[Guest]

I am interested in seeing proof of macroevolution. Allow me to explain my motive ...

I'm a Christian, but not a fundamentalist in the traditional sense. I believe in the biblical creation account, but I don't think that even a fairly literal interpretation (other than the use of the words "day", "morning", and "evening", which don't make any sense if interpreted in the common 24-hour manner) requires a young earth. Therefore, all of the anti-creationist arguments regarding the age of the earth are just fine by me. I'm more interested in reconciling the creation of "kinds" and the account of Adam and Eve with the theory of common ancestry. I firmly believe that there should not be a conflict between my beliefs and what can be proven by science. However, while I have seen the pretty clear-cut evidence of microevolution, or adaptation, as I prefer to think of it, I'm still pretty fuzzy on the proof for macroevolution, particularly the idea that all living things, including humans, share a common origin.

A few years ago I did a fair amount of research and came away unsatisfied. I always ended up feeling like the proposed theories were built on unproven card-houses, and it seemed like it was easy to cut the legs out from under the accepted solutions. But I'm also fully aware that many honest, intelligent people with far more experience than I have labored over these topics for decades, and I'd really like to see what it is that I'm missing. So, since these forums seem a likely place to find people who can weigh in on this topic ... show me what you got.

Although it may be hard for me, I will try not to refute anything you present, although I may ask a few questions. If there's something that bothers me enough that I want to discuss it further, I'll make a new post. Thanks in advance.

[Guest]

You are looking for "proof" of macroevolution. Do you always require "proof," when deciding whether to accept a belief?

Did you require proof when you decided to believe in God, or the devil, or angels, or the hereafter? Can you prove that you have a soul? Can you prove that Jesus died for our sins? Can you prove that the Bible is the word of God?

Why do so many religious people require proof of evolution, and nothing else? If you can believe in so many things, based on faith, why can't you have faith in evolution?

If you weren't convinced by your reading, then I don't see how you are going to be by anything said here. The evidence for macro evolution includes observations in physics, geology, chemistry, and biology.

Looking at geological strata you can see that fossils of simpler life occur beneath those of more complex life (allowing for upheavals, etc.). Radioactive dating of any number of elements shows the relative age of deposits. The age of rocks can also sometimes be determined by the magnetic pole information laid down in rocks as they cooled. Analysis of DNA shows the relation between various species and it corresponds very well with the family tree determined by more traditional methods of comparing like structures in fossilized life forms.

Almost our entire knowledge of the physical sciences would have to be overturned by the presumption that man and other creatures were each created separately as they exist now, rather than gradually evolving over time from common ancestors.

On the other hand, you have a book with no evidence that it was dictated directly by God, that describes one sequence of events of creation. It is just one creation story of many, most of which contradict one another. There is no more or less evidence for the Biblical story than there is of Native American creation accounts.

For starters, there are an awfully large number of living animal groups that bear remarkable resemblance to other living groups. As I mentioned above, for example, there's the human-chimp comparison. Under Special Creation there is no (as in zero, zilch, nada) reason or explanation why these two allegedly separate and distinct groups should share any similarities, much less the large number of similarities that they do share. Those sorts of observations are common throughout the animal and plant worlds (and, of course, the same holds true for all living things).

Now, factor in the fossil record. Here, we have vastly more organisms which we can examine and compare to existing groups. And we still see the same pattern: extinct groups represented in the fossil record share remarkable similarities with living groups, and with each other. The degree of similarity between fossil and living organism may decrease as one goes further back in the fossil record, but almost always there are at least other fossil groups which maintain a remarkable degree of similarity to the fossil being examined.

The conclusion, then, when coupled with the knowledge that organisms do change over time, is that these seemingly separate groups we see today, and in the fossil record, are related by descent.

Now, one can argue that similarity in form is a natural consequence of similarity of function, and that this is sufficient to explain any superficial similarities we see between organisms today, or between living organisms and extinct fossils. The problem is that we can construct trees of similarity, similar to one's own family tree but on a much larger scale, that is completely independent of function -- and those trees themselves can be unified into a single, larger tree comprised of all living things. If function were the primary producer of such similarities, then we would expect to see multiple, independent trees, based on lifestyle. Birds, bats, and pterosaurs ought to group most closely together; grazing mammals ought to group more closely with grazing reptiles than to whales; and so on. Most importantly, there would be no unification possible between those trees - which is not at all what we see at all. Further, at the genetic level, we see what appear to be selectively neutral sections of DNA which are remarkably conservative among groups which we have otherwise presumed to be related by descent. Again, this is not at all an expected result of Special Creation.

Consider this image: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs...imeline_pdf.pdf

(It's a .pdf document, obviously)

This is a what is known as a "supertree" for all major mammal groups, showing their relationships and relative times of divergence, based on a) the assumption of common descent and b) similarities found via multiple modes of inquiry (e.g., morphological, genetic, etc.). Were common descent mere fiction, such an image would be impossible to create.

Here is another supertree, this time for all major dinosaur groups. Again, such a thing would not be possible if common descent were not the case.

Then you have projects like this, which attempt to unite all those trees into a single, gi-huge-ic Tree of Life. Again, this would be an impossible task if all these various groups were not, in fact, related by descent from one another.

In the end, there is no single piece of evidence that allows us to state definitively that all life is descended form a single common ancestor which appeared some 3.9 billion years ago. It is a conclusion based on numerous lines of inquiry regarding the "whys" of similiarity between extant and extinct forms.

Once you get past this most important hurdle, the rest of the macroevolutionary concepts (e.g., speciation, diversification, extinction, evolution of novel structures, etc.) fall into place quite neatly.

[Guest]

A recent issue of Scientific American approached the issue of a common origin of life by looking for signs of the converse: that some life exists that doesn't share a common origin with all the rest. Are Aliens Among Us? by Paul Davies.

The article shows that despite the best efforts of scientists, no form of life, no matter how extreme the conditions, has ever been found that shows a second independent origination point.

The underlying point is that having once emerged, the common form of life would simply out-compete any newcomers unless they retreated into areas where other life could not follow or were built on principles that exploited resources that known life could not utilize.

One of the commonest techniques in mathematics is to try to prove the converse of your theorem and show that it leads to a contradiction or an impossibility. Most other sciences have few opportunities to go down this route. Failing to find non-common life is a fascinating indicator of how interrelated all known life must be.

The strongest evidence of common origin and the nature of inheritance and variation of characteristics is via the mechanism that Darwin did not have access to in his day; the genome. Although Gregor Mendel demonstrated the principles of inheritance, Darwin was not aware of his studies, and in any case it wasn't until Theodor Boveri and Walter Sutton, working in the early 1900's, identified the chromosomes as the carriers of Mendelian alleles (units of inheritance of phenotypes or expressed characteristics), and Thomas Hunt Morgan famously demonstrated this (picking up a Nobel Prize in the process) with the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, since become a favorite of those working in the field of genetics for its rather discrete allele structures and ease of breeding. The definitive work on modern evolutionary synthesis (the combining of the various fields within biology into a framework connected by the organizing concept of evolution and the underlying theory of natural selection) didn't occur until the 1930's when biologists like R. A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr, Sewall Wright, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and many others started to piece together the actual structure of the field with detailed hypotheses supported by observational and experimental evidence.

For anyone who knows about modern molecular genetics, it's simply impossible to deny that organisms share a common core of genetic code, often to an amazing degree; even comparisons between different phyla (a taxonomic rank below kindoms like Animalia) demonstrate a large degree of genetic commonality, and within genus the difference in genetic content of the genome between one species and another is on the close order of a percent or less. Furthermore, it is possible with modern gene sequencing methods to examine and compare the genomes of both extant and extinct species and make an accounting of the differences and commonalities. This clearly demonstrates a line of progression and divergence between species and their presumed antecedants which typically correlates quite well with mophological fossil classification (and where it doesn't often results in a correction to the fossil record).

The saltation-created "hopeful monster" (a new species created by massive, overarching changes to the genome) that would be inexplicably too complex of an alteration to have occurred naturally has never found, and such a spectre (often raised by those trying to make a definitive distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, or trying to argue that the differences between species and/or completeness of various characteristics are irreducibly complex) is in reality a strawman; what we find from a genetic examination of the fossil record--where it exists in some semblance of completeness--is indeed a gradual modification of the genome and corresponding additions from mutation and drift that are adopted piecemeal, evolving characteristics gradually and separating from an existing species group by some method of reproductive isolation.

