM radiation - nor its effects on these stupid "molecules" of "DNA".
I don't believe in the theory of evolution.

Yeah, I can believe whatever the hell I want!

 

That very reasonable POV was first advanced by Pascal. It is usually called "Pascal's Argument." Unfortunately, despite it obvious validity, it usually fails to instill genuine belief in almost all. - for that some "faith" is required.

 

Thanks for the reminder, couldn't remember who said it first.

 

The joys of sodomy and adultery?

 

So we should just "accept" it then? FINE. It's over, you guy's are much to smart.

 

I will tell you that Evolution has one flaw, this one flaw breaks the thread. Really it has two but...burp

 

What's to not accept?

What flaws?

 

Just an interesting choice of word's.

They are obvious, everyone knows the issues so I am not looking to break new ground here. There is a thread around here that makes a joke about it, if you think we have all the answers then fine.

Maybe I sound totally against it but I am not, just throwing something else out there that's all.

 

the keyword here is evolution.
there is no doubt in my mind that evolution is a reality. the big question is how we got here in the first place.. most of the literature i have read on the subject says that life could not have formed on the early earth. some scientists even speculate that life originated else where and was brought here by a meteorite.

 

I think them rather appropriate, those who attempt to argue against evolution simply refuse to accept it as fact. The key is that they are unable to successfully argue it.

No, we don't have all the answers, but to not accept the fact that evolution can be demonstrated would show there aren't any issues.

 

What? You imagine that the obvious was so lost on everyone else that they needed you to make it even more obvious?

Only a lower 50-percentilist would act on the assumption that the upper 50-percentile wasn't much represented around here.

You got that right, at least.

cc: Roman