Evolutionism and Creationism?

We haven't had a good religion thread lately.

So I'm reading the Nytimes editorial page today. According to them a recent gallup poll showed that only 28% of people in the US believe in Evolutionism. IS that true? Crazy...maybe us East Coast people are a bit different from the rest of America.

I remember sitting through my third grade class where only creationism was taught (Episcopal school). That night my parents deciding we were taking a family trip to Calvert Clyffs on Sat. On Monday they sent me back to school to ask "If the world is only 10,000 years old, how can this fossil be hundreds of thousands of years old?" (this was before you were forbidden to take the fossils)

Over the years, I've come a little more into the middle ground as I believe something had to start everything. However, I tend to believe evolution took over from there. Heck, I see it. I need only look at average heights among people and various other traits among people and animals to see we change over generations. I can't believe only 28% of people in the US believe in evolution.

I guess I'm stuck with the old "IN the absence of contrary evidence, the symplist explanation is usally the correct one." IF science says the fossil is 10K years old, I'll probably believe that over somebody saying God created everything exactly as it exists 10K years ago. I guess personally I'm okay with faith to explain things I otherwise can't explain, but I just can't use it to explain what is already explainable with science. That goes double when faith's explanation differs from science.

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised though. There's a survey course at the University of MD that tracks people's scientific literacy in the US. According to my friend taking the course now, the past few years have had an even split between people who think the earth revolves around the sun and people who think the sun revolves around the earth.

I believe in Evolution, because it can be proven by science, but, I am not saying there is no God or anything like that.

I guess I believe that the perception of religion may not be "exactly" as they people picture it... I believe there is a happy medium that exists...

Case in point, many events in the Bible can be proven... 2 great floods=2 ice ages etc.... The bible says God created everything in seven days..... are those seven of our days?? Who is to say a day isn't thousands of years??

Everything in the Bible doesn't have to have a literal translation... and besides, the Bible was written in Hebrew and the last time I checked, there are still Hebrew words that don't have an English counterpart and when ever translating, you leave alot open for interpretation.

Anyway, just some scattered thoughts..

Creationism

It's a MUCH bigger leap of faith to believe man evolved from an ape, than to believe he was created by The God who created our entire universe.

There is virtually NO EVIDENCE for evolution (if it could be proven by science, that would have already happened) and even Darwin admitted it was a far-flung theory.

Man was created but it is doubtful the deities described in any bronze age or iron age book were responsible.

I do believe that there is something larger at work in the universe -- that the rarity of life, and especially of this planet, cannot be explained by science alone.

That said, I think science gives a more accurate glimpse of the workings of a higher power than religious texts.

I have problems with both theories (Where's the missing link ie). So Im a Raeallian (sp). We all came from space.

Seriously though, I'll have to think on this one.

When I was in college, I became convinced that humanity must have evolved from lizards! My apartment faced the pool and EVERY time the sun came out, it was filled with people sunning themselves!

All it comes down to for me is if you have studied astronomy, science has proven som much as to the birth of the universe. The overwhelming theory that is close to fact is that there was a "big bang." Where that came from is where you can put your -----place religious beliefs here--- faith to work..........

Codeo, I'm with you on the whole not as portrayed in the bible.

To my way of thinking, 10,000 years must have just seemed like the largest chunk of conceivable time at the writing of the bible. So maybe saying 10,000 years ago was simply the equivalent of "a really long time ago."

Like I said, it's not that I don't believe in God. I simply don't believe the creation story took place as specified in the bible. What's more, evolution seems to be a given and measurable over modern generations. On a bigger scale, one can just look at the skeletons of people going back through the ages.

If God created earlier primates and we evolved from them ... wouldn't that encompass BOTH theories?

Yippeeee! Everyone's right!

The game is afoot.

Google "Ganesh Particle"

I cant believe the vote is near 50/50.

I voted for Evolution. I dont think believing in that theory means you have to forgo God or a higher power. God could have just as easily directed evolution through dna codes. Creationism loses me when it says the world began in 4004 B.C.

Originally posted by Kilmer17

I have problems with both theories (Where's the missing link ie). So Im a Raeallian (sp). We all came from space.

Seriously though, I'll have to think on this one.

The missing link is alive and well in the pacific northwest....

Brave, you said what I was trying to say, but only better.........

Damn you:doh:

In whose image was The Adam – the prototype of modern humans, Homo sapiens – created?

The Bible asserts that the Elohim said: “Let us fashion the Adam in our image and after our likeness.” But if one is to accept a tentative explanation for enigmatic genes that humans possess, offered when the deciphering of the human genome was announced in mid-February 2001, the feat was decided upon by a group of bacteria!

“Humbling” was the prevalent adjective used by the scientific teams and the media to describe the principal finding – that the human genome contains not the anticipated 100,000 - 140,000 genes (the stretches of DNA that direct the production of amino-acids and proteins) but only some 30,000+ -- little more than double the 13,601 genes of a fruit fly and barely fifty percent more than the roundworm’s 19,098. What a comedown from the pinnacle of the genomic Tree of Life!

Moreover, there was hardly any uniqueness to the human genes. They are comparative to not the presumed 95 percent but to almost 99 percent of the chimpanzees, and 70 percent of the mouse. Human genes, with the same functions, were found to be identical to genes of other vertebrates, as well as invertebrates, plants, fungi, even yeast. The findings not only confirmed that there was one source of DNA for all life on Earth, but also enabled the scientists to trace the evolutionary process – how more complex organisms evolved, genetically, from simpler ones, adopting at each stage the genes of a lower life form to create a more complex higher life form – culminating with Homo sapiens.