I realize I've thrown out a lot of technical terms, to which I've attempted some brief explanation; however, the above rationale probably won't satisfy you if you are, in fact, completely unschooled in genetics and molecular biology. What simple, pat, brief, definitive argument or example can I give you that the mechanism of natural selection and the overall framework of evolution are true? I can't, any more than I can give you a one page summary of the history of the Balkans, or explain the mechanism behind gyroscopic motion without going into far more detail and demanding you to learn the pertinent underpinning knowledge. If you are predisposed to disbelieve that evolution even occurs because you can't observe or experiment with it in your kitchen sink, then nothing anyone will write on a message board will convince you otherwise. (Note that evolution and the science behind it itself says nothing about abiogenesis--the origin of life--only about the progression of modification, and so at least in that sense is not in direct conflict with a liberal reading of divine creation. Nor can it dispute claims that all events that occur are driven by some unseen architect, operating via mysterious unobservable interactions; it can only demonstrate the lack of necessity for such.)

However, if you are sincerely interested in learning about the science behind the theory of natural selection--if only to better argue it--may I suggest reading Ernst Mayr's What Evolution Is (a detail summary of evolutionary theories), followed by some of the essays of the highly readable Stephen J. Gould? (The Richness of Life is a good place to start.) If you get that far, I'd then recommend reading something of Richard Dawkins, a "neo-Darwinistic" promoter of gene-centric interpretation (that genes are the essential units of selection), which while still being firmly under the banner of natural selection is in many ways in competition with the more holistic interpretations of Mayr, Gould, et al.

As for contrasting the "house of cards" of scientific theories regarding evolution against the creation story of the Biblical book of Genesis and the inception of Adam and then Eve (from Adam's rib), I can offer nothing other than to note that no one can objectively demonstrate that the story is anything but fiction, and that no physical record of those characters and their offspring remain for inspection or analysis. The story (or rather, I should say, stories) of Genesis are certainly at odds with both our understanding of the origin of the Earth and life upon it, such as they are, and also in literal interpretation dramatically contradicted by our current knowledge of physics, geology, biology, et cetera. One can make the case that an looser interpretation still roughly conforms to our current understanding of the natural world, but I fail to see what that offers from a scientific point of view beyond the comfort that what you have accepted on faith still fits within an objective understanding of nature. To paraphrase Niels Bohr, it is wrong to think that the task of science is to find out how nature is. Science concerns what we can say about nature. Faith--religious or otherwise--stands outside of that.

[Guest]

One more link for you. It's a less than 4 1/2 minute YouTube video. It's just one of literally millions of pieces of evidence for common ancestry. After watching it, I don't see how one could refute common ancestry without also believing their god is being deliberately deceptive in His creation.

[Guest]

I firmly believe that there should not be a conflict between my beliefs and what can be proven by science.

That requires modifying your beliefs when science proves them wrong. The Old Testament creation account sounds suspiciously like the sort of rubbish ignorant primitives would come up with to explain the cosmos. None of it jibes with scientific investigation and evidence. You're already willing to ignore the "days" mentioned in Genesis, yet you hold on to god creating the animals whole?

I think it might be worthwhile for you to define the difference between "micro" and "macro" evolution. As has been pointed out, evolution is a gradual process. If you believe that small changes are taking place, what is there to stop them from accumulating into larger changes? Be specific.

If you can't see how small changes could lead to different species, you might be surprised to know that speciation has been observed in a laboratory.

Edited February 1, 2008 by Scraff

[Guest]

Wow. That was a far more thorough response than I expected, Martini, and I really appreciate your taking the time to reply in such detail. I read it all and looked at all the links and I must say you've given me some new and interesting things to think about, which is exactly what I was hoping for. I was particularly intrigued by the Ken Lee video, and I will hopefully find the time to watch the entire presentation in the next couple days (since all 2 hours of it is on YouTube). As I noted, I am not interested in arguing, but I definitely feel it's important to respond to a few of the points and questions you raised. Hopefully I can make some time for it tomorrow.

That requires modifying your beliefs when science proves them wrong.

I would agree with that, the operative word being "proves," combined with a realistic perspective of what "science" is. According to dictionary.com:

1. a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws.

2. systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.

Therefore, "science" is limited by what it can observe and test, and while I agree with the acceptance of theories that are supported by evidence, there is always the difficulty of deciding what constitutes "proof." Einstein's theory of relativity has been supported by testing to the point that we can have a high degree of trust in its predictions, even though we know they don't hold at the quantum level. So is the theory proven? I point this out as a difficulty, not with your statement, but with my request for "proof." Martini was probably right that such "proof" cannot be provided, and I will try to keep an open mind to what the evidence suggests, rather than getting stuck on the concept of proof.

The Old Testament creation account sounds suspiciously like the sort of rubbish ignorant primitives would come up with to explain the cosmos. None of it jibes with scientific investigation and evidence. You're already willing to ignore the "days" mentioned in Genesis, yet you hold on to god creating the animals whole?

An attack on the biblical account will not be useful here. My belief does not arise from my innate desire to blindly accept myths. I believe, for a great number of reasons which I do not wish to discuss at this moment, that the Bible is inspired by God. It thus follows that I would view the Genesis account as having authority, and that I would be interested in determining how the specific creation described in the Bible meshes with what has been observed.

I think it might be worthwhile for you to define the difference between "micro" and "macro" evolution.

Good point. By macroevolution, I am essentially referring to the development of large sets of characteristics, not simply to speciation. For example, I would see dogs, cats, horses, etc. as distinct groups which would require macroevolution to produce. Variations in fruit-flies, finches, and cave-dwelling fish would fall into the category I would describe as microevolution.

[bonanova]

I pose a question, close to the OP and then comment what I know.

At the end I'll say something about what I believe.

Question:

Is macro evolution consistent [or not] with Biblical creation?

Examine the creation accounts given in Genesis [KJV used]

The text uses two verbs, chiefly, to describe the world's origin.

Gen. 2:3 he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

Examine what is "created" and what is "made".

Three passages use the verb create.

Create [ex nihilo - make something from nothing]

Gen 1:1. God created the heaven and the earth.

Gen 1:21. God created ... living creature ...

Gen 1:27. God created man in his own image. elaborating, Gen 2:7. God ... breathed into [man] ... the breath of life

More often the verb made is used.

Make [fashion - from something that exists]

Gen 1:7. God made the firmament ...

Gen 1:16. God made two great lights ...

Gen 1:16. ... he made the stars also.

Gen 2:9. ... out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree ..

Gen 1:25. God made the beast of the earth after his kind ...

Gen 2:22 And from the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman

Gen 3:1 ... the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.

Gen 3:7 ... and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

Other passages use the verb Let [allow or permit]

Things that are said to have appeared by use of the verb Let, as with Made, came from existing stuff: light, firmament, dry ground, grass, sun, moon, stars.

Genesis asserts three things were created by God from nothing:

[1] The physical universe: matter.

[2] Life.

[3] Man [in the image of God; energized by the spirit [breath] of God].

Apart from these, other things [both inert and living] were made

Examine scientific knowledge on these three points.

1(a) Big Bang - Time Zero.

1(b) God created the heaven and the earth.

Evidence continues to mount that the Big Bang [bB] occurred 15-20 billion years ago: chiefly, the red shift of receding stars [optical Doppler effect]. Hubble's law that states the furthest stars are receding at the greatest velocities. Second, the distribution of chemical elements in the galaxy. Big Bang theories predict that hydrogen atoms collided to form helium roughly in a ratio of 25% helium to 75% hydrogen, and we observe that ratio in our galaxy. Third, radioactive decay. Carbon-14 [half life about 5000 years] and Uranium 238 [half life about 4 billion years] date the oldest earth and moon rocks at 4-5 billion years, the approximate age of the solar system, and by inference from stars whose evolution is well studied, we date our galaxy about 10 billion years. Last, we observe a cosmic echo of the Big Bang. By theory, 300,000 years or so after BB, the universe cooled enough to begin radiating according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law, and, the frequency [energy] of this radiation decreased with time by known principles to the microwave range consistent with 3 degrees Kelvin, the current temperature of interstellar space.

As we trace the physical evolution of the universe backwards, we are stopped at a cosmic age of about 10^-47 seconds. Previous to that, the temperature and density of the universe are so great all our theories and equations break down. Our first picture of the universe is a perfectly symmetrical, 10-dimensional space-time. The four known forces: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear were unified by the super-string. Ten dimensions soon became four, as six of them collapsed. the universe was an opaque ionic soup for about 300,000 years. Then matter condensed into atoms and molecules. Stars and galaxies formed, and things became something resemblant to what we see today.

Genesis says In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Science knows nothing before 10^-47 seconds.

