If all is possible with God then both evolution and abiogenesis (difficult as the latter is) should be possible for God right? .: evolutionary theory and the unrelated abiogenesis posit glorify God...

I for one don't believe that religion is dying, at least not in the US. I think it has enjoyed quite a resurgence which has yet to plateau. It will plateau as these things tend to ebb and flow - but the death of religion has been predicted before, wrongly as I think is the case now. I think it has a little more growth in it before the inevitable decline begins once again.

Sounds a lot like the ignored complaints conservatives had when Mr. Moore premiered his movies.


1) Michael Moore does this constantly throughout his movies

2) Michael Moore does plenty of "setups" and no one bats an eye

3) Michael Moore does this several times a film, for instance the bank/gun thing, or the interview with Heston

4) Maybe that's a legit issue. Or maybe they "lost" the paperwork so that no evidence exists.

5) is a tricky situation: just because "science" may not reject religious explanations, doesn't mean that the PEOPLE working in science, and academia don't reject them.

6) if there's so many, how about listing some of their names?

4) Sounds tin-foilish to me
5) Absolutely some do. Just like some religious followers love to marry multiple women, or think Atheists are born of the devil. So what?
6) Why don't you go to your local University and take a poll as well as get full names?

The problem with "some conservatives" is that they're trying to make our children fail science worse than they currently are failing at it. They're trying to make our children even more stupid by bringing in ID (aka Creation) as a "theory" (of which it isn't even a hypothesis with a basis in reality).

Yes, ...well sort of.

It doesn't actually state that. The theory effectively states that natural selection could produce new species (and thus, we could all have the same common ancestor).

The Darwin Wallace theory was originally published as the "theory of descent with modification via natural selection" or something along those lines. There were many different "evolutionary" theories which were in development at the time which old D didn't want to be associated with. The original theory itself is a bit rough in spots: instincts are learned through repetition, blood transmits information about each part of the animal to the egg (instead of genes) etc.

Its been a century since most theorists viewed themselves as pure "Darwinists".

There is actually lot of depth to the history "transmutation" from one species to another appears a subject of study alongside the birth of science in the 17th century (in Francis Bacon's writings at least). A lot of evidence has developed for it, but I don't think anyone had actually seen it take place until Shaposhnikov produced a new species of Aphid in the 1960s.

Of course, that isn't the end of things: the post modern synthesis theory doesn't include any clauses for how initial informational complexity develops (this doesn't have anything to do with the laws of thermodynamics btw.) that is left to the study of emergent behaviours, math and physics to work out.

The funny thing about Young Earth Creationists is that they haven't developed alongside the development of the sciences. When Punctuated Equilibria came out the vast majority simply interpreted it as a Saltationist theory and dug up arguments that were used against those theories from the mid 19th century.

The fact that essentially no disproof of a disproof of evolutionary theory has been accepted by YEC's effectively shows that they are not scientific and also means that they tend to end up lying in almost every debate. This is probably because they already know that they are right, as truth comes from faith (a fundamentalist approach) as opposed to doubt (the scientific approach). So it becomes easy to believe that "whether you are misleading people about the evidence on a subject doesn't matter - the reason you're misleading them does".

Curious about the "doubt" clause being part of the scientific approach see this argument:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html

Those are my thoughts anyway,

S!

P.S.
Abiogenesis isn't an obstacle for evolution as it has about as much to do with the theory as a lightbulb does (ie. nothing). Darwin actually suggested divine intervention as the source of the first life form.

Another good documentary http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/program.html.

Hello,

All the original points come from an (imperfect) article on the Scientific American website (www.sciam.com)

To the first three (not listed above):
1) I don't recall Moore ever making a connection between Darwin and the Holocaust
2) Yes, he does doesn't he... (I think both cases are beside the point)
3) Didn't Heston recognise Moore (he's pretty noticeable)?

Now for the juicy ones:

4)
There is actually a lot of paperwork and documentation as well as more than one investigation in at least one of the cases. You should be able to find links through http://www.sciam.com

5)
Science actually rejects religious explanations as being scientific. The basic reasoning is that you can explain anything (even really mundane things) by invoking divine intervention. The problem is that it is normally impossible to disprove divine intervention. Even if you could test God isn't there a passage "Thou shalt not test the LORD"?

Without disproof you don't have science: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html

Science is a negative process which advances through creating ideas which are easy to disprove and then disproving them, but it can never prove anything. In this way all branches of the natural sciences could be described as, effectively, "working to disprove divine intervention" in any basic topic. So, Stein comes across as not anti-darwinian, but anti-scientific.

6)
A good request. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution for some initial reading.

I haven't found a good list of scientists yet but I did find this list of clergymen:
http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/religion_science_collaboration.htm

It is true that evolutionary theory depicts a world were bad luck can lead to death and many don't survive to reproduce. There are a number of theological ways around this but most evolutionists do wind up accepting that many people die in car accidents (and its not the victims fault but rather a fact of nature). Does this fact often lead to Atheism (if it does than evolutionary theory might)?

It should also be pointed out that a few theologians have incorporated evolutionary theories (although some of the theories used are a bit dated). For example Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry. It should be noted that Vatican City has the highest acceptance of evolutionary theory of any country on earth.

I hope that helps,

S!

Hardly a proven process. Even Darwin himself had doubts about the theory he created (and it's still just that - a theory).

...and that is where you're either wrong (or there's a very nasty, petty-minded deity at work - leaving perfect clues that are fake). "Theory" means nothing else than that not all pieces of the puzzle have been found... but enough pieces are there to see pretty well what the picture depicts. And to put this comparison one step further, the puzzle depicts a still life with bread and wine, it's just not clear yet which wine exactly because that piece is still missing. If you apply creationists version of "theory" to the puzzle however, they want you to believe that the puzzle may even depict Disney characters.

What about all of the fossil evidence (both animals and human ancestors) which has been collected and dated over the past 100 years or so?

Oh, and Darwin had some doubts about his theory of Natural Selection because he had no idea about genetics at the time (how could he anyway?) and most of the major fossil evidence concerning human ancestors were made after his death.