The “Head-scratching” Discovery

It was here, in tracing the vertical evolutionary record contained in the human and the other analyzed genomes, that the scientists ran into an enigma. The “head-scratching discovery by the public consortium,” as Science termed it, was that the human genome contains 223 genes that do not have the required predecessors on the genomic evolutionary tree.

How did Man acquire such a bunch of enigmatic genes?

In the evolutionary progression from bacteria to invertebrates (such as the lineages of yeast, worms, flies or mustard weed – which have been deciphered) to vertebrates (mice, chimpanzees) and finally modern humans, these 223 genes are completely missing in the invertebrate phase. Therefore, the scientists can explain their presence in the human genome by a “rather recent” (in evolutionary time scales) “probable horizontal transfer from bacteria.”

In other words: At a relatively recent time as Evolution goes, modern humans acquired an extra 223 genes not through gradual evolution, not vertically on the Tree of Life, but horizontally, as a sideways insertion of genetic material from bacteria…

An Immense Difference

Now, at first glance it would seem that 223 genes is no big deal. In fact, while every single gene makes a great difference to every individual, 223 genes make an immense difference to a species such as ours.

The human genome is made up of about three billion neucleotides (the “letters” A-C-G-T which stand for the initials of the four nucleic acids that spell out all life on Earth); of them, just a little more than one percent are grouped into functioning genes (each gene consists of thousands of "letters"). The difference between one individual person and another amounts to about one “letter” in a thousand in the DNA “alphabet.” The difference between Man and Chimpanzee is less than one percent as genes go; and one percent of 30,000 genes is 300.

So, 223 genes is more than two thirds of the difference between me, you and a chimpanzee!

An analysis of the functions of these genes through the proteins that they spell out, conducted by the Public Consortium team and published in the journal Nature, shows that they include not only proteins involved in important physiological but also psychiatric functions. Moreover, they are responsible for important neurological enzymes that stem only from the mitochondrial portion of the DNA – the so-called “Eve” DNA that humankind inherited only through the mother-line, all the way back to a single “Eve.” That finding alone raises doubt regarding that the "bacterial insertion" explanation.

A Shaky Theory

How sure are the scientists that such important and complex genes, such an immense human advantage, was obtained by us --“rather recently”-- through the courtesy of infecting bacteria?

“It is a jump that does not follow current evolutionary theories,” said Steven Scherer, director of mapping of the Human Genome Sequencing Center, Baylor College of Medicine.

“We did not identify a strongly preferred bacterial source for the putative horizontally transferred genes,” states the report in Nature. The Public Consortium team, conducting a detailed search, found that some 113 genes (out of the 223) “are widespread among bacteria” – though they are entirely absent even in invertebrates. An analysis of the proteins which the enigmatic genes express showed that out of 35 identified, only ten had counterparts in vertebrates (ranging from cows to rodents to fish); 25 of the 35 were unique to humans.

“It is not clear whether the transfer was from bacteria to human or from human to bacteria,” Science quoted Robert Waterson, co-director of Washington University’s Genome Sequencing Center, as saying.

But if Man gave those genes to bacteria, where did Man acquire those genes to begin with?

The missing link is alive and well and roots for the Dallas Cowboys (or sometimes the Iggles)!

I haven't read all the posts, however your poll fails to account for the fact that people like me believe in both Creationism and Evolution, in essence that God created the universe as it is, including evolution.

Science, like all other earthly pursuits, catches only occasional glimpses of truths, not Truth. The belief by scientists that their scientific discoveries disprove God's existence is simply silly.

People around medival times were short. People today are taller. Is that evolution? Or no?

How do you prove something is evolution and not just adaption? Is adaption a form of evolution?

What did the thousands of different species of animals (current and extinct) evolve from? What did apes evolve from (or did they de-evolve) :laugh:

Originally posted by rskin24

People around medival times were short. People today are taller. Is that evolution? Or no?

How do you prove something is evolution and not just adaption? Is adaption a form of evolution?

What did the thousands of different species of animals (current and extinct) evolve from? What did apes evolve from (or did they de-evolve) :laugh:

im not a science/biology geek but i did take a few anthropology classes at school. from what little i remember in the simplest terms the difference between adaption and evolution is the ability to produce viable offspring. so if a short guys and a tall girls were not able to produce kids or could only produce kids that were unable to breed then you could claim they are different species. Horses and Donkeys can produce mules but mules cant breed themselves. (right??..lol)

Guys, we're all just androids who've been programmed by our corporate masters to believe that we're human.

It's a kinda wacky, Director's Cut-version-of-Blade Runner sorta theory.

You need not look further than human body. It's complex inner workings, how everything is perfectly designed for us to use i.e.

hands,arms,feet,ect...

We were created with "free will" meaning we can choose to believe or not to believe.

GOD does not want "robots" following him.

RU,

hands and feet ain't nothing compared to how nephrons function in the kidneys, how so many cells are so specialized, and all the other complex workings of the body. studying that stuff in med school made me start to rethink the evolution rap. that said, there is lots of evidence supporting evolution. i'm stuck in the middle with code and brave...

Wow, I didn't know that so many people still believed in creationism! If the existence of Vestigial structure, branching organization of life, similarities in embryonic structures, Homology, Biogeography, and genetic similarities isn't enough evidence to assure you of the existence of evolution, then I don't what would.

Holy crap. (bad pun intended). Yeah, what can I say... I'm shocked. Speechless. I'll just leave it at that. What year is it again?