We have no theory - descriptive or causal - for the beginning.

There is no inconsistency between two points of view, one of which does not exist.

2(a) Life itself evolved from primordial soup

2(b) God created ... living creatures

There is an understandable difference between an elephant gun and an elephant. The elephant possesses something the gun does not - although in the hands of a marksman the gun can remove that difference - namely life. Darwin taught that living beings could defy the 2nd law of thermodynamics - that disorder must follow order - through the process of natural selection. While the overall disorder increases, as the carcasses of the non-survivors decay, more developed species - those better suited to the environment - could come into existence through favorable mutation. And so evolution can take one understandably from an amoeba to a homo sapiens. With plants thrown in for good measure.

But Darwin does not describe the origin of the amoeba.

To get the amoeba, we need something called primordial soup. And a bolt of lightning. Or maybe cosmic radiation. Something. Anything. In the laboratory, elemental carbon has been coaxed into hydrocarbon rings - the building blocks of life. But so far, that's it.

Genesis says God created life itself.

Science has made a hydrocarbon but not made something living from something inert.

Darwin does not address origins of life.

There is no inconsistency between two points of view on the origin of life. Only one exists.

There is no inconsistency between Genesis' "made" and Darwin's "evolved."

3(a) Man is evolution's highest achievement - the most complex of all species

3(b) Man, uniquely, bears the image of God and lives by the spirit [breath] of God.

For the secularist who has gotten past the origin of matter and the origin of life, it's the simplest of processes to get to homo sapiens. Time plus chance. Oodles of time to be sure, and the most favorable of chances. But the chances don't have to be so terribly favorable, if they're provided with say trillions of years to play out.

Here the comparison of two views is the most subjective. On the one hand, neither point of view sports compelling evidence: creationists have two or three verses in Genesis to support their belief; science has no experimental evidence to dispute it.

More so than with the first two creative acts, belief here seems to be personal choice.

===================

Some personal notes.

Having said some things with the motivation of framing debate on what is claimed by Christians to be the acts of ex-nihilo creation vs what parts of evolutionary thought may not be inconsistent with Biblical text -- having said these things, I share some personal thoughts, for what they may be worth. You won't be more a friend if you agree, nor less a friend if you disagree. I won't say you're wrong; and I anticipate you won't feel driven to point out weaknesses you see in the following.

I am a Christian. I take the Bible as a rule of practice in my personal life. I believe that the God described in the Bible exists and did and does and will do the things written therein. I have an experiential acquaintance with God. That experience is intrinsically personal, and I cannot transfer it to another. I have experienced enough of God to trust God - and I do trust God - for the things I do not know. And they are many.

I am a scientist. I have a PhD in Engineering with a minor in mathematics. I am not a recluse from the physical world. Most of my career was spent pursuing basic research. I believe with Einstein that there is truth in simplicity. I strive to find answers that have the fewest assumptions and the fewest arbitrary parameters. I believe that the parameters that can't be squeezed out of a theory are the keys to understanding the fundamental nature of things.

That said, I'll write briefly about the third comparison above.

I had a dog once who amazed me with his sixth sense. On moving day, I planned to drive him to friends who own a farm since I could not take him along with me. Until that moment, the jingle of car keys sent him running for the car - he loved to ride. But on that day, he hid. I coaxed him into the car, but two blocks from the house he jumped out and ran, into a field. I parked and went to him and talked with him for half an hour. Then he got in the car, and we finished the trip. I don't know, between the two of us, for whom the trip was harder.

I've read research on animals that have primitive forms of speech. The evidence of human-like traits in other species is large and growing. Nevertheless: if I discount evolutionary teaching and discount religious teaching altogether, and test my personal experience, I come down on the side that says man is fundamentally different from -- not just more complex than -- every other species. If I were to list the ways that I see the difference I fear it would sound like an attempt to persuade, and that is not my intent. So I'll just say that to me it is manifestly evident that when and how homo sapiens originated, it was different - different in a way that can be experienced and understood - from other species.

On the other two points, I once believed there were six days of creation and that creation occurred about 4004 B.C. First because Genesis speaks of six days, and second because Bishop Usher used the Genesis-named ancestors of people dateable by secular history to arrive at 4004 BC. I no longer believe either. Rather that Genesis correctly tells us what was capable of our understanding: the nature and action of a pre-existent, creating God. The essential knowledge of God that leads to a life lived in accord with the character of God does not rely upon cosmological detail. Neither could a human without knowledge of physics, mathematics or cosmological theory have understood those details or have recorded them to advantage for his readers.

What is said of God in Genesis is corroborated by later biblical writers. When Job later argued with God over his plight, God responded with a question: Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. [Job 38:4] Genesis does not stand in a biblical vacuum. The point is made that God is the creator, and Job is the creature. Quarks, leptons and super-strings do not cast additional light on that relationship.

Personally, even as a scientist, I cannot grasp the idea of life. As a schoolboy I saw a dog run into the street and be struck dead by a car. I looked long as his lifeless body, unable to understand how, only a moment before, he was a healthy animal, no doubt loved by a human family. Now he was motionless. Same appearance, same color, same molecules. Still warm. But fundamentally and forever changed. I still marvel at life. Primordial soup and lightning bolts don't do it for me.

As for the Big Bang. It looks compellingly probable. If there's eternity [double-ended infinity of time] and a pre-existent God, then what or who was there, before the Big Bang? Scientifically, it seems certain that we can't go back beyond that first 10^-47 seconds of time. And probably there is nothing like what we experience as time that precedes the Big Bang. If that's true, then time is single ended - everlasting - but having the BB as a starting point.

Which leaves me with the amazing notion -- that if God is eternal [doubly ended infinite time] and the Big Bang was but a single creative word uttered by God, then God is awesome beyond comprehension.

[Guest]

Good point. By macroevolution, I am essentially referring to the development of large sets of characteristics, not simply to speciation. For example, I would see dogs, cats, horses, etc. as distinct groups which would require macroevolution to produce. Variations in fruit-flies, finches, and cave-dwelling fish would fall into the category I would describe as microevolution.

Microevolution is pretty easy to grok intuitively. If there are leaves higher on trees, then the longer-necked giraffes will be the ones that survive, and over time giraffes as a whole have longer necks on average. Macroevolution, speciation and all that is much harder; how can a dog become a cat? One thing can become a slightly different version of that thing, but how can one thing become something entirely different?

I find that there's a few good things to think about to help understand it. The first is that dogs didn't actually become cats. Chimps didn't become humans. Rather, things that were sort of like those modern creatures became those modern creatures; things that were sort of like monkeys/humans became monkeys and humans. Dogs are actually reasonably closely related to bears, if I remember right; so a few million years ago, you'd have things that were somewhat doggish and somewhat bearish.

And that's the second thing; time. We're talking millions and billions of years. Speciation in insects and viruses have been observed within people's lifetimes; no-one's saying that the differences between animals and their ancient relatives aren't really significant, but there's a huge amount of time for microevolution to add up in. I can picture a sort of bear-ish, dog-ish thing becoming bears, dogs, wolves and the like. They're different, certainly, but there's enough time in there for small changes to really, really change things.

The third thing is to think of it in small steps. A good many creationists (and I'm not accusing you of anything here, don't worry ) will say "Oh, so fish became dogs? Where's the fossil of a fishdog, then?", as if expecting some kind of animal with a fish's head and the body of a dog. It doesn't work like that. A fish doesn't become a dog; it becomes another fish, but perhaps with stronger, more limb-like fins. And that creature becomes something with even stronger limbs, and maybe a bigger lung capacity. And that thing becomes something amphibious that can survive on land for a while. And perhaps that thing... you get the idea.

Another thing to keep in mind when talking about "species" or "kinds" is that these categories are things that we make up in order to describe the world around us. When a wolf and a coyote mate and produce offspring, they don't care that we call them separate species. Same thing when an Asian Elephant and an African Elephant mate in a zoo even though the two species would never encounter each other in the wild.

The only reason we see these different "kinds" is that we are looking only at extant populations. When you look at the fossil record, you see the continuum. That is not to say that we have every link in every evolutionary chain documented with fossils, but we have enough that we can see the same thing happening over and over again-- earlier populations merge into later populations. We have a remarkably well documented fossil record for whales, showing a gradual change from a semi-aquatic animal to a fully aquatic one. Human evolution is also surprisingly well represented in the fossil record even if we don't know exactly how all the pieces fit together.

I would strongly recommend to anyone having trouble understanding macro-evolution: YOUR INNER FISH. Neil Shubin, the author, does a great job explaining how seemingly different organism share common structures and how we can trace our own evolutionary history back to the simplest animals. And he does so in language that any layman can understand.

