Okay, I just started reading this post, and I got through about 1/2 of it, forgive me if I am being redundant. Also, I have a lot of debate to incorporate, so this may be a less than linear response.
I should also not that I am not a particularly religious person, I couldn'ttell you the last time I wnet to church, but as I reread my response, I see that I sound like I am fairely in support of creationism, but really, I just want to lay down some ideas and some facts.
1) The Bible
The bible is a document that presents something of a paradox. While it is absolutely full of historical testamony, it is also not to be taken literally. The result from this paradox is that currently, many people view those who wrote down the bible to be inferior to us because we have modern science to help us comprehend everything. We also discount Any eye witness testimony because it seems very removed and distant from us today. When we read such testimony, it often comes across as unbelievable, and because it lacks a scientific understanding in its explanation, we deem it unbelievable.
2) Man today:
The above is actually an excellent segway into the problem we run into with man presently. We as a species are fairly presumptuous. We feel that we have a good enough understanding of how the world works that we have in many ways mastered it and have the right to do as we wish with it. In fact, I believe somewhere in the bible it is said that god made man master of all the animals and whatever else man wanted. The fact of the matter is that we for all our modern science do not know what we are doing a lot of the time. For instance, calling upon some reading I've been doing recently: in our efforts to make crops more productive (including pesticides, fertiliser, and genetic engineering) we have actually increased the imput to yield ratio of crops. In other words, farming is not as efficient because we have to pour a lot more resources into it to get the yield that we get. Pesticides have actually increased the pest problem by killing the natural enemies of the insects that we were actually trying to get rid of (can you say collateral damage). This has also lead to groundwater pollution, increased cancer rates, and who knows what sort of long term damage to the food chain. Also fertiliser causes farmers to be much less likely use crop rotation methods, alond with this goes the practice of planting two crops in the same field at the same time ie: corn and alfalfa (for example) where the corn would grow tall, and the amfalfa would stay low and keep weeds down while preventing erosion. The point is that because there is a chemical alternative that is far more demanding to produce, produces hasardous byproducts, and is no more efficient than the traditional methods, but is still taunted by science as the answer to our problems, we do it. The same problem has developed with genetic engineering, in Asia, there were hundreds of varieties of rice. Currently because rice is being engineered and bred to produce higher yields per plant there are only 30 prominent varieties currently, this was not a natural process, but I think since variety of species is a basic tennent of Darwinian evolution we can all agree that this unnatural progression is a bad thing. That was somewhat roundabout, but what I am trying to say is that man is currently very busy knowing everything. we think we know the best ways to do many things, and fail to look at the merits of how things were done by our "primitive nacestors" and this mindset predisposes many of us to view the old ways as foolish, or superstitious nonsense.
3) Darwin:
Darwin is an interesting character. He was actually a very devout christian for a large part of his life. He held off publishing "Origin of Species" for I believe nearly ten years because he was afraid of the repercussions it might have in terms of his faith. The factor that made him decide to publish was the death of his young daughter. This was very traumatic to him, he could not understand why god would take away someone so innocent and young. In his struggle to reconcile his faith with the events of his life, he decided to publish his theory. This isn't really part of the argument, but it is some interesting background information.
4) Evolution:
The interesting thing about evolution is that it was presented as a theory. Since then, science haslargely swallowed it whole, and done very little questioning of its origional form. Granted, the question of where man came from is certainly a burning one, that begs at least a rudimentary explanation. There are definately some problems with Darwin's theory though. First of all, that picture in all of our highschool biology text books of the embryos that look nearly the same in their early stages...that was a fake, and currently that is taught at college levels (namely Uconn where I go; which should be noted is a fairly liberal school in many reguards) as a farce that should lead us to question long standing theories. Also, evolution should be a fairly smooth process. Yes, dead ends could certainly occur, but the lines of species that still exist should show a very smooth progression. I understand that fossils are only created under very specific circumstances, but our current fossil record is not a slow curve so much as it is a flight of stairs with distinct species at different levels. Yet another problem, and in my mind this is a big one...is that the process currnently supported as the way life [url=startedhttp://evolutionoftruth.com/evo/evogene.htm...the][url=startedhttp://evolutionoftruth.com/evo/evogene.htm...the][url=startedhttp://evolutionoftruth.com/evo/evogene.htm...the]startedhttp://evolutionoftruth.com/evo/evogene.htm...the[/url][/url][/url] basic elements to make the amino acid bases that create DNA were all swirling around in primordial oceans, and then lightning striles caused reactions creating amino acids which eventually formed primitive single cell organisms, was also recently revisited, and is no longer a promision theory. Given the electricity, the existing elements, and the atmosphere
http://www.rps.psu.edu/0101/reflections.html of the Earth at the time, only one amino acid base was created, and the byproduct of this was lots and lots of ammonia, to my knowlege, even chemotrophic bacteria do not survive in ammonia rich environments; and I know I certainly don't like the smell.
5) God
In the traditional christian view, God is all powerful, and all knowing. This presents a problem for us because any time something happens that we do not understand, it become an easy cop out to say that god works in mysterious ways. This explanation eventually gets old, and human nature causes us to want something more. I think that if god does exist, and is all powerful, then certainly there would be a lot of things we could not hope to understand (action at a distance forces for example gravity and magnetism). It would also be feasable that god placed all the fossils on earth, all the evidence as a test of faith. Sounds like a cop-out doesn't it? But all things considered, I think evolution is far from a perfct theory
http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/cartoon.htm. I think creationism is also a bit hard to swallow in its entirety.
So what do you all think?