Your post is way too long to fully respond to, bonanova, but it does raise some thoughts.

Does our current understanding of science correspond with the accounts in Genesis? The simplest answer is: it doesn't. Only people pleading special cases would even make the attempt and doing so, as you've shown, requires logical contortions that are totally beyond anything that can be called science.

You also continue to confuse abiogenesis - the creation of life - with evolution. Evolution describes what happens after life exists. It does not speak to how life came into being.

But Darwin does not describe the origin of the amoeba.

To get the amoeba, we need something called primordial soup. And a bolt of lightning. Or maybe cosmic radiation. Something. Anything. In the laboratory, elemental carbon has been coaxed into hydrocarbon rings - the building blocks of life. But so far, that's it.

Genesis says God created life itself.

Science has made a hydrocarbon but not made something living from something inert.

Darwin does not address origins of life.

There is no inconsistency between two points of view on the origin of life. Only one exists.

That's not quite true. While I don't think Darwin speculated as to the origins of life itself, abiogenesis theory is fairly vibrant. You allude to the Miller-Urey experiment, but theories exist to bring those organic molecules up to cellular life. For example, some hypothesize that RNA monomers (generated in a fashion similar to the Miller-Urey experiment perhaps) could polymerize on some non-organic substrate and form ribozymes--catalytic RNA enzymes. This is essentially the RNA world hypothesis with RNA both storing and modifying information. These could then become incorporated into lipid micelles, and cellular evolution might continue from there.

Wikipedia's article on Abiogenesis is pretty good.

Granted, none of these theories is as solid as evolution, which from a scientific standpoint, is really well accepted. But it's not fair to claim that science does not provide alternatives to theistic biogenesis.

We have no theory - descriptive or causal - for the beginning.

We have many theories for the beginning. We don't know which one of them is right. That's not the same thing as having no theory. Many of the theories are inconsistent with an equivalent creator spark. BTW. The more recent investigations into multiple universes especially move the issue more and more distant from needing a miraculous creation.

Man is evolution's highest achievement - the most complex of all species

No modern biologist holds this view. It is itself a creation of 19th century Christianity trying to reconcile faith with science. The notion that evolution or life exists just to create mankind as the pinnacle is anti-scientific.

The rest of your lengthy post can be dismissed as attempts to force science - not even real science, but a muddled and often false understanding of a few general points within science - into the straitjacket of your belief in Christianity. Science doesn't exist to reduced in this way. It is an independent body of knowledge, a magisterium, as Stephen Jay Gould once put it.

Those answering here tried to address a specific issue, macroevolution. That needs to be understood for what it is. You are free to try to reconcile your beliefs with that understanding.

[Guest]

Question:

Is macro evolution consistent [or not] with Biblical creation?

No.

Examine the creation accounts given in Genesis [KJV used]

The text uses two verbs, chiefly, to describe the world's origin.

Gen. 2:3 he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

Examine what is "created" and what is "made".

Three passages use the verb create.

Create [ex nihilo - make something from nothing]

Gen 1:1. God created the heaven and the earth.

Gen 1:21. God created ... living creature ...

Gen 1:27. God created man in his own image. elaborating, Gen 2:7. God ... breathed into [man] ... the breath of life

More often the verb made is used.

Make [fashion - from something that exists]

Gen 1:7. God made the firmament ...

Gen 1:16. God made two great lights ...

Gen 1:16. ... he made the stars also.

Gen 2:9. ... out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree ..

Gen 1:25. God made the beast of the earth after his kind ...

Gen 2:22 And from the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman

Gen 3:1 ... the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.

Gen 3:7 ... and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

Interesting how you rearranged the sequence a bit and left things out in order to make it seem as if the Biblical creation account doesn't get it wrong.

Posted by me in another thread:

Let’s take a closer look at what Genesis actually says.

From the get go there are problems. In the first two verses, Heaven and Earth are created. This is before the “let there be light” command which is supposed to be the Big Bang. According to theory, there was no space before the Big Bang for the Earth to exist in any type of shape or condition. Space itself expanded after the Big Bang.

In verse 5 God is separating light from darkness which one might interpret as something in the unfolding of the universe except that the Bible has God calling the light day and the darkness night and then there’s an evening and a morning. This would indicate that this is the Earth rotating and being lit from something other than the Sun (created “Genesis days” or billions of years later) which contradicts the theory of solar system formation which has the Earth and the Sun forming at the same time.

In verse 11 God creates the plants before the creation of the Sun which seems like a huge problem since plants obviously evolved to perform photosynthesis from sunlight.

Also the Bible has trees being created before “swimming creatures.” “Swimming creatures” or marine animals evolved in the oceans long before any life (including trees) began populating the land.

In verse 16 God finally makes the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. But dating of rocks from the Moon shows that the Moon and the Earth are virtually the same age. The Earth is not billions of years (or four “Genesis days”) older than the Moon.

Also all elements other than hydrogen and helium were created by the deaths of stars, yet the Bible has the Earth, land, water, etc… billions of years before the stars are even created.

Actually the Genesis chapter one creation story seems more in line with a much older Babylonian creation myth called “Enuma Elish,” at least as far as the order of creation in Genesis and the Enuma Elish’s “generation of gods.” Also similar is the dividing of Tehowm (Genesis waters or “deep”) into two with a sky dome or “firmament” and the slicing of the water snake “Tiamat” (Enuma Elish) into two.

It’s thought that the Genesis version was likely derived either from Enuma Elish or a similar older creation myth.

On the seventh day God rested. Since it seems the days are actually time periods of billions of years, wouldn't God still be resting? According to the Bible, Adam couldn't have been created much more than 6000 years ago. That's right folks, according to the Bible, the first man on Earth was created about 6000 years ago. How stupid scientists must be to not see the accuracy of the Genesis account..

[Guest]

Question:

Is macro evolution consistent [or not] with Biblical creation?

<snip>

Genesis asserts three things were created by God from nothing:

[1] The physical universe: matter.

[2] Life.

[3] Man [in the image of God; energized by the spirit [breath] of God].

Apart from these, other things [both inert and living] were made

Examine scientific knowledge on these three points.

1(a) Big Bang - Time Zero.

1(b) God created the heaven and the earth.

As we trace the physical evolution of the universe backwards, we are stopped at a cosmic age of about 10^-47 seconds. Previous to that, the temperature and density of the universe are so great all our theories and equations break down. Our first picture of the universe is a perfectly symmetrical, 10-dimensional space-time. The four known forces: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear were unified by the super-string. Ten dimensions soon became four, as six of them collapsed. the universe was an opaque ionic soup for about 300,000 years. Then matter condensed into atoms and molecules. Stars and galaxies formed, and things became something resemblant to what we see today.

Genesis says In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Science knows nothing before 10^-47 seconds.

We have no theory - descriptive or causal - for the beginning.

There is no inconsistency between two points of view, one of which does not exist.

Except that God create the heavens and the earth about 10 billion years apart. Why would that be? And, as mentioned, evolution has absolutely nothing to do with the creation of earth or the universe. It is usually said that it has nothing to do with abiogenesis either, but if life began from the evolution of self-replicating molecules, you might say it did.

2(a) Life itself evolved from primordial soup

2(b) God created ... living creatures

There is an understandable difference between an elephant gun and an elephant. The elephant possesses something the gun does not - although in the hands of a marksman the gun can remove that difference - namely life. Darwin taught that living beings could defy the 2nd law of thermodynamics - that disorder must follow order - through the process of natural selection.

No he did not, and I'm afraid that this shows you don't understand the second law. Do you think the growth of a flower from a seed violates the second law? The flower is far more organized. There is no physical law against the increase of complexity. If you draw a circle around anything, you will find that the energy in exceeds the energy out. For the earth, the sun provides plenty of energy to cover any growth or increase in complexity. Talk origins has an excellent section on this, I recommend that you look at it.

But Darwin does not describe the origin of the amoeba.

To get the amoeba, we need something called primordial soup. And a bolt of lightning. Or maybe cosmic radiation. Something. Anything. In the laboratory, elemental carbon has been coaxed into hydrocarbon rings - the building blocks of life. But so far, that's it.

An amoeba is quite a complex creature, and the ones we see have evolved for a billion years. You are sadly mistaken if you think abiogenesis says that amoebas pop out of the soup. Consider how much simpler viruses are than amoebas - so simple they're kind of on the borderline of living and non-living. We're just about ready to create artificial viruses. So much for the spark of life.

Genesis says God created life itself.

Science has made a hydrocarbon but not made something living from something inert.

Keep your eye on the news. This statement won't be correct a year or two from now.

For the secularist who has gotten past the origin of matter and the origin of life, it's the simplest of processes to get to homo sapiens. Time plus chance. Oodles of time to be sure, and the most favorable of chances. But the chances don't have to be so terribly favorable, if they're provided with say trillions of years to play out.

Your mistake here is the assumption that we're the desired end result. What are the chances of dealing one particular bridge hand? Astronomically small, of course. But you'll always get a hand. The chances of human beings showing up are small, but no smaller than the chance of any other intelligent species. We don't know what the chance of intelligence developing is, of course. If the asteroid hadn't hit, there might be intelligent dinosaurs speculating on how their existence was inevitable.

Here the comparison of two views is the most subjective. On the one hand, neither point of view sports compelling evidence: creationists have two or three verses in Genesis to support their belief; science has no experimental evidence to dispute it.

Wrongo. We have plenty of evidence about the order in which the "kinds" evolved, all of it contradicting Genesis. Genesis says that the moon creates light like the sun - wrong. Do you think women came from a man's rib? Which of the two versions of the creation story do you accept anyhow - the one where Adam and Eve came before the animals or after?

Personally, even as a scientist, I cannot grasp the idea of life. As a schoolboy I saw a dog run into the street and be struck dead by a car. I looked long as his lifeless body, unable to understand how, only a moment before, he was a healthy animal, no doubt loved by a human family. Now he was motionless. Same appearance, same color, same molecules. Still warm. But fundamentally and forever changed. I still marvel at life. Primordial soup and lightning bolts don't do it for me.

Had to respond to this one. At one moment your computer is working, your disk is spinning. Poof goes the power supply, and the next moment it's dead. How is this fundamentally different from a dog, or from us? We're complex creatures, and when parts break the whole breaks.

As for the Big Bang. It looks compellingly probable. If there's eternity [double-ended infinity of time] and a pre-existent God, then what or who was there, before the Big Bang? Scientifically, it seems certain that we can't go back beyond that first 10^-47 seconds of time. And probably there is nothing like what we experience as time that precedes the Big Bang. If that's true, then time is single ended - everlasting - but having the BB as a starting point.

Which leaves me with the amazing notion -- that if God is eternal [doubly ended infinite time] and the Big Bang was but a single creative word uttered by God, then God is awesome beyond comprehension.

If you want to believe that God started off the Big Bang and got out of the way, there is nothing that will contradict you. However, you should consider why an all-knowing god would get the story in Genesis so wrong. Maybe some God who has never come near us created the universe and gave a race of aliens who are his real people the true story. (And probably didn't wait around 13 billion years to make them.) Maybe we're the accidental byproducts of the universe created for them. It makes a lot more sense than a god who lied to us about the origin of things.

[Guest]

An attack on the biblical account will not be useful here. My belief does not arise from my innate desire to blindly accept myths. I believe, for a great number of reasons which I do not wish to discuss at this moment, that the Bible is inspired by God. It thus follows that I would view the Genesis account as having authority, and that I would be interested in determining how the specific creation described in the Bible meshes with what has been observed.

Are you also interested in what doesn't mesh with what has been observed? Will you consider evidence both for and against what the bible says?

Before you get too far into this field, it would be helpful for you to learn just exactly what evolution claims, not what fundamentalists wrongly think it claims. For example, I often hear "nothing that complex could just happen by random, unguided chance!" as an argument against evolution. But evolution makes no such claim. Once you understand what science is, not what someone thinks it is, then we will be making progress towards overcoming ignorance.

If you then insist that you must reconcile the bible with science, go ahead and try. Dr. Harry Rimmer did. But if you find a difference, ask yourself if God intended you to use that brain of yours or not.

[Guest]

Thank you all for your comments. I must admit it's a lot to try and assimilate at once, and there's simply way too much here to respond to everything. Let me start with a comment on the Genesis account, and why the assumptions made by Scraff and Stroud don't work for me. They made statements such as:

"In the first two verses, Heaven and Earth are created. This is before the “let there be light” command which is supposed to be the Big Bang."

"This would indicate that this is the Earth rotating and being lit from something other than the Sun."

"In verse 16 God finally makes the Sun, the Moon, and the stars. But dating of rocks from the Moon shows that the Moon and the Earth are virtually the same age."

"There is no inconsistency between two points of view ... except that God create the heavens and the earth about 10 billion years apart."

In attempting to poke holes in the creation account, they make a lot of assumptions about the meaning of various terms. Consider it from this angle (which is how it was described to me):

The creation account was likely provided by God in the form of a vision either to Moses (the writer) or to someone before him, and passed down through generations. The events unfold as though from the standpoint of an observer on earth. This is evident from the description of the Sun and Moon as greater luminaries on the 4th day. The term "in the beginning" (Ge 1:1) indicates a time preceding the six creative days. In other words, the "heavens" (including the physical universe, such as the Sun, Moon, and stars) and the "Earth" were in existence prior to the creative days, which simply describe the forming of the Earth's surface relevant to man's arrival. It kind of makes sense to me that each "day" is rather like the presentation of a phase of the process that begins and ends with a camera fade-in/fade-out.

Day 1: Let light come to be. Light reaches the Earth's surface. Perhaps dense gases in the atmosphere prior to this time kept the surface in relative darkness.

Day 2: Let an expanse (firmament) come between the waters. Later the birds are described as flying in this expanse, so it would follow that this is a description of water being lifted into the atmosphere. If this were to provide complete cloud cover for the planet, it would explain day 4.

Day 3: Dry land appears. Vegetation and trees appear. It doesn't seem impossible to me that plants could have appeared on land prior to the advent of water-animals, but if there was evidence to the contrary, that's not a sticking point. Again, this is just a general presentation of the order of events presented to a primitive people.

Day 4: Luminaries (a greater and a lesser, obviously the Sun and Moon) come to be in the expanse. In time the vegetation would have altered the atmosphere, increasing the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide, thus better supporting animal life. The result might have been a clearing of the cloud canopy, thus allowing the Sun, Moon, and stars to be clearly visible.

Day 5: Larger swimming and flying creatures appear. Of course, birds flying over the earth would have likely required some animal life to already be on the land (unless they were strictly herbivores, which seems unlikely), but not the presence of the larger, more visible animals described next.

Day 6: Wild and domestic land animals appear. Man is created.

I think it's safe to say that the Bible (regardless of whether authored by men or God) is intended as a guidebook, not a scientific reference. However, if it is from God, one would expect the details, no matter how simplistic, to be accurate. At the same time, as bonanova noted, it would not benefit humans to be provided with technical details they were not equipped to understand. Now, since I obviously don't take the account at a tight, word-for-word, literal interpretation, you could reason "How does the theory of evolution and common origin conflict with this account?"

Two points:

1. The evolutionary process, by definition, does not require outside intervention. The Bible, however, credits God with distinct acts of creation. Bonanova reconciles this by pointing out that the times where God "made" things from previous material does not require ex nihilo creation, thus supposedly not conflicting with evolution. However, if God is stepping in to direct the process, then that still strikes at the core of the what evolution is all about.

2. Even if I concluded that the evidence was, in fact, overwhelming in support of macroevolution for animals, this still does not fit with the account of Adam and Eve with regard to human origin. According to the Bible, there is a clear distinction between animals and humans, the latter being created "in God's image" and appointed as dominant over the rest of creation on Earth (Ge 1:27,28). Humans were designed to live forever, and death was the punishment for sin. Much of the rest of the Bible deals with the need for redemption from sin and death, and how this was accomplished by the death of the Messiah. According to Ro 5:12, "through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because they had all sinned." This simply doesn't jive with the idea that Adam and Eve were actually just two lucky/unlucky souls selected from among an entire population of homo-sapiens to start the human race.

I still want to reply to some of Martini's initial posts, but I'll have to do that another time. I can see from the rather large outpouring of response, however, that this is a topic many here feel strongly about. I obviously picked a good place to post the question. :-)

[Guest]

Good point. By macroevolution, I am essentially referring to the development of large sets of characteristics, not simply to speciation. For example, I would see dogs, cats, horses, etc. as distinct groups which would require macroevolution to produce. Variations in fruit-flies, finches, and cave-dwelling fish would fall into the category I would describe as microevolution.

I'm curious; what do you include in the category or "kind" you are referring to as "cats"? I assume you mean your basic domestic or house cat; but also the very closely related ancestral wild cat. (Which nowadays domestic cats are generally classed as a subspecies of rather than a separate species.) Various other small to medium-sized predators (servals and caracals and ocelots and lynxes and so on) are clearly also "cats". Then there are the pumas, which still (to me) are unmistakably "cats", but we're talking now about cats as big as a person, which could eat you, given the chance. Finally, there are the animals that as far as I know almost everyone (even creationists) calls "big cats": lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars. The resemblance to Fluffy the housecat still seems very clear, in terms of both appearance and behavior, but now we're talking about animals that weigh up to 500 pounds and are clearly capable of treating humans as lunch.

So, on the one hand, one could argue that there is really isn't any familial relationship between cats and ocelots and pumas and leopards--wherever one draws the line. But most people seem to intuitively reject that; we recognize the truth of the scientific classification of all of them as part of a "family" (Felidae). Or one could argue that Fluffy and a 500-pound Siberian tiger are nonetheless part of the same "kind". But if there is some process that can derive a tiger and Fluffy the housecat from a common ancestor, where is the line that says that far, but no further? Why can't there be another ancestor, even further back, which gave rise to cats and dogs? (By "dogs" I mean dogs and wolves and coyotes and jackals, and also dholes, and even foxes.) Sure, cats and dogs are pretty distinct; but they also have many common features; we're talking about furry quadrupeds with sharp teeth. The cat family and the dog family and the bear family and the weasel family are all members of the Order Carnivora--each family derives from some ancient common ancestor, and those common ancestors of the cats and dogs and bears and weasels and so on in turn were all descendants from some even more ancient Ur-Carnivoran. (Of course the actual family tree of Order Carnivora is more complicated than that.) Where precisely in all this do we cross that ne plus ultra line between "microevolution" and "macroevolution"?

[Guest]

The creation account was likely provided by God...

That's a BIG assumption. And that's assuming what we are trying to prove. Wrong sequence.

Much more likely is legends were passed by oral history, then put down by an early scribe. The Genesis theory is consistent with (and probably derived from) other legends and folk tales.

If we start off assuming the essential truth of the creation account in the Bible, then the debate is over. It's a mistake to try and reconcile Genesis with science. Evolution stands or falls on its own, and you cannot hamstring science by forcing it to fit into some preconceived religious framework. If you want to understand evolution, you need to simply look at the evidence. If you want to maintain your faith in Christianity, that is another issue altogether.

It kind of makes sense to me that each "day" is rather like the presentation of a phase of the process that begins and ends with a camera fade-in/fade-out.

The interpretation of "day" is a vital point. The Hebrew word "yom" appears in the bible 1480 times, and is translated 54 different ways in one version, yet I doubt that the ancients considered the biblical day as anything other than 24 hours. It was only in more modern times, when the age of the earth was discovered to be millions or billions of years that the translation of "yom" was stretched to encompass "eons".

If a day was an eon, you have a serious problem with a half-eon of dark for plants. Then you have to account for just how it was dark, then light for so long, then how days suddenly became 24 hours long. Did the earth stop rotating, then pick up speed all of a sudden?

When you begin to ponder such things, you begin to realize just how little the ancients knew about astronomy, physics, botany and most other sciences. The Genesis account makes complete sense only in light of their limited knowledge, and absolutely no sense with today's. In order to reconcile the biblical account, you have to discard parts, bend others, and make fantastical guesses. Ever heard of Occam's Razor?

Day 1: Let light come to be. Light reaches the Earth's surface. Perhaps dense gases in the atmosphere prior to this time kept the surface in relative darkness.

Perhaps. But is there any evidence? You are forced to postulate one unlikely event to explain another unlikely event. The more layers of guessing we have, the more preposterous things become.

Day 4: Luminaries (a greater and a lesser, obviously the Sun and Moon) come to be in the expanse. In time the vegetation would have altered the atmosphere, increasing the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide, thus better supporting animal life. The result might have been a clearing of the cloud canopy, thus allowing the Sun, Moon, and stars to be clearly visible.

So, if you are taking a day to be an eon, how did plants and animals exist without the sun? For that matter, how did this planet avoid becoming a sub-zero iceball without external heat? It gets pretty cold in some places on earth during winter nowadays. Can you imagine how cold it would be if no sun appeared for a million years?

Day 5: Larger swimming and flying creatures appear. Of course, birds flying over the earth would have likely required some animal life to already be on the land (unless they were strictly herbivores, which seems unlikely), but not the presence of the larger, more visible animals described next.

You are piling supposition upon supposition, all to explain an ignorant folk tale.

I think it's safe to say that the Bible (regardless of whether authored by men or God) is intended as a guidebook, not a scientific reference. However, if it is from God, one would expect the details, no matter how simplistic, to be accurate.

Good point. Since they don't appear to be, doesn't that cast serious doubt on those writings?

At the same time, as bonanova noted, it would not benefit humans to be provided with technical details they were not equipped to understand.

But if a mention of dinosaurs were included in sacred writings, and later, dinosaur bones were found, wouldn't that be stronger proof that the bible isn't just an ancient legend? Why didn't God tell us about DNA? Galaxies? Electricity? Calculus? Rocket science?

According to the Bible, there is a clear distinction between animals and humans...

Another folk tale. Modern genetics has shown that there is very little difference between humans and our closest relatives (99% similarity with chimpanzees, 97% with mice [the exact numbers vary according to the source]). As to a soul, that is entirely a religious concept. If humans have one or chimps don't is something science cannot answer.

I can see from the rather large outpouring of response, however, that this is a topic many here feel strongly about. I obviously picked a good place to post the question. :-)

Yes, you did, as long as you are serious about learning the truth, and not following blindly from your interpretation of the bible or your religious upbringing. It's refreshing to have these kind of people here.

[unreality]

Day 6: Wild and domestic land animals appear. Man is created.

So did the domestic animals start out domestic and calm, all ready to be trussed up and eaten and milked as soon as man was created?

No, they weren't. We had to tame them. Man took on wolves, and they became domesticated dogs. That's an example of evolution, right there. Wolves and dogs share a common ancestor. That's no different than wolves and bears sharing a common ancestor. As Stroud said, there is no line between micro and macro- it's all the same, and it happens of a LONG time, that's why changes can be so radical, with slight tiny changes each new generation. We are constantly and continuously evolving with each new baby conceived and born.

[Guest]

I'm a bit disappointed at the response to that last post. I thought it was evident that what I was presenting was a possible interpretation of the Genesis account, built on supposition and speculation, which would demonstrate that given a slightly liberal reading of the text (and not stretching too far, I don't believe), the biblical creation account does not conflict with what science has observed. Why bother? Well, as I've already explained, I have a strong belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God, based on a very logical and methodical examination of such topics as prophecy, archaeology, and the internal harmony between 40 different writers over a period of 1600 years. Now I know that just makes all you atheists cringe, roll your eyes, and dream of flying spaghetti monsters, but the point of this post wasn't to discuss the authenticity of the Bible or the existence of God, although I suppose these topics are inevitably intertwined. It follows, however, that as a result of my faith in God and the Bible, I would be very inclined to believe the Genesis account, regardless of how simplistic it might sound.

Incidentally, repeated comparisons to contemporary creation myths seem rather hollow. By comparison to most, the Bible's account is pretty boring, simply saying that God made everything, in a particular order. What's more, that order is not unrealistic, if you had actually read my explanation. Instead, Martini, you argued against something I wasn't saying.

That's a BIG assumption. And that's assuming what we are trying to prove. Wrong sequence.

As noted, I'm obviously not trying to prove anything via the creation account. I was trying to defend it by showing that it's not as full of holes as you critics love to claim.

If we start off assuming the essential truth of the creation account in the Bible, then the debate is over. It's a mistake to try and reconcile Genesis with science.

What an interesting statement. So is it a mistake to reconcile any religious belief with science? That's an easy statement for an atheist to make. Little bit harder to swallow for someone who has a very strong, personal belief in God and the Bible. In my original post I said that I wanted to reconcile the creation account with the theory of common origin. In hindsight, that's not entirely accurate. It would be clearer to say that I want to reconcile my beliefs with the observations of science. That's why I found your initial posts interesting. I'm interested in knowing that the 23 pairs of human chromosomes show evidence of the merging of two primate chromosomes. The supertrees showing the common features among animal life and the corresponding timelines is most certainly of interest. But telling me that I'm barking up the wrong tree to even try and harmonize two disparate fields of evidence (and yes, I would say that my study of the Bible has absolutely provided evidence) is not going to resonate. You're asking me to simply ignore many years of study and reasoning.

The interpretation of "day" is a vital point. The Hebrew word "yom" appears in the bible 1480 times, and is translated 54 different ways in one version, yet I doubt that the ancients considered the biblical day as anything other than 24 hours.

Sorry. Simply not true. Here are few examples (taken from the book Life - How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or Creation?): "Day" as used in the Bible can include summer and winter, the passing of seasons. (Zechariah 14:8) "The day of harvest" involves many days. (Proverbs 25:13, Genesis 30:14.) A thousand years are likened to a day. (Psalm 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8, 10) You can add to that terms like "Judgment Day", and the "Day of the LORD", which clearly do not connote 24 hour periods.

If a day was an eon, you have a serious problem with a half-eon of dark for plants. Then you have to account for just how it was dark, then light for so long, then how days suddenly became 24 hours long. Did the earth stop rotating, then pick up speed all of a sudden?

Guess you weren't reading closely. Note that I said light reached the planet's surface on Day 1, just like what you would observe on a day of complete cloud cover. The Sun, Moon, and stars became clearly visible entities on Day 4, so there was no problem of plants having to grow without light.

Ever heard of Occam's Razor?

Yes, I believe I cited it in a post on a different forum. :-)

But if a mention of dinosaurs were included in sacred writings, and later, dinosaur bones were found, wouldn't that be stronger proof that the bible isn't just an ancient legend? Why didn't God tell us about DNA? Galaxies? Electricity? Calculus? Rocket science?

As bonanova noted earlier, such additional details would not have been useful to people at the time. I agree, though, that a few details which could not be confirmed until much later would have been a handy way to reinforce divine authorship. For that matter, God could have made the entire Bible a whole lot more simple, straightforward, and impossible to dismiss. I believe that there's a very good reason he has obfuscated things to an extent, the creation account included, but a full explanation is outside the scope of this post and would no doubt be subjected to attacks which I have no desire to argue at the moment.

Modern genetics has shown that there is very little difference between humans and our closest relatives (99% similarity with chimpanzees, 97% with mice [the exact numbers vary according to the source]). As to a soul, that is entirely a religious concept. If humans have one or chimps don't is something science cannot answer.

One of the ritually recurring arguments for common origin is the amount of shared genetic material. To say that this favors evolution over specific creation is to imply that you have some idea how a divine being should go about the business of being God, as if to say "surely if I were God I would not reuse my former work when designing new creatures." I'll elaborate on this point when I have more time, but I find this "evidence" far less convincing than you think I should.

As to "souls", I never said humans have one and chimpanzees don't. According to the Genesis account, God cause the earth to be filled with living "souls" (referring to animals). And according to Eccl 3:18-20: "I, even I, have said in my heart with regard to the sons of mankind that the [true] God is going to select them, that they may see that they themselves are beasts. 19 For there is an eventuality as respects the sons of mankind and an eventuality as respects the beast, and they have the same eventuality. As the one dies, so the other dies; and they all have but one spirit, so that there is no superiority of the man over the beast, for everything is vanity. 20 All are going to one place. They have all come to be from the dust, and they are all returning to the dust."

So did the domestic animals start out domestic and calm, all ready to be trussed up and eaten and milked as soon as man was created?

Probably not, although there is some debate regarding how much domestication arises from selective breeding and how much from genetic predisposition. See Domestication For example, they have not been able to tame Zebras. Therefore, I could see it as possible that some animals were created with domestication in mind, but regardless, that doesn't make much difference. If, as I suggested, the creation account was provided as a vision, the writer would have identified the sheep, cattle, dogs, cats, etc. as domestic animals, even though it's obvious they couldn't yet have been domestic since there weren't any humans.

As long as you are serious about learning the truth, and not following blindly from your interpretation of the bible or your religious upbringing. It's refreshing to have these kind of people here.

Thanks. I really don't want to get into debates where nobody is going to win, which is why my initial request focused on obtaining information. I intend to take a look at some of the reading material you mentioned, although I hope it focuses on details rather than on trying to sell the theory. I've already read plenty of that.

With the Superbowl to watch (just got it via torrents), a nasty cold which has knocked me out for a couple days, and an upcoming vacation to Beijing that I haven't prepared for at all, I've been a little too wrapped up to give this the attention I would like. Perhaps when I return I'll be able to follow up on some of the loose ends I want to address and also discover some new and interesting information.

I wish you all a great week! Don't let posts like this distract you from the joy of solving problems. :-)

[unreality]

Probably not, although there is some debate regarding how much domestication arises from selective breeding and how much from genetic predisposition. See Domestication For example, they have not been able to tame Zebras. Therefore, I could see it as possible that some animals were created with domestication in mind, but regardless, that doesn't make much difference. If, as I suggested, the creation account was provided as a vision, the writer would have identified the sheep, cattle, dogs, cats, etc. as domestic animals, even though it's obvious they couldn't yet have been domestic since there weren't any humans.

ah I see whatcha mean there. nvm

Primordial soup and lightning bolts don't do it for me.

That's very interesting... cuz an uber-powerful uber-amazing uber-nice uber-magical uber-awesome God much more complex than the earliest lifeforms popping out of nowhere (or always existing...) and creating everything and giving accounts that go against all the laws of physics that we know doesn't do it for me either

[Guest]

I'm a bit disappointed at the response to that last post. I thought it was evident that what I was presenting was a possible interpretation of the Genesis account, built on supposition and speculation, which would demonstrate that given a slightly liberal reading of the text (and not stretching too far, I don't believe), the biblical creation account does not conflict with what science has observed.

In point of fact, you did not present such an interpretation, you asked us to present an interpretation which you would find personally satisfying. You made no detailed attempt to reconcile Genesis with science yourself.

Why bother? Well, as I've already explained, I have a strong belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God, based on a very logical and methodical examination of such topics as prophecy, archaeology, and the internal harmony between 40 different writers over a period of 1600 years.

You seem to be misinformed about the Bible in several areas. Taking them one at a time:

• There isn't a single demonstrable instance of fulfilled predictive prophecy anywhere in the Bible. This is a subject which is too long to get into in detail here, but I assure you, not a single instance of alleged Biblical prophecy fulfillment holds up to honest examination
  
  
• The archaeological evidence of the Ancient Near East is decidely in contradiction to many of the Bible's most key historical claims. Again, this is a long subject but I can address any of these points in great detail in another thread if you wish.
  
  
• Internal harmony? You must be joking. Would you like to see a list of internal contradictions?
  
  
• The Bible (both Testaments) was written over a period of about 600-800 years (with much of the definitive editing, syncretizing and narrative composition of the Pentateuch coming about the 5th Century BCE after the Babylonian exile), not 1600 year. The books show a great deal of theological change and evolution even in those few hundred years.
  

Now I know that just makes all you atheists cringe, roll your eyes, and dream of flying spaghetti monsters,

Why would it make us do that? We might roll our eyes perhaps but why would we cringe because you have some naive and uniformed beliefs about your Bible?

but the point of this post wasn't to discuss the authenticity of the Bible or the existence of God, although I suppose these topics are inevitably intertwined. It follows, however, that as a result of my faith in God and the Bible, I would be very inclined to believe the Genesis account, regardless of how simplistic it might sound.

Knock yourself out. Just don't expect us to be able to help you formulate a reconciliation with scientific evidence.

To do so you must be willing to perform feats of logical gymnastics that many of us are not inclined to attempt. With enough unsupported assumptions you can shoehorn any theory to match the bible. The question becomes what is the worth of that theory (or alternatively, that interpretation of the bible)?

IMO, a much more elegant solution is to believe in the bible as allegory and ignore the obvious scientific inaccuracies as something that was perfectly suited to the intended audience. Despite your insistence to the contrary there's really no way to reconcile a strict literal interpretation of Genesis with current theory. They don't match up and no amount of hand waving is going to make them match up.

As someone said, creationism is bad science, but it's worse religion. It's mainly people with a rigidly held belief trying to fit God into a mold of their own making.

Incidentally, repeated comparisons to contemporary creation myths seem rather hollow. By comparison to most, the Bible's account is pretty boring, simply saying that God made everything, in a particular order.

That's what all creation myths tend to be like.

What's more, that order is not unrealistic, if you had actually read my explanation. Instead, Martini, you argued against something I wasn't saying.

Actually, the order IS unrealistic, particularly in the Biblical claim that the earth was created before the stars. Not only that, but the Biblical chronology isn't even consistent, as has been pointed out already. Was Adam created before the animals or afterwards?

What an interesting statement. So is it a mistake to reconcile any religious belief with science? That's an easy statement for an atheist to make. Little bit harder to swallow for someone who has a very strong, personal belief in God and the Bible. In my original post I said that I wanted to reconcile the creation account with the theory of common origin. In hindsight, that's not entirely accurate. It would be clearer to say that I want to reconcile my beliefs with the observations of science. That's why I found the initial posts interesting. I'm interested in knowing that the 23 pairs of human chromosomes show evidence of the merging of two primate chromosomes. The supertrees showing the common features among animal life and the corresponding timelines is most certainly of interest. But telling me that I'm barking up the wrong tree to even try and harmonize two disparate fields of evidence (and yes, I would say that my study of the Bible has absolutely provided evidence) is not going to resonate. You're asking me to simply ignore many years of study and reasoning.

Well, in that case I doubt you're going to get much help here. There is nothing atheist about the view that religion, and the Christian Bible in particular, are not suitable vehicles for learning about the physical world around us. Physics, chemistry, and biology tell us things that the Bible simply cannot. Many forms of Christianity, Catholicism being one obvious example, take the Bible as an expression of faith and a guide to how one should lead one's life without attempting to use it as a science text or as a historically accurate description of past events. If you tried to do so honestly, you'd be an atheist pretty darn quick-- the Bible just doesn't stand up to scrutiny in its science or its history.

The way science works is to construct a hypothesis based on evidence, and then attempt to disprove the hypothesis through finding more evidence or conducting experiments. When religion and science mix religion must do the same for its scientific predictions - such as the age of the earth. Do you think that anyone reading Genesis would come up with predictions on what science would find close to what it actually did find? You do not try to twist the original hypothesis into supporting what actually happened.

The right thing to do is reject the hypothesis. This only rejects Genesis as an accurate description of history. You don't have to reject the existence of god. You are refusing to consider that your hypothesis might be faulty, and that is faith, not science.

The reason for recommending that religion not get involved with science is that religion seems to lose - its hypotheses that are testable keep getting disproved. If religion stays with stuff like the soul and the purpose of life, it is much safer.

BTW, if you've actually read the Bible all the way through, I don't see how you can say all the writers are consistent. The description of God in Genesis, actively talking to people, is far different from that of Kings or Chronicles.

[Guest]

Sorry. Simply not true. Here are few examples (taken from the book Life - How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or Creation?): "Day" as used in the Bible can include summer and winter, the passing of seasons. (Zechariah 14:8) "The day of harvest" involves many days. (Proverbs 25:13, Genesis 30:14.) A thousand years are likened to a day. (Psalm 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8, 10) You can add to that terms like "Judgment Day", and the "Day of the LORD", which clearly do not connote 24 hour periods.

Genesis actually says the evening and the morning, the nth day. Jewish days start with the evening. You don't say "The evening and the morning, the days of harvest."

You misunderstood me, and perhaps I didn't make myself clear. By "biblical day", I do not mean the use of the word "day" anywhere else in the bible but the account of creation in Genesis. I am well aware of the use of "yom" for "age" and many other words, which is why I said it "is translated 54 different ways..." But I doubt that the intention of the writer of Genesis was to describe, during the six "days" of creation, anything other than a 24 hour period per day. It is entirely a modern twist to inflate the 24 hours to an eon.

Genesis 1:3 [first day] And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Where did this light come from? If neither sun, moon nor stars were created until a few days (eons?) later, what was the source of this light? You are postulating a cloud cover with no evidence filtering light from an undisclosed source. You are piling guesses upon guesses and the result of your equation is nothing more than wishful thinking. You have assumed the biblical account is the only correct one and must distort all facts to fit. Not the way science works.

Guess you weren't reading closely. Note that I said light reached the planet's surface on Day 1, just like what you would observe on a day of complete cloud cover. The Sun, Moon, and stars became clearly visible entities on Day 4, so there was no problem of plants having to grow without light.

No, they were created on Day 4.

From Genesis:

1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

Since the story begins before the earth, I don't see how you can claim it is from the point of view of someone on Earth. No, only God could dictate this, and your version contradicts what God supposedly wrote.

One of the ritually recurring arguments for common origin is the amount of shared genetic material. To say that this favors evolution over specific creation is to imply that you have some idea how a divine being should go about the business of being God, as if to say "surely if I were God I would not reuse my former work when designing new creatures." I'll elaborate on this point when I have more time, but I find this "evidence" far less convincing than you think I should.

Have you ever heard of retroviral genes? They can only come about by shared ancestry. The genetic evidence is not just about similar "material." It can be definitively used to trace genetic lineage.

The problem with this argument is that the organization of genes doesn't show any indication of intentionality or deliberate design; in fact, it displays a jumble of mostly non-functional material (at least, in the sense of coding for proteins currently used in building body structures and hormones) that is the residue of capabilities once used and then discarded but not edited out unless it interferes with successful reproduction. And the same--or clearly similar--gene may provide entirely different function in diverse species, having been adapted from a previous use in one phenotype and evolving into some entirely different function; for instance, the ossicles (malleus, incus, and stapes bones of the middle ear) of mammals display a very clear derivation from the jaw bones of a class of prehistoric reptile called Synapsids (having a fused skull with two temporal fenestra (holes for the retinal nerve) and an integral sinus manifold. All mammals today have their hearing organs commonly derived from this source, and the fossil record shows the progression from one function to another. On the other hand, some common functions clearly have different origins; the eye, for instance, has been independently evolved over twenty different times. If your Creator were to reuse features from one species to another, why not adapt this intricate and complex design rather than built it up from scratch again and again?

Regarding the creation story (or rather stories) as portrayed in Genesis, it's really impossible to reconcile them with current scientific knowledge of the history of the planet and life upon it without subjecting it to such a liberal translation that it becomes meaningless as any kind of record of events. This doesn't disprove the existence of a supreme or supernatural entity, of course--at the very least, one could claim that it is all due to a string of bad translations which have muddled the original language--but it does cast doubt that any of the information in the Bible (the Old Testament, at least) can be considered and accurate or representative of account of events. (I'll leave the Rashomon-esque nature of the Gospels of the New Testament for another discussion.) Whatever you may believe, reconciling the Bible as an objective (if occasionally apocryphal) history of the Earth with a modern knowledge of the natural sciences is an exercise in credulous translation, not in establishing the biblical account as a veritable, qualified history of creation.

So maybe you can tell us why clear genetic mistakes got reused also. Not to mention why we have junk DNA.

Do you have the slightest inclination to reconsider your beliefs in light of science, or are you going to say damn the evidence, Genesis is correct? For one second, I ask you to put aside your absolute faith and consider how well Genesis lines up with the evidence discovered. Don't even tell us, do it to be honest with yourself. Can you?

And you also say that:

You're asking me to simply ignore many years of study and reasoning.

Yes, we are. That is the entire point of the responses in this thread.

Many believing Christians understand that the account in Genesis is mythopoeic (from mythopoesis, a narrative genre where a fictional mythology is created by an author), exactly as every other religious tradition in humanity's history. Most believing Jews also have this understanding, a not-inconsiderable fact given that it is their holy book, not the Christians'. Words and ideas fixed in 1300 BC should be understood as mythic renderings of then-current notions and today's science should not be distorted to that Procrustean bed.

Saying that only atheists can possibly look at the twin accounts in Genesis and not want to twist the entire sum of humanity's collected knowledge and wisdom to force them to fit one religion's ancient words is insulting to almost everyone on earth, believers and non-believers alike.

[Guest]

One of the ritually recurring arguments for common origin is the amount of shared genetic material. To say that this favors evolution over specific creation is to imply that you have some idea how a divine being should go about the business of being God, as if to say "surely if I were God I would not reuse my former work when designing new creatures." I'll elaborate on this point when I have more time, but I find this "evidence" far less convincing than you think I should.

Please read up about Endogenous Retroviral Insertions - these aren't common genetic design, they're traces of ancestral genetic damage (the clue being that if you find two organisms with matching patterns of damage, it indicates they share a common ancestor, who suffered that original damage).

Interestingly, a very similar analysis technique is applied to spelling errors in religious manuscripts, enabling us to chart their genealogy - i.e. which scrolls were copied from which, and in what sequence.

[Guest]

One thing I will say though - in all my dealings with creationists, I've only ever found the statement "well, I don't find the evidence all that convincing" to actually mean I've not really examined, appreciated or understood the evidence in any depth or detail.

[Guest]

Agreed. The fossil evidence so abundantly supports the theory of evolution, that it's absurd to say it leaves one unconvinced. The recently discovered fossil, Tiktaalik, is as good a "missing link" as there ever will be. And there are plenty more.

[Guest]

Proof for macro-evolution requested.

Proof of macro-evolution given.

thread locked